On with Creating

New pictures soon. I promise! I'm feeling great, since I've been on bipolar meds and I'm working away at things I'll show soon. Struggling just a little to focus and concentrate on one thing - I flit from one to the other, then to a new idea. I can feel I'm still pretty high. I managed to flood the bathroom yesterday, as I turned on the basin tap and then got distracted and wandered out of the bathroom! I also forgot the iron on. Not Good. Quite a creative surge though, which is wonderful.

A friend of mine is having an exhibition of her quilts next week, so I'm going to ask her if I can take some pics there and post them to my blog.

Edit 1 Oct 2008: I forgot to take my camera, and I forgot to ask her. Eeks, I guess I am still VERY distractible. The exhibition was great and I left feeling very inspired!

So, there it is.

I'm bipolar. Thus spake the psychiatrist. And verily, medication was prescribed, as aforesaith psychiatrist pronouneth that I was manic and he needeth to 'cap' it, so it did not spinneth out of control. And so it came to pass, that amongst other changes, an increase of Lamictin was warranteth, aforesaith medication being the best thing since sliced bread (and much, much nicer than lithium, saith I !)

And thus, was I addeth to the company of illustrious forerunners, such as Kurt Cobain, Richard Dreyfuss, Ludwig van Beethoven, Paul Gascoigne, Sylvia Plath, Sir Isaac Newton, Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh. ...... Ha ha, I wish !!! - instead I joineth the modest ranks of The Common (Wo)Man, since :

"I, being poor have only my dreams.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
tread gently, because you tread on my dreams..."
(WB Yeats)

September?

So August came and went without a single post. I'm sad and sorry about that. I AM making stuff, but taking photographs feels like an Everest. I'm better than I was, but still not well. I ought to be well, I feel, but something is still not quite right.

Oh, maybe it's me!

How weird is it when you have a hundred and one ideas for art and yet you sit and wonder why we bother at all? I'm working on about 5 things because I can't keep my concentration on one for long. My mind flits like a butterfly yet I'm very tired and not sleeping well. I see the Pdoc on Thursday in PE, so maybe he can re-evaluate this madness...

Ahhh.... weekends

I'm slowly and steadily on the mend. One of my daughters once commented that she loved waking up to the sound of the sewing machine as it meant that Mom was well and happy and things were right with the world. Alas, these days not even the sewing machine does that, as she's in her final school year and they are PILED HIGH with pressure. Apart from the academic work she has far too many other school duties to manage and is constantly exhausted. Just 6 more months to go!

I'm very ambivalent about having chosen to sew on all these roads by machine - it will hold better but trying to manoevre it under the sewing machine with all those pins is a prickly business. Yeah, I could baste.... but, really, life's too short for basting! Or at least my sewing time is too short! I also get some very cute and cuddly companions joining me, who make manoevreing the quilt even more difficult... :)

Melancholia 2

I had the next bit of inspiration for this piece, so spent the last weekend laboriously cutting out 'roads' to go around all the blue blocks, and pinning it all down. (The bottom half is a leftover piece of release paper from fusible, that I used for the pattern. I didn't fuse it (although I like to fuse stuff, I also sometimes find that it makes the fabric quite stiff and all of this stuff is raw-edge and torn, so fusible wouldn't have worked with it.)
Detail shot. I'm now busy sewing it all down, which will also constitute the quilting. Will embellish afterwards, as I want to quilt by machine.

So, as you can see, I'm working again, which feels like a good sign. I really don't want to jinx it, but I 'think' (whispering: ...the medications are working. I think maybe I'm getting better! Shhhhh.)

I bought art!

I don't usually feel I can justify buying Art, as I need the money for more mundane things. But I fell in love with this at the recent National Arts Fest. I went and looked about 5 times, and eventually I was worried that someone else would buy it! It cost R600 for both canvases. I look at it everyday and feel buoyed up - don't regret it for an instant! Isn't it beautiful? It's done by an artist in Port Alfred, Barbara Langley and I bought it directly from her.

Melancholia

Here's what I'm working on (amongst others). All the torn squares have now been sewed onto the background. I'm a little bit stuck over what to do next, so it's hanging here until I get some more inspiration. Although the concept of "things all arranged nicely moving towards disarray" is a little cliched, since everyone else got to do it, I want a turn too.

suddenly, a year older

I'm 47 today. I don't want to think about where I have been or where I am going. I'm trying just to be mindful of each moment as it is here, one moment at a time...

I switched from Cymbalta (no success) to Efexor 4 days ago. Maybe...

Latest

... and here is what I am currently laying out, without any real idea of the end product in mind. I just feel empty, flat and numb - just trying to put one foot in front of the other and plod on - so who knows what will emerge here...?

Therapy art

A painting I did, as part of my psychotherapy.
The psychologist that I'm seeing also does some art (how great is that!) so in between each session (I see him only about every third week, due to cost and distance) he gives me an art task to do for the next session.

My Place

This piece was started as my entry for the Tri-Nations challenge (South Africa, Australia and New Zealand), but it quickly became apparent that 1 ) I wasn't going to finish in time for the deadline and 2) I thought the subject matter rather too dark for the occasion.

I apologise for the poor quality of these photos. I wrote the verse that is embroidered onto it. The theme for the challenge was My Place.
"My place is cast in shadow, my destiny alone,
With darkened eyes and heavy feet, my likeness is as stone.
My cloak is cut from sorrow, the stitches worn and trite,
such is my place, since I am one, acquainted with the night."

The last 4 words "Acquainted with the night" are taken from the Robert Frost poem with this title.
The quilting is a spiral, representing spiralling down into despair, and the other three embroidered images are of death.

Pretty dark. I didn't think it would go down all that well amongst, most likely, exquisitely colourful other entries, so I withdrew from the challenge.

Endless Night

You can't read the words - but they are an extract from the poem Auguries of Innocence by William Blake:
"Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night."

The colours are not true, the flash has illuminated them much more than they are.

My burden

I did this in papier mache several years ago (in another depressive episode) but hauled it out and dusted it off the other day.

Enough Silence

I'm not really any better, but I had better learn to deal with it, because it's going to take a while to get my medication right and for therapy to "sink in".
It's been a bit of a dilemma over what to do with my blog over this time, becasue I was so determined to keep my depression out of it.. But it is something that happens periodically; I was free of it for several years, but the black dog has returned. It's part of my experience and as such, appears in my art...
I'll post a few pics of what I've done recently - as soon as I can take some decent ones. I didn't realise how difficult it is to photograph mostly black or very dark pieces. I'll keep trying.

Meanwhile...back in my head:
Apart from fibre art, I also love the art of words, of being able to put them together so they express exactly what you want to express. The next bit is dark and sad and.. well, yes... depressing, so feel free to skip it, if you want. I've tried to express how the last couple of months have been...

Melancholia

Depression, or as I prefer to call it, Melancholia, since the name 'Depression' is wholly inadequate to explain the dark despair, is an exceedingly ugly state of affairs.

It is a desolate, barren landscape, unbroken by any features or living things, save for stones that keep getting lodged in your shoes. Time becomes an endless stretch of bland emptiness crawling by, torturously slowly, provoking persecutory taunts of uselessness, time-wasting and oxygen theft. Judgment is twisted, perception distorted, every overheard comment at best a slight, more often an accusation, always finding something wanting in you.

Getting out of bed, getting dressed, making food, any movement at all, is an exercise in swimming through syrup, hardly worth the effort. Emotions swing from a numb detachment of complete indifference and meaninglessness, punctuated by falls into valleys of varying depth of cruel and torturous despair. Despair, all-consuming and overwhelming, that demands relief by whichever means possible, whether by copious tears, dependent clinging to any possible hope, sedatives or oblivion by one's own hand.

Sleep is a blissful escape, but frequently withheld as if some form of punishment for unstated crimes. When occasionally granted, it is often restless and filled with exhausting, incomprehensible dreams. Decisions are unsurmountable, thinking is slowed to that of a frame-by-frame action replay. Memory is a sieve with large holes; everything that must be accomplished must be written down, listed, or it is gone forever.

Concentration lapses mid-conversation, when the pervasive inertia takes over and staring blankly into space, as if in trance, comes naturally. Falling comes naturally, too, the feeling of involuntary free-fall into a pit of darkness, footfalls of hope whizzing by, out of reach.

Fatigue, physical, mental, emotional, accompanies every action, as the futility of all effort becomes clearer and clearer, the meaninglessness of existence more obvious, hope more elusive and obliteration more and more compelling, if only to escape the searing pain of the despair...

I'm sorry

I'm sorry if you came in here, hoping to find something. I feel like a shell of what I used to be. Just numb and blank, with the occasional tears, but I don't even know why I bother with the tears anymore.

"My life is just...

... a slow train, crawling up a hill...." - K. Melua

I've been absent

... or should I say my mind has been absent. I'm struggling, withdrawing from everyone, going through medication trials and just dragging through a day at a time. I'm sorry, but my enthusiasm seems to have gone AWOL...

Trying to paint happy pics

Fabric paints on cotton. They will all be combined into a fabric journal. I'm still tearful and very dejected, so just pics for now.

Nothing new

I'm not even doing much fibre art. But my Viral Load piece arrived safely in Cape Town and Inno 2008 opens Monday.

The hospital's beautiful gardens