Enjoying the Nature of Cloth

Robyn, your blog is like having private art lessons in my home! Can't begin to tell you how much food for thought you give me. Not to mention pictures in my head and a need for several clones of me, to make everything I want to!

Your last comment, referring me to your post Neville Trickett of Saint Verde fame
with the link to the Antique kimono set set me thinking, about why I did indeed love it, as you said.

These days I'm enjoying the NATURE of cloth and wanting to let the medium itself have a showing too, in addition to the message that I want to impart.

To use for art that lasts, cloth needs some taming, some imposition on its qualities to make it strong enough to hang and not fall apart. But beyond that, cloth has unruliness, edges which fray unless fastened, pinned down or hidden inside seams. It bends, stretches and unravels. It's not that I'm against seams or binding or straightening or catching down, at all, but rather that I'm enjoying letting the cloth be itself and not trying to control it too much.

The thing that draws me back to fibre every time, when I've played with other media, is that fibre has such ACCESSIBILITY to it. It is held in the hand, taken with me in a bag to work on when waiting to pick girls up from school, held while feeding it through the machine, and thrown over the back of the couch, in between hand-working it. When completed and "released into the world", it begs to be TOUCHED. People don't feel drawn to touch an oil painting (no offense to oil painters!) in the way same way that fibre is inherently something we feel with our skin.

Stark in my memory, is something I once read on Winnowings, Christine Thresh's blog (in her "About Me"):

"We are born to cloth. It is the second thing we touch after our mother."

Such a powerful way of putting it! All fibres (cloth, paper, wood) are archetypal. All of us have always known them; they're integral to our lives.

So, these days I'm enjoying intuitive, ragged, fraying edges, threads hanging down, hand-stitching. We teach best that which we most need to learn, and in a way, perhaps I am trying to say something about letting things be as they are and accepting their, and our, basic nature...?