Month: November 2022

time enough

November 11, 2022

I just realized this morning that I have time now that I have not had before. Entire days, uninterrupted by child care, elder care or distractions. Not that any of these interruptions were unwelcome, nor did they tend to take the entire day, but they did chop the day into discrete blocks of time, and the size and number of those blocks was finite. I certainly developed modes of working, and projects, that fit into the time available, but I always felt like time was short, and valuable, and needed to be used well.

For the last several weeks, I have been sinking into work that is complicated and layered. Work that takes a fair amount of brain space to hold all the pieces in relation to each other. This is a luxury I have not had in this quantity before, and I am coming to grips with what I owe my work, and what I owe the other parts of my life. Right now, the other parts of my life are definitely being shorted. I am also starting to understand better where some of my hurry came from, and how to combat it now that it no longer serves me as well.

developing ideas

November 3, 2022

I’ve been evolving ideas about form? I have in my head a vision; of a coastline, and the way the topography holds water and the tide goes in and out across it, and of rivers and the way they migrate across their floodplains – I want to show that. I’ve made a series of layered works, experimenting with cutting and layering stitched fabric over and under layers of plexiglass representing water.

Rivers look like this:

All the layers get cut on the laser cutter, so that the shapes all fit together perfectly. There is the layer of stitched fabric on thick interfacing, a layer of taskboard to raise the fabric higher than the plexiglass, and the layer of plexiglass. I can rest the plexiglass on box, or I can put the cutout river section of the stitching under the plexiglass, so the continuity of the landscape is clear.

Coastlines are a trickier undertaking:

Coastlines go down into the water, and rise up out of the water, so there are more layers of taskboard that need to overlap in the right places and the fabric and stitching have to be in the right places, and the layers of plexiglass have to fit the cutout shapes of the taskboard… it feels like a lot of parts to keep track of. And these are fairly simple examples.

I am working up to larger pieces with more layers, and working with real geography too.