3/ The Story of an Artist: Expansion and Exploration

I’ve always been an artist. It’s something I feel and do. Even when I didn’t feel like an artist, I still was. Even when I didn’t do art, I was still an artist. My story as an artist has been one of discovery and limitation; longing, separation, and wholeness; expansion and exploration; and reconciliation and now integration.

This is Part 3 of 4.

EXPANSION

A three-month overseas sabbatical with my husband to Southeast Asia and Northeast India helped propel the launch of my social enterprise, Indigo Lion Handmade.

The business idea had formed over many years and it grew out of my decades as an artist, traveler, and expatriate fascinated by traditionally crafted objects and their stories. Importing textile accessories and home accents from Laos, a place that I had fallen in love with, offered me the opportunity to bring together people, cultures, stories, and creative expression. And it was easier to create a livelihood from other people’s art, than to do that with my own art.

I feel that handmade objects hold an energy. This feeling connects with the Shinto perspectives I had learned in Japan decades earlier. If I hold a handmade object in my hands, get close and listen, let my imagination wander and wonder, it will reveal its stories. I call this process curating beautiful conversations.

As part of Indigo Lion Handmade, I organized a series of creative writing events through Studio Pause that invited others to create their own beautiful conversations, to notice and respond to what they felt when holding Lao textiles. It was magical.

Every time I returned to Laos on a business trip, I learned more about weaving, natural hand-dyeing, traditional techniques and designs from different ethnic groups. Lao textiles are from the earth—the cotton that is grown, hand-spun, and woven; the plants and roots that are turned into color. The rainy season, the vitality of the soil, and the sun’s rays all play their part.

*Making color, weaving threads, dyeing threads, Houey Hong Vocational Training Center, Vientiane, Laos, 2017*

For Lao people, the natural world is to be explored and trusted – just as it was for me as a child. Even more so for them, nature is life giving and sustaining, as it has been for centuries.

A key partner in Vientiane, Shui-Meng Ng of TaiBaan Crafts once told me, “Textiles and other handcrafts are a living culture and not separate from the livelihood of the community and their well-being – their physical well-being, spiritual well-being, and cultural expression – all this is part of their life.”

The craft of artisans is a part of Lao life, community, and wholeness. It is intricately woven with everything else. It has never been separate.

EXPLORATION

Laos had a profound impact on my own art. It was a place that inspired me in many new ways. By the late 2010s I had all-over-the-place ideas igniting my creativity. I began meeting regularly with my friend, Sushmita Mazumdar at her studio, Studio Pause to explore those ideas.

I began experimenting in a new medium – textiles and hand-stitching – and also saw nature’s continuing influence on my art. I took a hand stitching class with Julie Booth at The Art League and began hand stitching dried leaves, seed pods, and twigs on swatches of indigo-dyed textiles from Laos.

I began wrapping dried leaves and pine needles in indigo-dyed threads, then tying them to twigs and hanging them as mobiles.

My photography increasingly focused on close ups of tree bark patterns, leaf compositions, and tangled branches. Seeing in one medium unfolded into unexpected ways of seeing in another.