Line by Line

After completing two magazine articles and now returning to complete this current "Pages" piece, this blog's title definitely describes my artist and writer lives recently.

After carefully pinning all the individual stratas of Sulky water soluble fabric together to connect them into a whole piece this past weekend, I'm now stitching along the centers of each row of pieces horizontally, one line at a time. Once that's done I can take out all the ouchy straight pins and fill in the rest of the horizontals and all the verticals. At this point I'm using only a heavy cream thread for all the joins. The softness of the greys and whites is increasingly appealing to me. Here is a shot of the printing (silver pearlescent) on the white fabric that I used when I decided not to fill those areas just with stitching.

I enjoyed making the screen for this last summer when I created the many greyscale, language-inspired fabrics that I've been working with since then. This one developed from partial letters I traced from newspaper headlines and ads -- their original meaning disappeared but the suggestion of language remains. I have since discovered that Canadian artist Sylvia Ptak did a whole series called "Disassembling Language" by tracing fragments of text from rare books. I would love to visit a rare book collection just to appreciate the fonts and how different sentence structures and word choices were in earlier times.

I've chosen to take a different track with adding the letter forms to this surface after some experimentation this weekend. It offers me more freedom to alter my course down the road (hey always a good choice --if General Custer could speak now, I'm sure he'd agree). I can compose these in front of and behind the little pages, just not weave them through this way. I'm willing to sacrifice that for the freedom to move these elements around and edit them after all the stitching is done on this piece. I may attach them by hand or by machine or a combination of both.

I'll continue to stitch these lines today, then take a break tomorrow to return to my dye studio and put more layers on the new cloth I'm working on there. As I write this, I realize with gratitude what a rich inner life I have -- and the outer one is pretty good too! -- and how appreciative I am for those of you who take an interest in my work. Many many thanks.