Maker

Confession. My home page is not -- exactly -- an art related site. But, on www.boingboing.net I always find something that stirs my artist's interest.

Today, it was a post that linked to an article in "The New Atlantis" an online magazine, where essayist Matthew B. Crawford explores the state of manual competence. After my last post, driven by the frustration of my own manual incompetence at a particular task, I found the synchronicity compelling and the writer's words a good reminder of why I call myself a "maker."

The term is more often used by artists and artisans in Great Britain, and I like its leveling of all the distinctions that drive me into drivel. Am I arts or crafts? Is my work Art with a capitol or damnably artsy? Is this work fine craft, fine art, product or object? A recent discussion on a very large online listserve centered on whether the Gee's Bend quiltmakers were artists or not drove me off the list after only a week of lurking.

Anyway, Crawford, who is exploring the educational trend away from vocational classes, has this to say near the beginning of his article:

"A decline in tool use would seem to betoken a shift in our mode of inhabiting the world: more passive and more dependent. And indeed, there are fewer occasions for the kind of spiritedness that is called forth when we take things in hand for ourselves, whether to fix them or to make them. What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part.

"So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world."

Finding Sanctuary

Over and over, up and down, another panel. Another crooked line of stitch. How did I get 32" instead of 30". And don't get me started on colors -- can a nice juicy Lenten purple be that difficult to get on silk? Rolling of eyes. Gnashing of teeth. Pulling of threads. How could a church project inspire such woeful internal language? If I ever decide that making a traditional quilt is necessary for my art quilt mastery --proving to myself and others that I am a "real" artist -- please remind me of this week.

Pinned to the wall in the studio is a diptych of art quilts, a commission for San Pedro Presbyterian Church-- the first commission I have accepted in a long time. The diptych, with its rich silks and relatively simple design and patterning, has been a pleasure. Ever step was joyful: researching church symbols, dyeing and printing fabrics and ordering silk from my favorite sari store in Houston, stitching the layers together by machine and by hand, even the repetitive meditation of finishing the edges with layered stitch. (To see some interesting finishing ideas for textile work, order my mentor and friend Jane Dunnewold's "Edges and Borders" CD.)

Not so the simple silk dyed banners that are to hang either side and change with the liturgical seasons. Why does 30" slip around on my measuring stick? And why has it taken me four tries to get an appropriately Lenten purple? My old Singer machine (it was my Grandmother's 1952 pride) is a workhorse when it comes to freemotion quilting -- but because I have pushed the tension and manhandled so much fabric through it, making a simple seam strengthens my resolve to start down payments on a new Bernina. I'm still not done, and need to deliver the banners and art quilts next week, so that they can be welcomed into the sanctuary on Sunday, Sept. 10.

That date, Sept. 10.

That day a few years ago was last day before everything changed about how we in the U.S. think of peace and war, sanctuary and safety. It's amazing the power that typing Sept. 10 or Sept. 11 or Sept.12 has now. As an artist, it's often hard to see the relationship between peace out there and peace in here. What can my work do to heal a world where some people are so desperate to achieve their view of right that they are willing to kill others, and destroy their own precious gift of life? All I know to do is to keep doing my soul purpose, to trust that my quilts are putting peace into the world. And to remember that the tasks that I do, even the ones that tangle the threads and threaten my sense of worth in silly little ways, can provide sanctuary if only I keep the peace.

For more about Jane Dunnewold's CD, check out her website.

Welcome to my view

This is about the maker's life. The teacher's path. The stitching and dyeing and printing of the craft of art cloth and art quilt. The stumbling around and the soaring, the way the words and the pictures come together. Poetry on the page and in the piecing of bright scraps together. The inner work and the outer journeys to and from. Practicalities and flights of fancy and fearful grandeur, trivial pursuits and tactile amusements.

It's also about this particular place and time --in my life -- and in the life of this studio space as it and we become the next thing on the list. The view from this studio space on this Texas Hill Country ridge is awe-inspiring and ever-changing. Blink and the light shifts, but the seven hills that stretch out on the near horizon are as old as, well, the hills. What you see below foot -- crushed caliche, jagged limestone, shaped and sharp, smooth and honeycombed, dusty and chalky -- is what makes the contours, the rounded nubs and gentle peaks. The limestone shapes the hills beneath their green cloak of cedar - ash juniper - that stretches as far as the eye reaches. And, despite this present aparition, the rock was once alive, once the skeletons of sea creatures, the living reef.

So this is about nature and art and people as we come together in communion on this patch of old reef, a ridgeline about 20 minutes drive from any named place on a map, although the post office address is Pipe Creek.

Expect this chronicle to be as changing as the rock.