I happily work on six, seven pieces at a time and then ALL OF A SUDDEN, the need to finish something becomes urgent.
I am the same way with housework… looking with neutral disregard at piles of clutter everywhere until one day, I CAN’T STAND THEM ANYMORE.
This piece was a dream-sketch quilt and it is taking waaaaaaaaaay too long to complete — as are my three Easter Cross quilts, a poppy piece, and a pillow commission. So forget about the torture depicted in the piece. The thing torturing me right now is the unfinished state of things.
(but I have been all tied up — kids on break, garden attention-grabbing — just in the last few days I removed the dead inkberry, attended two track meets,
potted up a bunch of sedum, raked the side beds, planted some basil seeds, used garbage-snagged pieces of glass (– someone’s old fridge components picked up yesterday –) to make a casual cold frame, swept the side porch and readied it for summer morning reading, swept the bluestone, got the houseplants outdoors, grocery shopped twice, cleared up the south bed, made the garage passable again by moving shit around, started a new compost heap)…
During the construction of this quilt, which I am calling “Witness”, the artist Barron Storey — whose work I really love — started a “women and ropes” series. My “ropes” look more like threads, and lack the paralyzing tension that I had hoped to depict, but this quilt is, nevertheless of a “woman and ropes”. The cloaked witness is partially shown here:
On a lighter note, I am finding this business of having middle-aged eyes is adding a new dimension to design — the looking with glasses on, the looking with glasses off — something I never knew about because I had never worn glasses until middle age. Last night I noticed that the batik of the Witness’s face, if you blur your eyes, really looks like a face. I like it when things like that happen.
This was made during an intense period of caregiving for my sister so for that reason I can place it in time — about eight and a half years ago. I was really angry about it all at the time. It’s a piece of muslin that was written on, ripped into strips, woven and then top stitched with couched threads and other bits of fabric. I gessoed the surface at the end, or applied white paint — that part I can’t remember. It’s been fun to see some old pieces.
