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| Hand walking Monet, our first summer on the Sunshine Coast |
December 15
Dear Heather and Julia,
A couple of days after we shared our first letters, around the time when Julia popped into the conversation, one of our neighbours in Roberts Creek pointed to a trickle of water running down the gravel driveway next to the cabin where James and I live. Our neighbour told us that the water is a freshwater spring that runs beneath the property –– probably good and clean because it filters through rock as it comes up from the ground. That tongue of water has always been there, but recognizing it as a spring added to the rightness I’ve been feeling about how things are starting to move. Thank you both for your letters and for the dozens of private notes you’ve sent in these last weeks. I’ve been comparatively quiet in our back-channel, but I want you to know that I’m looking at the world around me and noticing promising hints and echoes of you both.
I’d like to bring a new idea to this conversation, before I wind my way back to the ideas you shared in your letters.
Heather, you recently told me about the coarseness of your scale in embroidery. The way I understand it is that you’re making choices about your thread gauge, stitch size and the weave of your background fabric, and this influences the level of detail in your embroidered image. So, when you say that your scale is ‘coarse’, this means you’ve selected your materials and technique in a way that makes your lines ‘simpler’. Am I close? I hope you’ll correct me in your letter back, but for now, here’s a question:
When you think about the scale in your embroidery, are you also thinking about time? I’m guessing that choosing a coarser or finer scale impacts how long it takes to stitch something, and your experience of it, just as it impacts the image. Please tell me about the expressiveness of scale – both process, and product!
Here’s why I’m asking:
This idea of scale reminded me that there’s a relationship between your handwork, and how you see or sense the world. I am curious to know how you think about that, particularly because the natural world is such a presence in your work. How it shows up feels complex and layered; it’s something other than direct representation.
From my own end, I’ve been thinking about the interplay between the time it takes to stitch something, and the relatively short time of observation. I find myself particularly wanting to stitch the kinds of things that I love to write about: things in the human and more-than-human world that are fleeting, or resistant to capture; things that are built on layers and layers of hidden connections and relationship. I like the idea of embroidery helping to lengthen or deepen the time of observation.
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| Monet pulling me at horse speed through a scene of summer wild flowers that I want to eat with my eyes; we’re walking just a little too fast to take everything in; it’s pleasurably overwhelming. |
I’ll share an example of a ‘project idea’:
There’s a walk I do regularly, to visit my horse, Monet. It’s 4 km up a steep hill and in the summer it can be grueling. The road is lined with deciduous trees and when these are in leaf, their branches cast lacey, complicated shadows on the asphalt. On very hot days, I need to move slowly and I find myself watching the shadow play to distract myself from the uphill grind. When the wind gusts, I can track a full cycle of movement in the shadows as I pass a section of road: they lift, spring back, shake, rest, shake (less), rest, and so on.
In two summers of visiting this hill, I’ve developed kind of an obsession with the idea that I could somehow cover the shadows with a textile of some sort, and then document the movement of the shadows across and away from it. I’ve thought about lacemaking, embroidery, tambour. I love how spending hours and hours trying to stitch shadows that move whenever the wind does might catch some of the impossibility of stilling the world. But I think the hours I would need to spend in handwork would also condense something about the physical exertion and repetition of walking up the hill –– the kind of practical, un-intellectual reality that brings me to witness the moment in the first place. I think it would be wonderful if the textile could also hold the feeling of endorphin rush when you arrive at the top of a hill and your breath comes back to you…
Another layer: I owe this ‘project idea’ to my horse, who lives at the top of this very steep hill. What pulls me up the hill is a sense of responsibility to him. And this is where I finally come back to your letters: humbleness, accountability, the wild mess.
You both picked up on my use of the word ‘humble’. I agree, it’s a loaded word. But the humbleness that I aspire to is less about being a good little stitcher for god, or of snipping away your wildness to please the customers. I’m thinking about work you do that is released from an expectation of outcome; a kind of work that avoids entitlement, work that is bigger than you, has its own mysteries, and may not please you at times.
I’m not particularly religious and don’t have kids, so my horse is where I get to learn about this. I’ve found that having a horse is about building habits: doing the same things over and over again with no obvious breakthrough or change, until there is one. My first summer on the Sunshine Coast was supposed to be a summer of writing and art and honestly, I spent much of it travelling up that hill to visit him. We barely even rode. Instead, I hand-walked him through the woods and I learned to notice the ground. I didn’t do anything especially special with him, but I learned how to organize myself around him.
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| I stop Monet and make him look at clouds. |
Heather, you suggested that I might be a director. What I’m finding out is that my way of ‘making things happen’ is becoming so quietly cumulative that it’s almost subliminal. ‘Success’ might look like noticing a clearwater spring in my gravel driveway, a few days after you and Julia met my initial, small idea in such a spirit of abundance and warmth.
Julia, I want to say that I know and ferociously care for the wild underside you describe. I recognize this mess as the place loyalty lives and grows: how you truly come to care for people when they share something secret or raw. The ‘unhappy customers’ you describe in your letter perfectly define why I want to organize work-in-progress shows for you, and others who take such great care in challenging the art ‘product’. I think the wild underside is the home of grassroots and DIY organizing –– we get to choose each other, we decide who we will be accountable to.
I think that one reason for my fascination with a perfect embroidered back is that I haven’t had many technique teachers. Or – I absolutely have had technique teachers – but one is a horse, and several are theory/history scholars, and the rest is the aggregation of artists and friends I’ve been paying close attention to over a couple of decades. The people – and beings? - who I think of as my ‘cohort’.
Heather and Julia, your letters were each such a lovely rallying cry for paying attention to this shaggier, less predictable way of learning and connecting. Your letters helped me think about the underside to the underside of my embroidery and writing – currently, the horse who pulls me up a hill.
If you’re willing, I’d love to hear about what’s pulling you up your hills. I am also curious about this idea of scale – just anything you can tell me about how you think about it. I’ve never really considered it, so I feel like a green rookie even asking the question. What’s the right question? Just, tell me more! And thank you for everything you’ve told me so far,
xxB
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| Monet turning to go home at the summit of a hill that makes him sweat. |
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