We Go Deeper: The Fifth Letter

I write on an unusual snowy afternoon – although the accumulation is just an inch or two, on the mild Gulf Islands no one dares venture out. It is blissfully quiet, with just the odd crackle or ping from the wood stove, and the occasional burble from a snoozing cat.

Perhaps it is a suitable time to engage with the hubbub of ideas that you both have raised in your letters. Barbara’s newfound awareness of a freshwater spring under the place where she lives is such a lovely thing, and maybe a metaphor for all the currents that flow in and around us, without our awareness. It reminds me of my forest walks with Alex, who moves slowly and carefully, while I usually bustle on ahead. Alex is a birder and has previously been focused on what is overhead, but now he looks to the ground, for safer footing. What he now notices are the leaves, lichens, mosses and fungi of the forest floor, nests and anthills and the burrows of small animals. He will often call me back from my bustling to inspect something fascinating that he has just discovered. Gradually, I am learning to match my pace with his, so as not to miss any of the richness and texture of the world at the edge of the path.

When I was a teenager, I felt like an outcast. I took heart in something that I think was attributed to Lou Reed, or maybe he was quoting someone else: “It’s good for an artist to be an outsider, you can see a lot farther when you are out on the edge.” Edges or undersides are interesting places to explore, liminal places that offer possibilities that are often unseen, ignored by the mainstream.

Julia, your description of your improvised, messy, imperfect performance sounded like it was a fantastic gift to your audience. What an opportunity to see how your music is made, to witness the interplay between you and Aram as you create, to hear the divine tangle of “What if?”! The trust that you offered to your audience, that they would listen and their hearts would respond – what an amazing experience it must have been. I am not surprised that it was women who understood. The very day I received your letter, I was having a massage treatment for my frozen shoulder, and the masseuse related a memory of her mother, who she said was not particularly affectionate, but sewed all the clothes for the family. Lise remembered being fitted for her first communion dress, standing in front of her mother as she pinned the dress to fit, and never poking her once. Lise said she felt “protected” in that moment, and as she told me the story I felt a rush of connection to your story of the woman in the audience who said she felt protected, and in the presence of her grandmother. Female presence, trust, caring, being seen and protected – this feels very deep and essential. I think perhaps it is harder for men to open themselves to such an experience, or maybe it just happened to fall along gender lines that night.

You say, so perceptively, that “Visibility asks for participation. It asks that someone not turn their eyes away. It asks for sustained attention and a willingness to engage, to notice.” And then you ask what happens when a person is asked to give their attention to something uncomfortable, and what is going on when someone turns away? Is this related to power and inequity? Does asking to be seen by someone with more power mean giving up things you love?

Wow. Such questions, so important and so rarely asked. My instinctual response is to say: Never forsake what you love. What you love is the source of your art. To quote Rumi: “May the beauty you love be what you do.” (I made an embroidery of that once.) You ask about accountability, and it may be the romantic in me that says you are ultimately only accountable to yourself and the ones you love. As an artist, you must be true to yourself. As a member of your audience, that is what I am hoping for, to receive that rare gift of your true voice – messy, imperfect, humble, wild, transcendent, glorious. 

Links to this work: https://truestitches.blogspot.com/2010/08/beginning.html https://truestitches.blogspot.com/2010/10/slow-progress.html 
https://truestitches.blogspot.com/2010/11/finished.html

I have gotten carried away. (Sigh. I wish I had been at that show!) I will go back to your question, Julia, about wildness and dissolution in myself and my practise. I think my practise, which might seem on the surface to be very controlled and careful, is actually about my self-imposed atonement and reparation for past misdeeds which involved the wildest, riskiest part of myself. I have had tons of therapy, and still I hold back on taking risks, of letting the world see how hurt and angry I really am. I am “nice”, therefore I don’t stand out/am less visible. 

When I am stitching all those endless stitches, I can tolerate a bit of unevenness, a bit of variation from the norm, but sometimes my stitches do get too large, or too slanted, and I have to pick them out and redo them properly. When people see my work and comment on how “perfect” it is, I shake my head and say it only looks perfect. Yet when other people suggest I could save myself a lot of work and do it by machine, I say that would negate the subtle mark of the human hand, which is necessarily imperfect. There is a Willa Cather quote that I have carried with me for years: “The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.”

Do I prefer the beautiful top side to the messy underneath? In theory, absolutely not! In practise, the underside never shows. But just because it is not seen, it doesn’t mean that it is not there, active, it’s dark heart beating. I see the (metaphorical) underside as full of compost, worms, the icky bits that get hidden away, decomposing, nourishing, returning to earth as rich soil, regenerative. In my stitching, the underside is the base, what holds everything together, otherwise it would just be a bunch of loose threads.

I could go on and on, and perhaps I have said more than I should have already. It’s such a juicy topic though... But I want to move on to Barbara’s question about scale. I like to work big, and it’s not just because my favourite high school art teacher told me I should. (He did have a point, though, in that bigger work is taken more seriously than small.) Bigger work doesn’t have to be coarser, but in my case it is. By coarse I mean that I use relatively thick crewel wool rather than fine silk. In the Codex Canadensis series, for example, I enlarge the original pen and ink drawing to 400%. I still try to reproduce every line, so I am not simplifying, but it is on a less finicky scale. I only transfer minimal outlines of my design to the cloth, so as I stitch my eyes move back and forth between original drawing and my ground (cloth) just as they would if I was drawing from life, my needle like a piece of charcoal, filling in the details, adding shading and definition.

Heather Cameron, A Skin for a Skin, 2015. Hand embroidery, wool on linen 48"(w) 54(h)

I don’t think working bigger changes the amount of time I put into a piece, but it does allow a bit of physical ease. At 63, I am developing arthritis in my hands, and it is simply more feasible for me to sit and stitch for long intervals if the needle I am gripping is not tiny. I might also say it is a bit less tiring on the eyes, working with larger threads. And there is something about the scale I work at that does refer back to the body, both my own physical engagement with the cloth, and that of the viewer. In oneintotwotwointoone, for example, the panels are six feet high and three feet across – human size. In the gallery, they meet the viewer at a scale that neither overwhelms nor diminishes.

To my mind, working big legitimizes embroidery as a fine art medium. Keeping it small and dainty evokes the realm of the domestic, makes it easier to ignore. Another reason I like working big is that a larger scale emphasizes how embroidery sits somewhere in the space between two and three dimensions. Although stitching is technically a surface art, the diameter of the threads creates depth, texture and shadow. Thicker threads will create more depth, more substance. 

I love your idea of stitching shadows, of capturing the movement of sun and wind and shade. This is so different from my own obsession with creating presence, stability even. But I recognize this aspect of “the impossibility of stilling the world” (such a beautiful line) in some of your other work: the short video clips of the crocheted pieces made for Mermaid Spring, moving in the breeze, casting shadows, mysterious and ephemeral. I don’t know where I would begin to make something that captured moving shadows – this feels very much outside my repertoire. Lace maybe, very light silk gauze perhaps. A contrast to the hours of making, embodying the physical exertion and repetition of walking up the hill, where Monet waits. Holding the feeling of endorphin rush and the return of breath. This will be a lovely piece, I know that.

I’m not sure what pulls me up my hills. Once, when I was very young, I wanted to be a famous Canadian artist.(!) Fame and fortune have no allure now – in spite of a recurring dream in which I can barely make out the letters R-E-C-O-G-N-I-T-I-O-N. I just know that I have ideas that arise and subside and arise again with increasing urgency until I just have to try and create it in real life. Jung might say those ideas start in the messy, fertile unconscious, the underside of life, the shadow. And there we have shadows again! 

Biologically, even very simple life forms react to light and dark, it is deeply encoded in the DNA of existence. Light might mean warmth and food, while darkness means rest and retreat. One is not better than the other, one needs both to survive.

I had better go stoke the fire in the wood stove – the forecast tells me this cold snap is going to last another few days. I hope both of you, Barbara and Julia, and your loved ones, are safe and warm. 

Love to all,
Heather

P.S. The snow has piled up!