Journal Text from December 13 1987
Images of stitching and nature walks from this week.
Showing posts with label walking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label walking. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
beauty binds us together
Monday, March 20, 2017
wrecked
which are a big part of their lives,
except when they listen to music
or look at art.
Agnes Martin
A woman made utility quilts as fast as she could
so that her familly wouldn't freeze, and
she made them as beautiful as she could
so that her heart wouldn't break.
American folk saying
image from April 2012
both quotes from my current journal
glad to be walking on my road again, the ice has gone.
both quotes from my current journal
glad to be walking on my road again, the ice has gone.
Wednesday, October 05, 2016
luminous halo path
Curator Sophie Anne Edwards invited me to create a piece about the daily walk I've make along my country road. I've done this walk for 23 years, sewing myself to this place.
Friends from Nova Scotia were visiting for the week and helped with the installation. Above, Margi Hennen assists 4 element's Patricia with the un-wrapping.
We attended Marlene Creates' presentation of the walking she does to help her learn more about her 6 acres of boreal forest in Newfoundland and also her poetry walks.
My daily walk to Cricket Hill is one km - 1250 steps. (one way)
Virginia Woolf said: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
A life of stepping over and through hurdles and burdens, joys and unexpected visions
Above, Valerie Hearder helps with the installation.
The path has something to do with mortality and summing up and about stitching my self together.
Using the colourful cloth as soul medicine.
Van Gogh believed that colour has power over line.
Line may be the language of reason but colour is sensuality itself.
Every day I sewed a little more, working towards one km of cloth.
It is such an important and enduring tactile presence in all our daily lives.
Cloth is what touches our skin, cloth is what we sleep with.
Cloth is tangible, the most intimate and familiar material construction and touching it makes current thought and past emotions visible.
The materiality of cloth is generous, allowing memories of beauty or love to come up to the surface and be a halo or aura that holds each of us.
Working with materials reveals me to myself.
I understand my life and my healing through making.
In Eastern cultures the act of joining small pieces together embodies a wish for a long life.
As you walk this path, go slowly.
Match my gait.
Notice your own experience of walking along the river.
Step step step.
My body – spirit steps into the future.
Who knows where? Answer, the same place.
Friday, September 16, 2016
I chant my steps
I use a cane, I count each step, chanting in my mind
...twenty two, twenty three, twenty four.........
I don't know why I do that.
Each day I can get a little further without stopping to rest.
The act of walking has become a brave repetition of small movements
that strengthen me, ground me, and give me ritual.
I've have been considering doing this for years.
Last winter, each time that I completed the walk, I moved a square of white linen into a basket, although I didn't know how or what I was going to do with them. Some kind of path perhaps.
The repetition of day after day of stepping reminded me of stitching. It was as if I was sewing myself to my local landscape. I wanted to make something that referenced the running stitch I guess.
A walking step/stitch.
No more walk.
Instead, I looked at the horizon. I sat on my deck.
I began wrapping those squares of white around around sweet clover. Wrap wrap wrap.
The clover stalks grow as tall as me. In the summer they smelled sweet.
I bent the branches, cut the stalk, and bandaged them with cloth and thread.
I thought that somehow, these could still represent me and my walk. The walk un-walked.
My daughter told me that they looked like bones.
material objects open a door to inner ness
My life path, a patchwork of time.
My path will measures the distance of the walk I can do now and I'll speak more about it when it is installed during the elemental festival in 2 weeks.
Gravity is measured by the bottom of the foot. Juhani Pallasmaa said that
Tuesday, August 02, 2016
enfolded
yesterday, today, and tomorrow
(before I lost the ability to do that walk)
last winter and spring I was making a piece about the importance for me of my daily walk on our country road
every day that I did that walk, I placed a square of white cloth into a basket
it grows along the beach and we consider it a weed
it smells so beautiful
it is as tall as me
the smell increases as the plant dries
it connects high-low, human-earth
it connects what we understand and what we don't
for ourselves and for others
it gave me time and solitude
I didn't go anywhere for two months except to hospital or dr. appointment
I stayed on one level
I started going up and down (just 5) stairs on July 20, seven weeks after I broke that left leg
I stepped backwards into more space and less worry
it is to acknowledge that presence of death in life.
not a binary opposite but
enfolded at its very centre. penina barnett
they close us down
art opens us up again
we need art as much as we need food and shelter
about loss
about my body
about healing
bundled, wrapped, bandaged
step step step
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
my fear
Having courage is not about not having fear,
but keeping on going in company with that fear" Cheryl Strayed
My body. My losses. My anger. My own goodness.
My yearning for tenderness. My yearning for social contact. " Radka Donnell
The left leg is connected to the authentic part of ourself
The left leg is related to how you feel and what you believe
A painful left leg shows that there is something askew with personal needs and desires"
Wendy Golden-Levitt
It gave me a place to just lay it out in black and white who I am. Really truly.
The nurse brought black coffee and marmalade toast to me at 6 am , a small kindness, so important.
The femur is the biggest and strongest bone in the body.
It is not an object
It is seen through an object" Agnes Martin
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
stitching myself into a dotted line
I divide myself up yet keep myself together with my work. At the same time.
My daily walk helps me manage this as I stitch myself to place, yes,
but also stitch myself together with each step.
I sew a path measured by my own stride.
Each day, each dot, is important because it's another day that I've kept myself together, able to carry on with all my scattered-ness.
That walk gives me a container to wrap my self up in.
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