satisfying my inner ship geek

i've been in copenhagen for a few wonderful days. i was working with some of the most creative people in denmark and i get to keep doing so! what more could a girl ask? a little walk along the quayside at nordhavn. i encountered this rather rusty barge and remembered all the beauty of rusty metal. in all, a very wonderful few days. 

color pop :: a dialogue with two talented women

i mentioned some months ago, a treasure trove of hand-dyed fabrics that i got from a artistic friend who has terminal cancer. when our local creative group chose color pop as our theme, i knew i needed to make something with the fabric scraps that she gave me. i also realized that the color palette also went with the other treasure trove of samples that another friend gave me last year. it was time to start a creative dialogue with these women. as you can see, olga (the cat formerly known as paws mcgraw) was eager to help.

i got out the scraps and ironed them and just began sewing them together - doing it in a very intuitive way without thinking too much about how it would end up. just selecting colors and sizes that fit together and just sewing and holding them up and sewing some more. as you can see, the color palette is indeed bright and fits perfectly with the theme of color pop. 

once i had enough bits and pieces, i sewed them into mini quilt rectangles, wanting them to be around the same size, so they could hang in a group of three. since we are three women, three dialogues seemed right.

dialogue 1

dialogue 2

dialogue 3

then it was time to quilt. in my stash, i found a spool of rainbow-colored thread and i knew it was perfect for this color pop project. on the back side of the quilts, i used some shibori indigo cotton that i had dyed last fall. 

i had a small fight with my sewing machine, but we worked it out in the end. 

i had a lot of trimming to do, but it felt like part of the process. i quilted in a very intuitive way as well, following the lines as i saw fit in the moment. then switching. it felt like it was indeed a dialogue with the fabrics, as they whispered to me what they wanted.

dialogue 1 - finished with binding and quilting. this was the first one i made and is my favorite. probably because i'm also a firstborn. :-) this one features only fabrics from the friend who has cancer. that wasn't actually intentional, it just happened that way. the intuitive way i sewed the bits and pieces together just happened to come together like that. 

dialogue 2 - i love the block-printed pieces at the bottom and top left - they are from the friend who gave me all the samples and works from her education at what eventually became kolding design school. 

dialogue 3 - this one is another dialogue between the three of us. i hung them on these hangers with the cute colorful clothes pins just to photograph them, but decided that it was also how i wanted to display them at the exhibition. 

the night we hung the exhibition, we got these cute little coronita beers. it took hours to find the right placement for everything. i loved how my works looked together. i had also recovered the chair i've been sitting on throughout corona with some hand-woven fabric that we acquired together with one of the looms we got for the little museum where i weave. 

i bought the beautiful hot pink fleece at a wonderful leather shop in aarhus, thinking i'd make a festive color pop pillow of it. in the end, i couldn't bring myself to cut it up, so i just draped it over the recovered chair. it looked perfect with my mini quilts and the colorful knitted hugging pillows one of the other members made. now my chair is back at my desk and the hot pink fleece and the new recovered look give me a new perspective when working at home. 

dialogues 1-2-3 and my recovered chair, which i called "working from home.”

and the beautiful skirt that my friend lent to me - it's what she made with the dyed fabrics back in the 80s. and it was FABULOUS. what a privilege to wear it. i felt absolutely amazing. i positively embodied color pop. what a beautiful day that was. i'll always be grateful for the opportunity and the dialogue.

a creative treasure trove and a reminder to live life to the fullest

one of the members of our local creative group posted on our facebook page that she was giving away her batik supplies, including a number of cantings (tjantings), which i've long been looking for (they're the little "pens" with a vessel to hold the hot wax). i wrote to her and said i'd love to have them. lucky for me, i was first. she lives only about 10 minutes away, so i arranged to stop by this afternoon to pick them up. i took a bottle of wine, since she didn't want to sell the supplies.

i had met her a few years ago at one of our exhibitions, but she's not a super active member, so i didn't know her well. stepping into her home, i loved how creative it felt...the entry hallway was covered in a collage of wallpaper samples. it's always wonderful to step into a creative home. next up, was a wall of book shelves and two comfy chairs. so inviting and wonderful. she had the things all out on the table and invited me to sit down. 

like the treasure trove another friend gave me last year, she had her extensive notes from her art education, with all the exact formulas of all the colors. she had highlighted some of the most key instructions for me. and it seemed important to her that i could read and understand them. i felt, like i did last spring, so privileged to be given this treasure. i also fear that there is no longer such an education, where you really learn everything there is to learn about dyeing fabric. 

she also gave me her color samples, on which she had carefully noted her exact formulas for achieving the colors, sometimes with multiple color baths. when i look at them, what i see is a quilt. a beautiful, rich, colorful quilt. 

she looked different than when i last saw her. her hair was very short, but i hadn't realized that it was because she had been through chemotherapy. and that that was why she was giving away her batik supplies. she has an aggressive breast cancer and at her last appointment, her doctor told her to think about how she wanted to use what time she had left. what that must feel like. it takes my breath away.

it was sobering to talk to her and her husband about what it's like to have a terminal cancer diagnosis in the time of corona. and even though we only scratched the surface, all of us with tears in our eyes, it was very moving and intense and i felt privileged to be part of the moment, even as i can't even imagine how it must feel.

i can't imagine what it's like, but there, in the moment i could, for just a second, even though it isn't my story. and then i understood the feeling i got that it was so important to her to share her notes on the colors. 

we all want to leave something behind. we want to have mattered. we want to create something lasting. and i want to create something lasting from the fabric she dyed and from her supplies. so i'm going to learn how to use them, even though they require learning about caustic soda. i have her carefully-written instructions and i can ask her for help, as she only lives about 10 minutes away. 

we have to live our lives while they're here, seize the moments while we can, and not waste a single one and leave behind all the beauty we can.

i am so grateful to have her samples and her supplies and i will think of her every single moment as i use them to make something beautiful. it's the very least i can do.

finding surprises in your own neighborhood

a most amazing experience today. one which proves that you can still discover something which will inspire you and make you think, within 20 minutes of your home, after a decade of living here. christina saw a program on DR this week, with gardener søren rye, who visited a place called skovsnogen, out near kibæk, where a guy has put up all sorts of art in the forest around his home over some years and it's open to the public to wander through, for only the price of a free-will offering. there is a huge variety of art, from things that look like maybe stalin ordered them, to the namesake skovsnogen, which is a winding wooden snake that's painted bright yellow and which you can crawl around inside, to a brick wall that spells out HATE and which was built in 2011, before trump made a wall of hate his trademark. it was so powerful to come upon this in the forest, to able to climb on it and walk through it.

another powerful work was what i would call the ildsjæl - a golden woman's head, where her hair was sticking upright, like a flame, atop a stylized fire pyramid. She had a peaceful, beatific look on her face, her eyes closed, not the least disturbed by her position the pyre. there was a bench where you could sit and look at her. The more you looked, the more you were affected by her peacefulness with her situation. There was something of the buddha over her, with that zen attitude over what was arguably her plight. but perhaps there was a message in it that it wasn't a plight at all, but freedom and a relief. some small boys came and exclaimed to their parents, "look, mom, it's a fire person - ildmenneske." that's exactly what she was. as we walked away to leave the experience to them, i remarked the she was an ildsjæl, and gave myself goosebumps.

i had moments where i wished we had the place to ourselves. there were many cars there, thanks to an appearance this week on DR, but once you were out, walking the trails, there was decent space between people. though at times, i wished we had more time there for ourselves. and i definitely wished that some of the whining kids that were there weren't there, which made me feel a little old and crabby. but, it was because it was such a striking, intense experience, and i wanted to savor it and that was difficult when there were people crowding up from behind.

there was a huge gong out the trees in one spot. we were recording it, and experiencing the reverberations, and a family came up behind us, chattering away. we definitely wished we'd had it to ourselves.

there were two uncanny figures which were in the vein of our exhibition last year. they were so striking the forest, and only slightly spoiled by an older couple with politiken glasses on, saying, "er det her virkelig kunst," (probably in more correct grammar than that) in a very snotty way. we felt a bit sorry for them with their snobbish view of the world, unable to give themselves over to the experience, needing to hold on to judgements in the face of a world that's changing and where those judgements may be falling away and the world becoming something else.

it will be interesting to see what kind of art arises out there, after corona. maybe christina and i should try to make some, as a reaction to this experience we are in. what would it look like? it would surely be uncanny in some sense. and surprising and unexpected. and it might be frightening and anxiety-causing, but it might also be a relief and somehow freeing.

it's so hard to know the affect this whole experience is going to have, when we are right in the middle of it. but to figure it out through art and in harmony with another artist or artists, and the landscape, could be the very best way to process it - in words and paint and things which hang from the trees.

one thing that was so interesting was that there weren't any artist names or names of the works anywhere visible in the forest, you had to just experience the works for yourself, figuring out what they said to you and only you, through your direct experience of them and the feelings that they gave to you, or the echoes they sounded of your lived experience - like a little hut up on stilts that made me think of Baba Yaga and which made Christina think about whether the hut or the nature around it came first. a thought-provoking experience for both of us, but a very different experience for each of us as well.

it also seemed like a place where you'd want to go on an artist's retreat. to sit in the brutalist shelter, light a fire and settle down to some writing. or to wander among the trees, capturing the sounds of the birds and wind and the leaves. or whether you'd want to record yourself reciting a poem you'd written, or a favorite poem in the amazing acoustics of the metal ball that's all alone, unexpectedly, in the middle of a field.

it definitely won't be my last visit.

relaxed and recharged

we have finally had a few summery days and i had the most wonderful weekend with ten other creative women in a lovely place in a charming town - eating good food, laughing a lot, painting and talking and drawing and walking on the beach together. i am recharged and relaxed and ready for a visit from an old friend. well, not quite ready - i've got to vacuum and get the linens changed on the bed tomorrow morning - but there's time for that. and after such a lovely weekend, time seems to stretch into exactly the amount i need. there was even time this afternoon for a little nap. (i took the day off, you see.) these sort of moments are something we allow ourselves too seldom, so i'm luxuriating in mine and hoping to hold on to a bit of it for the next time it all seems to be too much.

feeling blue about old my blue room

i've been in an intense adobe premiere pro course for the past two days. my head is full and i'm quite frankly exhausted. i was searching my flickr for a photo of pretty paper to use to encourage folks to participate in an art journaling workshop this weekend and i stumbled onto photos of my old blue room. and i got a bit, well...blue about it. i miss that beautiful space. somewhere i could leave projects out and where i could have multiple projects going on at once. somewhere to light a merry fire in the wood-burning stove, listen to music and hang out with friends and drink wine. and then cyndy sent me a blog post she did about my blue room long ago, which included a SONG that she wrote about it. i swear i don't think i knew about this song before now. i think that may have been during that period when i was feeling invisible. maybe it's just that the universe knew that today i would need to both laugh and cry at the same time. thank you so much, cyndy. it was precisely what i needed.

small abstractions

today was a good day. i spent the morning with my very big lego ship and 600 people who hadn't seen it before came by to see it. they also had hot cocoa and sausages. that was good.

then i spent the afternoon being creative. we've started a thing in our local creative group called "CreaGiving" - where we teach one another a technique. today, we learned to make small abstractions using print techniques and an old hotel room card. i also used a small acorn cap as a circle stamp. in the end, we mounted the best ones on cards. i didn't mount any of my bright ones, as i want to work further on them. but i made some pink and yellow ones that i was happy enough to turn into cards.

perhaps i'll send mom a real letter using them. she does still appreciate the written word, so i will do it while i can.

those three pink ones in the foreground are mine. i'm quite happy with how they turned out. and a whole afternoon spent being creative was precisely what i needed.

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this prediction of what the trump years will be like chills me to the bone.

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this will also scare the shit out of you.

it's about the MI6 agent who uncovered the trump-russian election interference intel.

100 happy days :: day 70

light. art. and new life in the long-unused rooms of our local train station station building. 

today, the rooms will be filled with art and music and laughter and voices.

as we were setting up, i had the feeling that the building itself liked being used again.

reindeer games

i took sticks and twigs and little bitty aspen cones and acorns and moss to the library today and turned anyone who wanted to loose making charming little twiggy reindeer. the materials from nature seemed to set everyone's imaginations alight and the idea expanded and became something even more than it was originally. young and old seemed to be happy and delighted to take their deer little deer with them.

creativity and co-creation

this morning an article with the shocking headline of ted talks are lying to you caught my eye. my initial thought was, "say it isn't so!" but then i remembered that brené brown drivel on which i once spent 20 minutes of my life that i'll never have back. brené - what kind of a pretentious crap name is that? but thomas frank lays out a pretty good case for the pop phenomenon of self-help/business books on the topic of creativity. they're formulaic (like most business books), they're filled with the same stories (invention of the post-it with a few bob dylan lyrics thrown in) and they're not really about creativity at all, but about conformity and societal norms. and that made a lot of sense to me. because i've experienced myself how truly thinking outside the box will get you thrown out of the club, because what people really want is to be surrounded by people who think as they do, not by people who push them to think differently and behave in new ways.

it's an interesting read and it makes a lot of sense to me and articulates the aversion i've found that i have for books on cultivating creativity, without really knowing why i found myself rolling my eyes at them. what he doesn't go into is something i've been pondering of late and that's whether it's even possible to be truly creative and think outside of the box (i hate that phrase)? i'm beginning to think that creativity has much more to do with regular, even dogged, practice than it has to do with any epiphanies. the possibility of developing something unique and which is truly yours or truly an expression of what you'd like to, well, express, is nearly null. anything we make is somehow a conglomeration of influences and experiences and contains grains of them all, rather than being something completely new and unique. even a post it is really just weak tape and a small piece of paper, it's not anything new.

but that said, i do believe in a creative practice, tho' i admit that i do it myself in fits and starts and not very consistently. and i believe in the power of co-creation - where a group of people from different, seemingly diverse fields, come together and put their ideas into one big pot, where they are stirred together and become new and improved ideas. and i'd say that one of my main talents lies in an ability to put such groups together and have magic come of it. but it's unpredictable and the magic is always, always different than you imagined it would be. that's actually the magical thing about magic. to co-create ideas with other people also means being very open and willing to throw an idea into the mix and see it change and morph and become something else that only carries a kernel of what it originally was. and it's there that a lot of people have problems. they're not willing to let go of their precious baby ideas and really let them outside of their original box. i think that's where the dogged persistence and the actual nitty, gritty work come in. you have to keep going and pushing and seeing what happens. just like in real life.

and ultimately, it's why i still think ted talks are a good thing - ideas are floated into the world, consumed by people, who combine them with their own ideas and they become something else entirely. life, it's an act of co-creation.

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always pondering libraries, so i liked this guardian piece by neil gaiman.

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fantastic photos and stories of a forgotten russia.