It's Friday and I'm Finished!

Wow.  I feel like I'm about to lay my soul bare.  This is a very personal body of work.  Usually, I'm just painting or stitching happy little birds and flowers; this stuff is about the environments that shaped me and made me who I am today.  As I mentioned earlier, I am working on a series of textile art pieces that I am calling Personal Landscapes.  This is a project that I've been incubating for the past year.  Each piece starts with an article of vintage linen, a napkin, table runner, hankie, whatnot, and I add elements, incorporating the existing stitchery into the design.  Through this work, I am exploring ideas of physical and mental environments and how they shape people and families, namely, myself and my family.  I will be doing one piece for every place I've lived, plus some additional pieces that relate more to my family of origin.  These three that I'm about to show you are going to join their hankie friends over at the Michael Berry Gallery as part of the Utah Surface Design Group show that opens next Friday.

This one represents Utah; I actually made this one last spring.  I'm calling it Salt Flats, because it has a piece of the Salt Flats on it, and because that place itself says a lot about how I feel about Utah; it is harsh, and barren, and beautiful.  I moved here almost nine years ago.  This experience and place is full of dichotomies.  It has been wonderful and horrible.  I have met lovely, kind, friendly people, and I've met an equal number of mean, judgmental, arrogant, selfish people.   Never in my life have I encountered so much passive aggressive behavior.  It's almost institutionalized.  There seem to be a lot of injured souls here.  The only other place I've ever come across so many emotionally unhealthy people was while I was working in a domestic violence shelter.

A close up of the salt.  The salt crust is very fragile.  I think I've become a lot more fragile since coming here.

Ahh Iowa!  My husband always teases me about being a "gold" personality.  That means I have this thing about how rules should be followed.  There is a certain way that things are to be done and you'd better do them that way.  I can be strict and rigid with myself and others.  When I was visiting Iowa earlier this year, I spent a lot of time observing people, their mannerisms and behavior.  I started to wonder if there is a preponderance of specific personality types in various geographical regions.  It occurred to me, very clearly, that Iowa had shaped my gold personality in my early years spent there.

When I think of Iowa, I think mostly of the summers I spent there with my children when they were young.  I think of sunshine and blue skies stretching out forever, along with the fields of corn below.  I think of expansiveness and fresh air.  Upon examining it more closely I do realize there is very much this expectation of doing things the way they are supposed to be done.  To reflect this, I tried to be much more precise when creating this piece than how I usually create my art.  I took a pile of fussy, messy, silk sari threads and reined them in with a felting needle.  Looking at this photo now, I can see that I wasn't quite as precise as I meant to be.

This one is Colorado.  I'm calling it "Baptism by Flood".  The Colorado landscape seeped inside me more than any other place.  Just a few blocks from where I lived was the Big Thompson River.  The Big Thompson starts up in Rocky Mountain National Park and flows down through Loveland where we lived.  By the time it got to us it was a trickle.  We called it Big Thompson Creek.  In late April 1999, my first spring in Colorado, it started raining and the river started rising.  Each day I would walk down to the river bank after work to watch the water rise and rush, until one day, while I was at work, the water came right up to the parking lot of the apartment I was living in.  It was exhilarating!  Moving to Colorado was a huge turning point in my life.  For the first time I was finally starting to get to know myself.  I was awakening, growing, and finding a strength I'd never had.  I felt very connected to this flood.  It was washing through me, washing away all the crap from before.

  This is mica from near the Big Thompson.

I love that feeling of having completed a big project.  Creating a piece of art can be very much like giving birth.  You push and push trying to get it out, and finally your baby is born and you can breathe again:)

I'm going to go breathe (and clean up the mess I've made).  Have a lovely weekend!