Finding Joy in Weaving: Embracing Artistic Messiness

Leave a comment

Quick reminder: My Practically Twisted blog will be going away over the next few months. If you want to continue to receive my random musings and to keep up with my art life please sign up at the new website.

There’s snow in Crozet today, Friday. It’s beautiful and white and still falling. Rather than drive into the studio I’m going to stay at home and feed the squirrels peanuts. After weeks of non-stop making I’m going to press pause. I’m going to take time to reflect. Ponder. Reconsider. 

Hey – do you remember learning to weave with strips of paper when you were in grade school? I do. And then we learned that our strips of paper didn’t have to be as straight as arrows. If we cut them with curves or at angles they still wove together and – for this little girl at least – created something magical.

I still think weaving is magical.

With this in mind, several years ago I purchased a small frame loom. And then a larger one. And then a larger one still. I’ve brought them home from the studio and while I have every intention of dusting them off the truth is that my messy artist self feels constrained (or maybe intimidated) by those looms. But any time I see a discarded wire rack or some window screen or an abandoned picture frame my brain says, ‘Hey! I can weave on that!’.

And that’s what I’ve been doing these past few weeks. 

We’re not talking the incredible Anni Albers here. This adventure I’m on is fun and frustrating and weird and has taken me on an unexpected detour from the encaustic ‘dream boats’ I was focused on in October.

Instead I’ve been working on two small aluminum picture frames that I’m repurposing as looms and a large 24×36 inch piece. Contrary to everything I just wrote, the larger work is on a loom, where it will remain. This rustic loom, a rectangle of reclaimed wood with pin nails to hold the warp, was made years ago by someone else and given to me by a friend. I’ve attached a collage I created with tissue paper on foam core with the stenciled text ‘looking at art reminds us that we are not alone’ to the back so that the loom frames the collage. The weave hovers an inch above the collage. And what a weave it is. I chose a palette far removed from the swampy browns of my earlier photo encaustic work. It is off the charts bold, bright and neon. I chose cotton, wire and monofilament for the warp and more wire, embroidery floss, beading, produce netting and the funny plastic stuff we made lanyards from when we were kids for the weft. I tied warp threads together and l’ve let the weft hang in places like stray hairs. The viewers eyes have to dodge around the threads and wire in order to find the text hiding beneath it all. 

As I worked I believed in what I was doing. I considered each choice, I killed my darlings and explored new ways to solve the technical issues I bumped into along the way. Pushing the boundaries of weaving is not new, yet as I worked on this piece I believed I was being bold and inventive.

But ss I was attempting to photograph the work for submission to a call for art at a Richmond, Virginia gallery any thoughts I had of its ‘bold inventiveness’ were replaced with thoughts like ‘what were you thinking?’ and ‘this is a mess!’.

Confidence and conviction can be fleeting. Self-doubt is easier to handle than the deep  exploration it takes to uncover the truth of why we make what we make. Art is a language without words and what keeps me anchored in the process is asking myself again and again ‘what story am I trying to tell?’.  But sometimes the work is too hard.

I seek validation from others rather than trust my own instincts because I forget that we need art in the world. Because I forget that we need art to remember that we’re not alone.

Panic at the Studio: How I’m Learning to Show Up for Myself

I can’t say this is true for all artists, but it’s true for this artist. After a show is hung, after the studio is swept and organized, after the opening is over –  my mind goes blank. I’m certain I’ll never create again.

At the end of May there was no doubt my encaustic days were over. I was done. I brought a table loom into the studio and pulled out a few kumihimo wheels from storage in the garage believing I had spent my limited creative battery life. I felt drained.

Playing with weaving on a tomato cage

And then the panic began. I realized that October is not too far away and in October I will be hanging a solo show. 

Panic, of course, was getting me nowhere. To distract myself from the rising tide of fear that my life was a total waste and that I was incapable of ever having a good idea again, I settled into weaving on the table loom. Which also got me nowhere. So I settled into creating kumihimo braids for the charms that came back with me from our trip to India a few years ago. At least that was something productive. December, after all, will be here not long after October and I need product for the holiday craft shows.

And that’s where I found my calm.

The meditative nature of kumihimo and the rhythmic click of the bobbins as the wheel turns in my hands brought me to a place where I could begin to think about melting wax again. And that’s how I realized there’s something brewing inside me. Another story asking to be told.

Wheeling away with my kuihimo wheel

Of course, Austin Kleon would point to Tom Waits and Nick Cave, songwriters who believe the music is not within them and struggling to get out. Instead, they prefer to  believe the words and music already exist and are floating in the ether waiting to be found. Which is not unlike Michelangelo’s assumption that the sculpture he was searching for was already in the marble. It was his job to chisel away the superfluous material. Or like the art teacher I knew, who asked his students to consider that the drawing was already in the pencil they held in their hands. 

If I’m willing to open myself to those sweet possibilities then my time at the table loom and with the kumihimo wheel was time that I needed to settle. Time I needed to become receptive. To tune in. To reflect on how I want to show up for the work, for the muse, and for myself. 

The supplies I need to build my new body of work will arrive on Tuesday. I’m itching to get back to what I love to do and I need to do. I’m excited by what I might learn this time around. 

We are acts of creation and born to create. It doesn’t matter if you’re dragging a loaded paintbrush across a blank canvas, typing on a keyboard, pouring ingredients into a mixing bowl or writing formulae on a whiteboard. We are acts of creation born to create. 

As we step into a new week – what will you do to be more receptive to that possibility? How will you show up for yourself these next seven days?