This hasn’t ended up where I thought it would.
But I think that’s good, and I think this is better.
I thought that the final show would end up with more collaborative pieces, but I think, in the end, neither Bo nor I have chosen to show anything (much) the other has had a hand in making. It’s as if we shared the driving to get here, but now we’re here it doesn’t matter.
About half way through the year I was worried that I wasn’t really emotionally engaged with the work. (I need to be.) I wanted to work with Bo, and wanted to have an exhibition, but the work wasn’t really doing it for me. I’m not sure how aware of this he was. I plugged away at it. I have faith in the process, and truly believed that something would come up.
Then I injured the tendons in my right arm, rendering me pretty much useless when it came to holding a pencil or a needle, or using a pair of scissors. In danger of going mad, at Bo’s suggestion I turned to the digital and my thoughts ranged around the sense of touch. I could not touch my materials or manipulate them at all. I was bereft. But this catastrophe is what did it for me, this 5 weeks of pain and sniping misery, rattiness and self-pity led me somewhere. I produced image after image, manipulating, combining, blending bits of Bo’s work with bits of mine. Playing creatively with the only thing I could physically do, with one finger on the track pad of my MacBook, my brain started to make connections between the scraps of images, the nothing quality of a digital image, the sense of touch and how we also feel things we don’t touch… heat, the movement of air. I began to think about things not having edges, about people not having edges. The edges of people don’t stop at their skin.
And up popped Aristotle… “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
Our influence takes us beyond our physicality. Small things have an effect on other people. We leave an emotional trail behind us that effects people when we are gone. These are the extra bits. The bits that make us greater: love, faith, kindness, memory, family. I began to collect the bits on my studio floor, bits of fabric and thread. There is a basket of left over bits on my table, the remains of projects gone before, and a bowl of threads got out, used and not put back. They usually get sorted and put away when they begin to overflow. These were the extra parts, I decided. These are the pieces that make us greater than the sum of our parts.
So in the pieces I show for the exhibition, the pieces that mean the most are these. There are material links from one to the next as I work my way through odds and ends of other works and lives, the influence of a long finished quilt, the buttonhole strips from a shirt taken apart to make something else, a worn out piece of embroidery…
Suddenly, through injury and being quite down, I had found the emotional heart of the work. Guided by the uniformity of the pixel Bo was working with, I decided I would use just one simple stitch, nothing fancy, just a knot, thread pulled up through the fabric and pushed back down. This ONE stitch began to mean something. Alone it was pretty useless. But together, a multitude of stitches held strong the useless left overs, those influences, memories, remainders. I could make something from nothing.
The pieces I have speak for me. As Bo said in the previous post about his own work, I am proud of it now.
Can’t wait to see how it all works together. I am totally confident that it will. Bo’s work and mine have common ancestors.
