In Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals, one of the commonalities he uncovers is that many artists, past and present, factor(ed) a daily walk in their regular routine.
As hard as it can sometimes be to interrupt what I’m working on to answer Quinn’s insistent mid-day call to get out to stretch our legs, I’m always glad we went. Aside from the obvious: enjoying our beautiful surroundings and witnessing the never-static changes of the seasons, I’ve also found that many of my best ideas, solutions, and conceptual connections have surfaced as I hang onto the back end of the leash. No doubt that’s part of what Currey’s subjects experienced as well.
A knotted field of stitching on top of two layers of shibori patterning. The underlayer is raw silk, the one on top is translucent silk organza (which allows the lower pattern to show through).
In order to add another layer of texture to the piece I’ve been working on this week, while simultaneously suggesting the confining nature of a net (digging back to my Maine roots and lobster traps), I have been attaching short lengths of thread to an underlying foundation of stitches. Perhaps it was just a matter of getting more blood to the brain, but the proverbial lightbulb went on as we made our way up the hill on Tuesday. Beyond being a reference to netting, I recognized the dozens of knots I was tying as a metaphor for my general frame of mind while anxiously waiting for the election’s results.
Shorter threads knotted where the horizontal and vertical lines meet are reminiscent of netting.
Overall, does it really matter to the finished work that I made that connection? Maybe…maybe not, but it does serve to underline the emotional intent of this piece as an expression of this tense point in history.
Until The Bitterness Passes, ©2020 Elizabeth Fram, Stitched-resist dye and stitching/knotting on silk with foraged branches, 16.5″H x 7.5″W x 8″D
Moving onward, we have a lot of work ahead of us in this country if we are going to find our way past the divide. As it always has, art will have a role to play in defining the current circumstances and in forging a way forward. However, artist or not, maybe getting out to take a walk is the simplest first step to finding solutions.