Un/tethering
As things become undone, other things come together
Infinite collages
For the past couple of months, I’ve been making collage squares. Many, many collage squares from cut-up practice pages of mark-making. The combinations seem infinite, something I wrote about in an earlier post:
The ways of combining and connecting, of contrasting and complementing, just keep coming. Surely there is an end, but I don’t see it yet. Maybe I don’t want to.
She seeks the infinite. Maybe she’s sensing that nothing ever really finishes, anyway. Things always change, evolving from one to the next—rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning. Over and over again.
Bigger ideas
In the online course I just completed, Perfectly Imperfect with Lorna Crane, she sewed torn paper onto a strip of fabric, which got me thinking of my own way of doing it. And instead of a scroll, as she called it, I wanted to make a hanging.
Sometimes ideas come to me in the middle of the night, an image of what I could create, or how I could make it. Sometimes it comes to me on a walk, or in the stillness between things, or when I look at something just so. This time it came to me in another artist’s work, a large sculptural hanging I’d seen at a gallery a couple of years ago, and I was so intrigued.
It was a pull to do something different, and for her, to go bigger, to make her work bigger. Her big imagination breaking free of confinement, sameness, and needing space to explore.
Letting go
And so I began. Rummaging through fabrics, I came across ones I had hand-printed a while ago. They were perfect, as if waiting for this very moment.
I cut the fabric into strips, then attached them into longer strips, then chose the collage squares, aligning them into a column. I didn’t think much about which collages to select, as if they knew what order to be anyway. Next, one by one, I tacked them with black thread to the fabric strip, and finally tethered them to a stick.
Days passed, and weeks passed, and there was a sense of spaciousness, even. I wasn’t bored doing the same thing (it wasn’t production), and I wasn’t bothered by trying to figure something new out (because it wasn’t all new, just a new configuration). I realized letting go of my subscription platform on Ko-fi two months prior offered me this space to explore, this space of time without a deadline. I could linger in this creative presence, even.
She was letting go of things she didn’t know she was holding onto—an expectation of the way things would always be, or a sense of certainty that she could determine her future. As she let go, her spirit had no choice but to jump into the unknown, flailing and floating. As she let go, she knew she wouldn’t fall away entirely.
Tethering
“With your art, you tether fragile things together,” my friend Laura told me recently. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it made sense. Leaves, sticks, pine needles, dried grasses, pods, woven Laos fabric and handspun silk thread—they are fragile and also very resilient.
Then I thought of my current collage hangings, and how they weren’t all made from fragile things, yet they looked delicate. The collage squares were about chaos, held in a shape, a square, to get close and see the details within the mark-makings. And how they’re held, tethered onto the fabric strips, stitch by simple stitch.
She heard herself say to people that she was feeling untethered these days, that the things holding her before felt looser, maybe more ambiguous. Those were not only outer things, but also inner things like perceptions, understandings, beliefs, and hopes. These were fragile things in a chaotic world, and resilience was needed.
But kindness and compassion, they weren’t ambiguous. They were tethered to her spirit, made of the resilience she needed as she let go.
Floating…
LouLou
