the Golden Thread
Rearranging the living room always means there’s stuff to sort through. This time I moved my old black trunk full of art made in college, which had been serving as a place to pile clothes so as to not stack them on the floor, to the space carved out by my new taupe 3-sided sectional couch.
Since I uncovered the old black trunk and moved it out into the daylight this morning, I decided to sort through the contents as well.
I found a catalog from an art show at the Viking Gallery at Western Washington University in the spring of 2001. That’s the year I turned 22, graduated from college, and moved to Seattle. Two of my pieces had been accepted into that juried art show, neither of which are memorable really. But what stood out to me was my artist statement, alongside photographs of the art pieces, written more than 20 years ago.
It went as follows:
”It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” Henry James
As I look back on my work, especially recent work, most of it has been about the process of making. I have chosen labor-intensive processes including hours of beading, knitting, embroidering, dressing looms, and weaving to express myself. The end product is an artifact from that journey. My most recent work has been in the medium of weaving. I have found this process to be a wonderful metaphor for living, working, and thinking. Weaving is intimate, tedious, and laborious, all of wit h are the things I love about the process. I also feel deeply connected to ancient traditions as I sit on my bench. Just as weaving is tedious, so is embroidering French knots and sewing beads onto a surface. These processes have become important to me because they speak about my own personal processes of healing, growing and learning.
That was written shortly before I photo-documented my hands working the threads on the loom and weaving a piece of plain cloth. Later during an art critique, I projected the images of producing the cloth onto that very piece of cloth.
It was before I knitted dozens and dozens of sweaters - adult and baby sizes, hats of the same, and shawls, over the years of sitting in lecture halls and staff meetings and nursing a baby - artfully documenting hours and hours of repetitive and often monotonous tasks.
It was before I was invited for a week-long one-woman show at BMOCA where I created a wedding dress in public, long desiring to publicize the private nature of the design board to the final product and all the steps in between. Sewing as performance art.
It was long before I studied to be an art therapist and make a career out of processing one’s life through art.
However, it was written after years and years of handwork - crocheting Barbie clothes, one stitch at a time; giving a 4H demonstration on how to hem a silk scarf by hand; hours and hours of releves to strengthen my feet for pointe shoes,
That artist's statement captures the song of my life. It’s the golden thread that has woven my life together. I have always been fascinated with documenting the process of creation, and more specifically creation by hand that harkens back to a time when life moved slower, when there was time to digest and reflect, when social events centered around raising a barn or top-stitching a quilt.
What’s your golden thread? What is the thing you come back to again and again? What has sustained you all this time?
Make art. Document your life.
