AMY MEISSNER
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6 Needle & Myth workshops.

12/4/2017

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Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops

"She played bridge, tennis, smoked and needlepoint. She thought Tang was a good source of Vitamin C. Those are things I remember about her. And she loved the Lord. Of all those things, her needlepoint is all that is left in the tangible world, but the rest must be inherited in another way." 

Diana Weymar, Artist, Writer, Curator and Vintage Linen Contributor, describing her Grandmother in The 14th boxes of mystery.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
     
How well do we know anyone, even people we see everyday?
And how can we possibly know people who've left us, especially if they never allowed us know them in the first place? 
And then, the impossible task of knowing someone who remains unknown because history has failed to attribute her time, her marks.
​
     We can gather our scraps.
     We can pick through memory.
     We can re-consider.
     We can collaborate.
     We can create a new mythology.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops

Last spring I received a Rasmuson Foundation project grant in support of the Inheritance Project.  A portion of the grant allowed me to complete a special workshop series this fall at the Anchorage Museum; "Needle & Myth" was designed as five, 2-hour sessions for small work groups of artists, makers, museum members and the public, with a 6th session added at the end. The work generated in these work sessions will become a large community piece installed in May with the exhibition Inheritance: makers. memory. myth. My gratitude to the Rasmuson Foundation for the gift of time, to the Anchorage Museum for the gift of support and space.

I originally prepared 45 or 50 panels, we completed 80. 


Over 70 people participated. My deepest gratitude goes to them.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops

I asked registrants to consider the following prompt before arriving: "She was ____." or "She is ____." This single word or short phrase was then embroidered onto a prepared panel, a linen handkerchief mounted on sheer silk organza. (I received around 85 hankies during the crowdsourcing portion of the Inheritance Project. One Contributor sent me her entire collection of 33). I also asked participants to bring a small, lightweight object, which we then mounted or embedded between the cloth layers. The sheer panels are numbered, and when hung together begin to form a more complete picture of a complex woman, of ourselves.

"...harlot, always making things beautiful, an artist mother, brave, powerful, powerless, rooted, tough as nails, sew much love, too attached, happiness, iguapaeterei, je brule, the matriarch, my only comfort, worth the time, unknown, clever, a weather pattern..."

When was the last time you spent a full two hours considering a handful of words? Hand stitching forces you to slow and consider a needle's placement to achieve a certain curve or line, but this is a small technical thing. What I hoped this project would do was create a 2-hour space to honor memory -- some of it pleasant, some of it painful.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops

​"...These handkerchiefs have probably found their way to countless libraries, golf courses, and trips both across the country and abroad. These everyday items wear the lives of my grandparents."

Kathleen Probst, Artist and Vintage Linen Contributor, fromThe 18th boxes of mystery.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops

"...daring and original, once mine, into thy hands, everything, graphic, judgmental, a hearty babushka, one of those mean-mean-mean girls, paying attention, the only one, brave, busy, patient, fearless, the tie that binds, a red head, our treasure (hunter), happy, enough, a survivor, tall, an artisan..."

Five men attended. And two children. Six languages are represented.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops

When one woman told the story of her beautiful mother's two abusive marriages, the entire room fell silent. When another woman shared her mother-in-law's journey from China to Peru to the US with 10 children in tow, the same thing happened. And again, when a woman explained how she'd created the panel for herself, her mother-in-law and the four babies they'd lost. When another woman furtively shared that her mother sometimes stole things, "maybe just a little," we laughed, but then retreated inwards to consider this. Not to judge, but consider. Because aren't we all guilty?

And aren't we -- aren't women -- all worthy of awe?

The safety of a space like this is generated when a task is on the table. No one has to make eye contact with storytellers, no one has to respond directly. There is a reason why the tradition of gathering for handwork has remained so strong for generations.


"...resilient, authentic, finding herself, a complex woman, covered in glitter and dancing like a fiend, ancestral, a smoother of roughness, a Kansas City girl, heartbroken, trouble, delightful, beautifully strong, beautifully hidden, so much more than I ever knew, far from home, grieving, an oasis, told to be quiet, an artist, mom..."
​

After the workshops, one of the participants sent a link to this TED Talk. It put a lot of things into perspective and gave a broader language for what I was, and am, trying to do. Perhaps it explains why so many people came, sometimes more than once, to such quiet gatherings.
​

"...enough, unknowingly lonely, frail, gentle, kind, in my heart, still full of wonder, my very first sewing role model and idol, so witty, a twin, a mother trucker, bright, my rock, mother, a sailboat captain, a birdie, mujer mexicana migrante, a fairy with strong wishes, love, a stout woman, persistent...."
​

I'm now in the process of finishing: taking up the stitches left undone, considering the panel order, planning their mount. I've been asked many times if this will be a quilt. It will not. I can tell you it will suspend and hope viewers will be able to journey around each piece, because the messy b-sides are just as valid as all those pretty facades.

​Maybe more so.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post 6 Needle & Myth workshops. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/6-needle-&-myth-workshops

One year ago on this blog:

How to raise a dragon.

Two years ago on this blog:

The fourth boxes of mystery.

Three years ago on this blog:

How to be better.
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An (ongoing) history of teeth.

4/21/2017

9 Comments

 
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post An ongoing history of teeth. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/an-ongoing-history-of-teeth

My lovely friend from France, 
Aude Franjou, sent this message to me today:

Dear Amy, I have read again your Instagram post of yesterday, and you looks so sad and lonely at this moment (...) I really hope every thing are for you, yours children and husband all right...no bad news?...no trouble?...

And while I had written an off-hand comment on Instagram about feeling lonely in my studio life, what she really saw -- if there was anything to see in this photo my daughter took -- was me grimacing while I worked, the crinkle in my forehead deepening, because for the last 3 weeks I've been in horrible pain.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post An ongoing history of teeth. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/an-ongoing-history-of-teeth

When I was nine, I broke my two front teeth in an accident at a friend's house, and when I say it's the gift that keeps on giving, I'm dead f-ing serious. Most recently, my beautiful 10-year-old-finally-I-was-at-a-place-in-my-life-where-I-could-afford-it veneer on one tooth exploded, leaving me with a horizontal crack millimeters away from meeting in the middle and maybe/probably sloughing off. Like, you know, while you're on vacation. Did you know there are a number of dentists in Lihue, Kauai who specialize in dental emergencies? There are. I programmed their numbers into my phone before we left Alaska, but I never had to use them.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post An ongoing history of teeth. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/an-ongoing-history-of-teeth

I talked about memory in another post called A History of teeth. How it is fleeting. Reshaped again and again. But going through this at 45 -- the shots (were there 3? or 4?) having my veneer and the crown beside it pried off, cracking and splintering, filling my mouth with shards and exposing the brown nubs beneath, then wearing a one-piece-double-tooth temporary affair, much like a rabbit tooth a few shades too white for two weeks while the "real" crowns were created  -- it all returned me to my 9-year-old self. 

Vulnerable. Wanting to hide. Unable to sleep.

And reminded me how the body, how pain, holds memory.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post An ongoing history of teeth. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/an-ongoing-history-of-teeth

We've discovered that what remains of one tooth has a fracture disappearing beneath my gum, leading into the root. I may have 10 more years with this stub, or 20, or a handful of weeks. My dentist said if I feel intense pain ("You will know..."), we can't opt for a root canal on such a fragile shard, that it would be better to take it out completely.

A dental implant is a process, involving a number of frightening steps, and time. Suffering.

But for now, I have two new crowns. Lovely, ever so slightly different from the former, flatter on the bottom, a little too perfect, with a different curve along the backside that I can't keep my tongue off of. They are an unknown maker's idea of what my teeth should look like. This hand different from the one who fashioned them 10 years ago. Different still from what my natural teeth would have been like, if given the chance. 

Working along the ghosts of women, other unknown makers whose cloth I use in my own work, makes me think a lot about the luxuries I have, as a woman, which they did not. 100 years ago, I would have broken my teeth at age nine and they would have remained that way, turning brown, decaying and eventually pulled due to infection. And I would have screamed for them to please pull the teeth, because this was the place I was in just 48 hours ago, before I returned to my dentist with my molded night guard mouth piece (I'm a clencher), which didn't fit the new crowns, and a plea for pain killers to take the edge off the ice pick that had lodged in my gums and was now probing my sinuses and reaching molars.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post An ongoing history of teeth. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/an-ongoing-history-of-teeth

I'm not a pussy. I have a ridiculously high pain threshold. I had two natural childbirths, the second was frank breach. That's right. I delivered a frank breach daughter, the effect of crowning twice, with no pain medication, an anesthesiologist standing by in an operating room filled with flustered nurses and about 20 other people who'd never seen an actual frank breach delivery, also my husband, my midwife, a good doctor-friend and a perinatologist who was a BAD ASS, who'd done deliveries like this before and used her entire body to corkscrew that girl out of me in one elegant movement that my husband still demonstrates for friends. Ask him. He'll do it. 

Did I mention I also had an undiagnosed 12 mm herniated disk in L5 at the same time, and my foot had gone numb 2 weeks before she was born?

It's still numb because I have permanent nerve damage.

The threshold. It's high.
This is not a good thing.

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post An ongoing history of teeth. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/an-ongoing-history-of-teeth

But this time, I was ready to ask the dentist to pull it. Pull. It.

Within 36 hours of taking antibiotics, it's now become clear I had an infection. That exposed crack a conduit for whatever bacteria wormed its way deep inside the root. 

And isn't that the way? How pain starts as something humming with each heartbeat, then a pulsing hot throb and finally a snap of unspooled threads reaching far beyond the epicenter? And when relief comes, if it comes, it settles like an animal at your feet. Blinking and sighing.

So, Dear Aude, thank you for asking. I am fine.
Now.
​
I am fine now.


Picture

Previous posts:

One year ago: PechaKucha

Two years ago: Yellow quilt.

And lastly:

If you are interested in a sometimes-newsletter (I just sent out my first one even though I've been talking about it for over a year), please visit the contact page. I'm kind of excited by how many people subscribed already. Okay, blown away actually.

If you have subscribed and didn't receive a newsletter last week with exhibition and Inheritance Project updates (shit's happening, some of it I can't even tell you about yet), please check your spam filter and mark me as non-spammy. Because, I'm not. Nothing makes me feel better than an empty inbox.

Well, other things make me feel pretty good, too.
​
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Ice.

11/16/2016

2 Comments

 
“I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction
​ice

Is also great” 
​

― Robert Frost
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice

"Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.

―Leonard Cohen
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice

​"You cannot run away from weakness;
you must some time fight it out or perish;
and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?"

―Robert Louis Stevenson
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice

I'm going through photographs, sorting them into themes -- Fire, Ice, Blood & Bone. These images and words pull me into contemplation for the work that lies ahead. Some of it is literal, but the deeper work is personal. This far North, at this time of year, I descend into myself. Every time.

It's a seizing, clamping rhythm. 
​But it's seriously productive.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post, Ice. | www.amymeissner.com/blog/ice

Most of these images are somewhere in my Instagram feed. Follow if you're hanging out there, too.
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The 14th boxes of mystery.

8/6/2016

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Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Maker: Unknown, Origin: Unknown, possibly St. Louis Missouri, Circa: 1940.
The image above was taken around the Summer Solstice. Where I am in Anchorage, Alaska, the sun rises at 4:20 am and sets around 11:40 pm -- almost 19 1/2 hours of daylight. Children ride bikes and scooters and play until 10 pm (not mine, well, not always). Gardeners push till 11 pm. Before kids, we used to pitch a tent at midnight without headlamps and manically wonder why we didn't do this more often.

And then mid-July hits.
Which in my house is called the "Cranky Season," a close second to February, which is "The Really Cranky Season." During "Cranky" we start thinking about darkness and how lovely it would be to crawl into bed at 8:30 pm without an eye mask, wrapped in a cloak of deep blackness. Overcoming "Really Cranky" requires more desperate measures, which usually involves 10,000 IUs of Vitamin D, Mexico and far less clothing.

If you've been following this blog, you know about the Inheritance Project and the amazing items that have traveled to me here in Alaska from people all over the world. The generous nature of this outpouring says so much about women and memory and the making hand. These are the materials and narratives that will inform a solo exhibition called Inheritance: makers. memory. myth. slated for the fall of 2018 at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center. I've been inheriting items for nearly a year.

​Here are the 14th Boxes of Mystery:

33 Problems and a Hankie Ain't One.

Thank you Marolyn Cook for sending 33 delicately crochet-edged linen hankies for the Inheritance Project. These are buttery soft, apparently never used, and while it's unclear whether the same hand made them all, the edges run the gamut from butterfly to Crinoline Lady. (I know the "Crinoline Lady" is a thing because Marolyn sent a pattern book circa 1949 with just such a title).

Marolyn loves handmade items, has sewn all her life and formerly made sample pieces for a needle art company. Her gaze has since turned to rug hooking and waxed linen basket coiling. She collected these hankies over the last 20 years, like many of us, recognizing the quality yet unsure of how best to use them.

​I have some ideas.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Makers: Unknown, Origins: Unknown, possibly St. Louis Missouri, Circa: 1940's.
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Makers: Unknown, Origins: Unknown, possibly St. Louis Missouri, Circa: 1940's.
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Coats & Clark's pattern book, circa 1949.

Fellow Northerner.

My gratitude goes to Victoria BC- and Princeton-based artist, Diana Weymar for sending her grandmother's handwork. I know Diana as a curator, artist and writer; last year she invited me to participate in a textile-based show she curated at the Arts Council of Princeton ("Every Fiber of My Being" coincided with her artist residency there). Our cyber paths crossed again when the Gynocentric Art Gallery (The GAG) asked me to write a companion essay to Diana's online show. (You can read an excerpt of that here, or the full essay and full set of images here).

Although Diana and I haven't met in person, we've spoken on the phone and maintain a yes-let's-meet-we-will-meet-when-can-we-someday-meet relationship like so many others born online through image, words and the intensity of making.

Diana recently sent several needlepoint embroideries made by her grandmother, Roxana Keller Brakeley: 

Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery

"
She thought Tang was a good source of Vitamin C and kept a full plastic pitcher in the fridge at all times. 

​
She played bridge, tennis, smoked and (had her) needlepoint. Those are things I remember about her. And she loved the Lord.

Of all those things, her needlepoint is all that is left in the tangible world, but the rest must be inherited in another way.”

​I appreciate your time, Diana. And we will meet. We will.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Maker: Roxana Keller Brakeley, Origin: possibly Montreal QC, or Darien or New Canaan CT, or Bonita Springs FL, Circa: Unknown.

Very Important Household Projects.

Thank you Michelle P. for sending these lovely crocheted potholders. According to my studio assistant, the little dresses have become more ubiquitous around here ("Mom, did you know you have 6 of these!?"). The other thoughtful gesture is the inclusion of a 1968 Coats & Clark's pattern book. For 35 cents, you too, could fill your home with charming decor and your closets with enviable accessories, all seemingly whipped out in an evening.
​
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Maker: Unknown, Found: Western New York State, Circa: mid-20th century.
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Coats & Clark's pattern book, circa 1968.
Amy Meissner, textile artist | From the post The 14th boxes of mystery | www.amymeissner.com/blog/the-14th-boxes-of-mystery
Coats & Clark's pattern book, circa 1968.

​All I have to say is -- "Ring Hot Plate Mat" aside -- if you appreciate my sense of humor, you can't go wrong with the "Leper Bandage" pattern and instructions. You'll note that Coats & Clark's did not include a sample of this project on the cover of the booklet. Curious. Nor is there an address included as to where to send completed bandages. 

Ha! And you thought crowdsourcing was a new thing.

*     *     *
If you've contacted me already regarding the Inheritance Project -- or have been meaning to -- I'm accepting items for a little while still. I plan to wrap it up around the one year mark (soon) or 20th Boxes of Mystery post, whichever works out best. To read more about this domestic linen/doily/embroidery crowdsourcing effort, you can click on the sidebar categories Boxes of Mystery or Inheritance Project and scroll down to see more.

My gratitude goes to all who've contributed and encouraged. My work is hinged on the work of other women, past and present, and this is not lost on me.

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Cloth. It's a landscape.

7/28/2016

6 Comments

 
Diana Weymar, artist | www.amymeissner.com/blog/cloth-its-a-landscape | July 2016
Telegraph Creek: Dog Sled (30 x 18" x 2") Cotton thread on antique textile, hand embroidered, 2014. Diana Weymar.

I was recently contacted by the Gynocentric Art Gallery (The GAG, "A gallery that values the brain and cuts the bias") to write a companion essay for the online exhibition of Diana Weymar's recent textile-based work. The GAG is the project of Danielle Hogan, the founding director, who is currently presenting a talk about this project in Barcelona, Spain. My thanks to her for asking me to respond to Diana's work.

I've collaborated with these two women before in the exhibition "Every Fiber of My Being" at the Paul Robeson Gallery at the Arts Council of Princeton, and while I've never met either of them, I connect with their work and writing. Collaborating again felt like a series of streams converging before splitting apart again -- natural, intense, a churn of minerals and distance traveled all melding to create a brand new moment.

Excerpts of the essay are below, and you can read the full essay plus see Diana's exhibition here. I am always considering landscape in my own work and what someone recently described as "insistent work." The idea that the two are connected has been brewing for some time and this essay was an opportunity to grow some flesh on those bones. Diana's thoughts on land and insistence are featured in italics. It's like we were having a conversation face to face, but if we had, we'd have interrupted one another too many times. 

Then of course, there'd have been the wine.

The Pull of the Needle:
​Diana Weymar and the Landscape of Cloth.

In any environment there exists an Inevitable Season, an undercurrent that informs inhabitants of what to do, where to go and when. In the far north, despite the intensity of summer’s light-stretched days, all birth and impossible growth and exhaustion, the scent and thrum of winter always exists on the periphery, waiting. Sometimes we look askance, whisper its name. To have this adamant ghost as part of the landscape at any point in one’s life — childhood, adulthood, parenthood — builds an unrelenting understanding that never entirely leaves the psyche. The creative impulse can’t be ignored or set aside for another day, because the time is now, the time is now, the time is now. 

Winter is coming.

Diana Weymar, artist | www.amymeissner.com/blog/cloth-its-a-landscape | July 2016
Telegraph Creek: The Swing (14" x 18" x 2") Cotton thread on antique textile, hand embroidered, 2015. Diana Weymar.
Diana Weymar, artist | www.amymeissner.com/blog/cloth-its-a-landscape | July 2016
Interlaced | Artifacts Series (dimensions variable) Found objects, 2013-15. Diana Weymar.

​When first introduced to images of artist Diana Weymar’s contemporary embroidery, I felt instantly connected to its tactile, insistent quality. I lingered over folds and layers of the intimate stitched work and manipulated found objects, considered her steps, her thought process. It wasn’t surprising to learn she spent part of her childhood in northern British Columbia, Canada, a vast, unpredictable landscape, hinged to shifting light and season. As a northerner, I recognize the persistent need to shape and create forms that explore the existing or unremarkable objects of a life, honoring hand skills, self sufficiency and a demand to question, create and transform. With magnetic intensity, we point to cloth, object and back to the self.
​
Diana Weymar, artist | www.amymeissner.com/blog/cloth-its-a-landscape | July 2016
Nature Book, p. 29 (dimensions variable) Found objects. Diana Weymar.

"The language of the landscape of the riverbank of the Stikine River is vast and raw. Untouched. Unconquerable. It humbles the human. What happens when you cannot control the nature environment is that you start with small movements. You plant a garden, dig a ditch, cast a net, build an outhouse, the list goes on. You insist that you exist. And yet you don't because the minute you stop, you leave, it returns to the way it was before you arrived. I think this is what I learned. That we are temporary and that we must work to exist. We must insist that we belong, survive, create, and express."

Diana Weymar, artist | www.amymeissner.com/blog/cloth-its-a-landscape | July 2016
Healthcare Workers (8" x 8") Cotton thread on antique textile, hand embroidered, 2015. Diana Weymar.

For women artists who maintain a studio practice when their children are young, there are seasons when the domestic landscape is just as bleak as the most northern, contributing to the slow unraveling of self. The historic significance of reaching for cloth isn’t lost on contemporary needle workers and fiber artists, many of whom are mothers. Cloth is understood despite the inevitability of its migration, abandonment and constant unearthing in and around the demands of children, family and home. When I discover other artists who’ve embraced this form, without apology, without question, without some historic burden of craft versus art, I’m immediately in kinship. The work provides a way of existing in the slow moment while still exercising the tireless will, despite the surrounding chaos that wants always to draw us away. As generations of women understood, the pull of the needle is an urgent companion. We seek the tool, it disappears beneath our hands, it re-emerges again. It represents a balance.


"Motherhood is also a wilderness. You work, share, toil, shape, and create as a parent but it is also vast and raw. It too is a slow process of letting go. Of insisting and then resisting. Of letting time do its work. Time works away at all of us. Making the invisible visible. This is another part of my work that comes from living so close to nature: we are always creating evidence of work that will be removed by time. The landscape grows over. The material frays. The object eventually slips from our hands and we do not know if it will be picked up and thrown away."

Diana Weymar, artist | www.amymeissner.com/blog/cloth-its-a-landscape | July 2016
Telegraph Creek: Tanning a Moose Hide (22" x 18" x 2") Cotton thread on antique textile, hand embroidered, 2015. Diana Weymar.

By slowing the hand, the mind is held to the landscape of cloth, but within it is the freedom to wander and expand, fully considering the next word or stitch before each plunge, embracing the luxury of the tautness of thought. When onlookers remark on the likes of us hunched over this old way of working, it’s often with, “Oh, my mother embroidered,” or “My grandmother was a seamstress.” But what stories did those women bury in cloth? What narratives hid, folded and silent in their laps? Which unspoken words were couched in that drum of a hoop? Mark upon mark, stitch after stitch, they may well have been their best selves in that stolen time, blanketing, transforming and fully ruling that remote land.

Diana Weymar, artist | www.amymeissner.com/blog/cloth-it's-a-landscape | July 2016
Trump Towels (dimensions variable). Hand embroidery on antique tea towels. Diana Weymar.

For the complete essay and many, many more images of Diana's work head on over to the GAG.

And here is Diana's bio: 

Diana Weymar has exhibited work at The Ministry of Casual Living, Vancouver Island School of Art, Xchanges Gallery, The Arts Centre at Cedar Hill, The Midwives Collective, The Smithers Art Gallery, 1580 Gallery, and Makehouse. She was a Build Peace 2015 Artist in Nicosia, Cyprus, and she will be again at Build Peace 2016 in Zurich. She is the Spring 2016 Anne Reeves Artist-in-Residence at The Arts Council of Princeton. She is participating in and curating a show – Every Fiber of my Being– at the Taplin Gallery at the Arts Council that opens on March 5th, featuring work by Amy Meissner, Katie Truk, Cassie Jones, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Danielle Hogan and Maira Kalman. She has taught art workshops in schools and volunteered with Art Therapy programs with the Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society and at the Queen Alexandra Centre for Children’s Health. She has also served on the Board of Princeton Young Achievers and worked in publishing and feature film in New York City. Diana has studied art at The Arts Council of Princeton (NJ) and The Vancouver Island School of Art (BC) and she has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Princeton University.

If you are interested in more writing and/or imagery about the North, check out the blog posts under the sidebar category: Alaska.
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    Amy Meissner, textile artist. Photo credit Brian Adams, 2013. www.amymeissner.com

    Amy Meissner

    Artist in Anchorage, Alaska, sometimes blogging about the collision of history, family & art, with the understanding that none exists without the other.

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