We are a women's art collective exploring creative practices to restore color to our greying world. While our feminine nature of receptivity is often misrepresented as passivity and inaction, we choose to establish ourselves as passages of potential, receiving and synchronizing our environments with ourselves. We seek to cultivate life through the materials which surround us in the spirit of resourcefulness and non-wastefulness. Our project is one of healing through doing, creating and recycling with human energy and hand skills, thus re-establishing the pleasure of slowness. Ultimately we wish to redefine our relationship with Things by harvesting potential and nurturing beauty.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Branded Arts Show
Here are some photos from our booth at the Branded Arts show in Culver City, California. We showed our plant dyed prayer flags, handwoven rag rugs, handmade necklaces, and indigo dyed vintage handkerchiefs. Thanks to our friend and LA art critic Daniel Rolnik for offering us space at his booth and thanks to everyone who supported our work!
Friday, November 2, 2012
California Prayer Flags
Our new set of prayer flags are dyed with plants from California. We got some old white curtains and dyed them with plants we found. We have dyed with toyon leaves we foraged from Franklin Canyon and which make the fabric a lovely light green color. We have also dyed with madder root which dyes a rich pink and palm tree husks which dye a soft brown. We added balls of thread to our dye baths with which Alex has been embroidering the flags.
The use of the palm tree husks was an experiment we were slightly unsure of but which has really amazed us. After a few windy days, we saw a lot of loose palm tree husks strewn all over the ground. Alex had never dyed with palm before but wondered if it would work. It produced a lovely brown hue which looks beautiful against the pink madder root embroidery. Alex has also been experimenting with wrapping pieces of fabric around wine corks before adding them to the dye baths so they leave the clean white middle within which she is doing to embroider.
Preparing toyon leaves for a dye bath |
Prayer flags dyed with toyon and embroidered with madder root thread |
A collection of toyon and madder root prayer flags |
Prayer flags dyed with palm husks and embroidered with madder root (top) Indigo string of prayer flags (bottom) |
Alex's experiment of wrapping fabric around wine corks to leave an white middle on the madder root flags |
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Live your life, Love your work
Watching these makes me appreciate and connect with the power of simplicity, and how it is liberated through repetitive practices of patience, devotion and intuition.
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Monday, October 15, 2012
A Woman's Work
A woman’s work is quiet
work. She makes use of what surrounds her; she is aware of all of her potential
resources though she is discriminating and uses only what she needs. Her work
is often subtle, particularly to those who only look towards the end results of
things and not the processes which compose them. Though subtle and often not
culminating in any finite product, a woman’s work is not without its very real
effects, though such effects are not always or only tangible. A woman’s work
needs no form of external praise to be validated: to nurture, to create, to
birth new possibilities and revitalize old ones — that is a value which
nourishes itself. Yet it is for this lack of requirement for concrete
validation that she often goes unnoticed, ignored; she is judged as passive and
inactive though her work is so constant and ubiquitous as to be unseen. Her
greatest actions lie in what others may pejoratively deem inaction. Thus her
work is so easily erased, written over by the loud voices of others, extracted
as unimportant and replaced with methods considered more effective and
efficient in producing end results, which is ‘what such actions are undertaken
for in the first place,’ they assert.
A woman’s work is quiet but her voice is not. Though she
may not always produce audible words, her mind is always speaking. Thinking is
her domain, yet this too is linked with her doing. While it cannot be
universally said, I am tempted to think that women live and think everyday what
male philosophers responding to and building upon what their predecessors
forgot in their search for wholeness claim to discover anew and for which
they are remembered in history. Women, accustomed to having such ideas of
wholeness, of the intrinsic relationship between immediate personal
interactions and the whole, do not always write them down, nor even think to
say them, holding them quietly to themselves, folding them into their actions,
and giving them only subtly to others; they are however cautious to preach them,
particularly in the written form, aware of the potential stagnating and
dangerous influences of fluid ideas turned hard.
Though her voice may be silenced, her activities mimicked
by the machine, she can never be removed or replaced; for the breast which
warms the body of an infant, a heart which sees the other so easily as oneself,
and a mind and body which can create from old and from new without robbing from
things elsewhere, that is a spirit who heals while doing, who acts while
dwelling from the quietest of spaces.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Our First Indigo Shibori Prayer Flags
Today we finished our
first two sets of prayer flags. Somehow it is always a little bit strange how
what is just an idea one day—an idea which excites us but which we are not
sure will ever come to fruition—is suddenly completed, and we are not even
sure how it came to be. What was most wonderful I think about completing one
was how, by the end of the process, while we knew it was by our own hands it
was made, it seemed in some ways as though it had made itself. Each of our own
individual hands was printed upon it in some way, whether by dyeing the reused
fabric with indigo or sewing it to the string, but it was not only one of ours
to claim. By the end, it was all of ours individually, collectively, and
somehow also beyond our own hand’s creation.
Each of us in our own ways are confronting the challenge
of making our own ways in the world, of applying the skills and knowledge we
learned in school to the actions of the world outside the academic environment.
We each have different yet overlapping backgrounds and interests. Alex studied
design at Parsons during which she started a small design shop with other
students and spent a summer learning from and designing with Mayan weavers in
Guatemala; Sophie studied environmental education at a Warren Wilson, a small
rural school in North Carolina and learned weaving from Appalachian women; and
I studied political philosophy at UC Berkeley, focusing on nonviolent
philosophy while volunteering and writing for environmental organizations on
campus. I find our diverse backgrounds to be one of the most interesting things
about us working together as we can contribute and teach each other things
which the others may not have learned. And yet, it is also interesting how
despite our differing backgrounds, we are all experiencing similar difficulties
with acting in the world, figuring out specifically how to apply our learned
principles to our work and action. For Alex, I think it is mostly the anxiety
of attempting to insert herself as a designer within an industry which seems
mostly populated by rampant consumerism and competition. For Sophie, it is
learning how and knowing when to soften her internal voice chiding her for all
the effects people’s consumption, including her own, have on the world so that
she may truly act. And for me, it is matching my exhaustively thought-out
theories, principles and critiques with concrete action. Thus, we are all in
some way paralyzed by our thoughts, our knowledge. We have learned much and yet
are fearful that our actions may go awry from our principles, that somehow we
will act in a way that, if others were to do the same, we would criticize.
School is often a place for great knowledge, but not always, we are beginning
to learn, for wisdom. Wisdom comes through applied action, through being in the
world. And while a well wrought critique or theory is always helpful to have in
developing wisdom, if such thought only paralyzes, wisdom cannot be cultivated.
We started this collective as a way to align our principles with our constructive practices. What is interesting is that we did not overcome our paralysis before beginning to create, but are learning to overcome it through our creation, trusting that our core ideals and principles are not lost even if we are not always so consciously thinking about them. Our practice then is one of healing through doing. It is as much a practice for ourselves to learn as it is an action to celebrate our ideals in order to share with others.
When we get together to
create, it is never a hurried process. We sit down, sometimes talking and
sharing our thoughts on what we are doing, or something we are experiencing in
our lives. Often times we just sit in the silence of our action. It is
extraordinary to feel that not only can we make handmade things, slowing down
our lives to create something beautiful to share with others, but we can also,
as Alex put it, make handmade lives. Through
our doing, through the materials we use and the processes we utilize, we are
healing ourselves, our environments and others. All of our anxieties and
frustrations somehow dispel into the space we create between and with each
other. There is never a rushed pace, but just clear and focused doing, which really
seems like no work at all. It is a space, I believe, which is a truly feminine
space. We all are a bit apprehensive about reifying gender categories and
laying strict dichotomies, yet we have also realized that truly understanding
our feminine qualities and their masculine counterparts is, perhaps paradoxically,
a way to overcome the confining aspects of such a dichotomy.
Above all, our practice
is an experiment in transforming our relationship to the things of this world.
At one extreme, this relationship is one of destruction, overconsumption and
wastefulness. At the other extreme lies an ascetic life, a life which perhaps
one day we will willfully take, but for a love of this world, we believe the
challenge is to learn to live among it, to be of the world and in the world.
Beauty is a human need, we think, and while our desire for beauty can easily
become a 'lusting after,' a 'needing to possess,' if properly nurtured, beauty can
be a most intuitive way into understanding our relationship to the things
around us. Our belongings then become precious relics rich in narrative, rather
than expendable things to be eventually replaced by something whose value lies
solely in its newness.
This
is an experiment we are undertaking together, an experiment to align our
political, aesthetic and social ideals with our individual and collective
actions in the world.
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