Fracking Paradise

'Fracking Paradise: Original Lies And The Temptation To Plunder', 2019, hand-stitched cotton thread on linen, 12'' x 16''

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction." -Rachel Carson 

My work, and this piece in particular, is very much informed by woven textiles, and I'm describing it as a needlework tapestry. While most of the figures and objects are rendered more or less naturalistically, I stitched the background with repeating stylized floral designs, and I filled in the land and sky with stitches that try to mimic weaving.

'Fracking Paradise: Original Lies And The Temptation To Plunder' is influenced by my maternal grandmother who understood the deep misogyny of the Adam and Eve myth and who read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring the year it was published. It's the culmination of my Fracking Weld County series, with visual ideas converging as a sort of contemplation on how we've gotten ourselves to the brink of creating an unlivable planet. The myth of Genesis is one of the stories that illustrates how we've become disconnected from both the natural world and our inner nature. The idea of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil points to duality and describes our separation from wholeness and the emergence of egoic identity stories that divide the world into parts to be conquered. The massive irony is that this narrative arose from the left-brained linear 'knowledge' of the patriarchal religious structure. It describes humanity's separation from the natural world by scapegoating the feminine, demonizing nature, and designating human sexuality ('man born of woman') as original sin. Without the dualistic view of the world, the tree and apples represent the abundance, generosity, and intelligence of nature. 

The central figures are taken from a 14th c Italian fresco by Bartoli di Fredi called 'The Creation of Eve'. I discovered the image in the book 'The Androgyne, Reconciliation of Male and Female' by Elemire Zola. Contrary to the title of the book, the idea that Eve is created from Adam's rib disempowers the feminine and reflects women's second class status as being merely adjunct human beings. I remember my grandmother asking, "if Eve came from Adam's rib, why aren't men missing one of their own ribs?".

Some of the images make compelling pairings of visual comparison and symbolic contrast. The first pairing of note is of the prehistoric goddess statue on the lower left (taken from the cover of The Chalice and the Blade, another book that my grandmother admired) and the oil rig carrying an exit sign on the far upper right. Another important pairing is of the serpent- which, rather than being the agent of deception from the Bible myth, here represents the universal Kundalini energy that is present in everything, connecting earth and cosmos- and the fracking pump, which represents the unsustainable and destructive extraction of fossil fuels, a form of energy that is inextricably linked to our current climate crisis. 

Other images include three critically endangered species: the Actinote zikani moth from the Amazon rain forest, a Brown mouse lemur, and a Pitcher plant. The lemur hangs on a fig tree near the sleeping (unconscious) Adam. Its leaves surround his head, foreshadowing the expulsion from paradise and the attendant shame that needs to be covered up. A plastic bottle lies on the ground, a surveillance camera points at Eve, and a small fighter jet hovers above the fracking equipment, close to a waxing crescent moon. The border is of a repeating ankh, bomb, and thermometer. 

Here are the words of Sandra Steingraber - biologist, poet, and environmental activist:

We are all musicians in a great human orchestra, and it is now time to play the Save The World Symphony. You are not required to play a solo, but you are required to know what instrument you hold and to play it as well as you can. You are required to find your place in the score. What we love we must protect. That's what love means. From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act. 

Fracking Weld County part 2

Fracking Farm, hand-stitched cotton thread on linen,  4"x6",  2019

Fracking Fields, hand-stitched cotton thread on linen,  5"x5",  2019

Fracking Elementary School, hand-stitched cotton thread on linen,  4.5"x6",  2019

"If fracking treated all people equally, that is, if every person in Colorado were threatened with anywhere from 10 to 50 fracked wells in their neighborhood, the oil and gas industry would be long gone." -Philip Doe 

Here's a sampling from the compendium of scientific, medical, and media findings demonstrating risks and harms of fracking:

• Over 90 percent of all original research studies published from 2016-2018 on the health impacts of fracking found a positive association with harm or potential harm. 
• People living within setback distances are potentially vulnerable to thermal injury during a well blowout, and they are also susceptible to exposures of benzene and hydrogen sulfide at levels above those known to cause health risks.
• In 29 out of 76 samples, toxin concentrations far exceeded federal health and safety standards, sometimes by several orders of magnitude. 
• Fracking fluid was found to contain arsenic, benzene, cadmium, formaldehyde, lead, and mercury. 
• Pollution near drilling and fracking operations is high enough in some Colorado communities to raise cancer risks, according to a 2018 study. 
• Data from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission showed that fracking-related chemical spills in Colorado exceed an average rate of one spill per day. Of the 495 chemical spills that occurred in that state over a one-year period of time, nearly a quarter impacted ground or surface water. 
• Water withdrawals for fracking can deplete water levels by 51% in nearby streams. Streams near drilling and fracking activity had significantly higher numbers of methane-metabolizing and methane-producing microorganisms. 
• Wastewater samples collected from 329 fracked oil wells found that virtually all—98 percent—contained benzene at levels that exceeded standards for permissible concentrations in drinking water.   

http://btc-usa.net/compendium-of-scientific-medical-and-media-findings-demonstrating-risks-and-harms-of-fracking/

Fracking Weld County part 1

Fracking Neighborhood, hand-stitched cotton thread on linen,  5"x5",  2019

Fracking Playground, hand-stitched cotton thread on linen,  5"x 7.5",  2019

Fracking Highschool, hand-stitched cotton thread on linen,  5"x 7.25",  2019

“If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money.”     – Professor Guy McPherson, School of Natural Resources, University of Arizona

These pieces are the first three in a series of six. This work is inspired by contemporary Afghan war rugs, with their vivid pictorial scenes and border decorations interspersed with images of tanks, fighter jets, Kalashnikov rifles, military helicopters, and other depictions of war. I created these small stitchwork pieces by referencing photographs of actual fracking sites in Weld County, Colorado, portraying the fracking rigs, tanks, and other drilling paraphernalia within the landscape. Utilizing similar visual motifs and styles of the war rugs, they include small repeating images- mainly around the borders- that I associate with the fracking industry: dollar signs, water drops, flames, and thermometers. I played around with different kinds of stitching, and each one has a slightly different style.

I'm calling the series Fracking Weld County, which refers to the county in Colorado where I grew up. The vast majority of fracking in the state is concentrated in this area, called the Niobrara shale formation. It currently has more than 25,000 active wells in this area alone, with many more permits pending. Many of the drilling sites are within neighborhoods and are very close to schools and playgrounds, and every time I go to my hometown of Greeley to visit my dad I'm astonished to see what the extraction industry is doing to this area and the ugliness that it brings. Using new technologies applied to horizontal fracking, the raw greed of the gas and oil industry, with the full complicity of the local government, has overlooked the health and safety of its citizens and of the earth itself in favor of profit. Fracking is extremely toxic, contaminating both the air and water. It also directly contributes to climate change by releasing methane. I think that true wealth is a healthy environment and an authentic connection to the beauty and intelligence of nature.

Miniature Fracking Blanket

Miniature Fracking Blanket, 2019 hand-stitched cotton thread on linen, 6" x 6"

"We are letting the extractive energy industries turn the world inside out." - Josh Fox

Although Miniature Fracking Blanket is a precursor to my work-in-progress series about fracking in Weld County, Colorado, it is mainly a stand-alone piece directly inspired by a woven Navajo blanket that was in my mother's family and that was recently sold (shown below). The story about who in the family purchased it - her father or grandfather - and in what year, got lost when she died. Her notes describe it as a Chief Blanket (third phase) 64”x 55”.

I thought about how the blanket ended up in my family. In doing some research I discovered a book titled Swept Under the Rug: a Hidden History of Navajo Weaving, by Kathy M’Closkey which explains the history of Navaho textiles in the context of colonization and economic exploitation. It includes an analysis of trader archives revealing that nearly all Navajo textiles were wholesaled by weight until the 1960s. M'Closkey explains how the Navaho artist’s weaving is "marginalized when the work is treated as a collectible craft and culture is split from commodity."

Miniature Fracking Blanket is a small piece, 6” x 6”, stitched in the mosaic style on a hoop. I wanted to create something in homage to the weaving’s beauty as textile art while at the same time acknowledging its context in the dominant culture. I replaced the central image in the blanket with a fracking/drilling rig to reference what is 'sacred' in a capitalist system that exploits the earth's resources for money. I chose this image in particular because the area that my mother's family is from, and where I grew up, is currently being subjected to extreme gas and oil extraction. 

I found this paragraph on a webpage of the Art Institute Chicago:

The Navajo believe that the deity Spider woman taught women how to weave and continues to work through today's artists by directing the growth and beauty of each textile they make. Finished blankets are thought to have life forces of their own, radiating a sense of vitality and harmony essential to the Navajo philosophy of hozho in which every individual strives to live in balance with the world.

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/157115/chief-blanket-third-phase

The Queen Of Wands Contemplates Saturn's Return

The Queen Of Wands Contemplates Saturn's Return, 2019,
 hand-stitched cotton thread on machine-stitched
dish towel remnant, 15.5" x 12.5"

This piece is another of my 'dish towel tapestries', using the mosaic style combined with outline stitching. The idea for it had been brewing in my imagination for a while, but I couldn’t start it until the work for my solo show was finished. During the time I was working on the show I had a three card tarot reading which included the Queen of Wands. I don’t know much about tarot interpretations but I was immediately intrigued by the images on the card and I decided to create my own personalized version of it. The overall composition of The Queen Of Wands Contemplates Saturn's Return is influenced by classical paintings and mosaics, especially the central figure of the queen. I included the traditional symbols of the card: sunflower, black cat, wand, lions - and I added my own: pug, flicker, Saturn.

In the reading, I was told that the Queen Of Wands embodies creativity and living an unconventional life. Here she represents 'the self' - myself - and aspects of the higher self. Her crown is consciousness, its yellow reflected in the yellow of the large sunflower to her left which represents the soul. The stone pug, out of which the sunflower rises, replaces a stone lion in the original version and symbolizes my past and its seemingly concrete life story. The black cat is an obvious archetype of the shadow, or subconscious, and was the first thing that struck me about the card.  Both the wand, a branch with green leaves, and the bird perched on it, symbolize the earth and being grounded and inherently connected to it. I added the flicker in particular because I've often found symbolic meaning in my encounters with them. The planet Saturn represents our human relationship to the cosmos and, personally, its second astrological return. I stitched the two lions as part of the background, almost like clouds, to portray them as ethereal thought forms and emotions. They surround the queen as she takes a break from holding up her wand in one hand, and sunflower in the other, to reflect on her life in a moment of time.

Duck and Rabbit

Musavir's Pink-Headed Duck,
hand-stitched cotton thread on machine stitched dish towel remnant, 2018  9"x8"

Musavir's Pink-Headed Duck is based on a watercolor painting (c.1780) by Indian painter Musavir Bhawani Das that I came across when I was researching animals for the Vanishing Kingdom. Although the pink-headed duck was once found in parts of the Gangetic plains of India, Bangladesh and in the swamps of Myanmar, it was feared extinct since the 1950s. Numerous searches have failed to provide any proof of continued existence but it has been suggested that it may exist in the inaccessible swamp regions of northern Myanmar and some sight reports from that region have led to its status being declared as critically endangered rather than extinct. 

Riverine Rabbit (Vanishing Kingdom), 2018,
 hand-stitched cotton thread on machine stitched dish towel remnant, 9"x8"

I wasn't able to fit a riverine rabbit on the original map, so I stitched this separate portrait, Riverine Rabbit (Vanishing Kingdom). The riverine rabbit, also known as the bushman rabbit or bushman hare, is one of the most endangered mammals in the world, with only around 500 living adults, and 1500 overall. This rabbit has an extremely limited distribution area, found only in the central and southern regions of the Karoo Desert of South Africa's Northern Cape Province.

I consider these two small stitchwork pieces to be bridge pieces between my old and new work. They both relate to the Vanishing Kingdom map, but I stitched them on dish towel remnants, and I'll be creating pieces on this particular type of dish towels for some of my next body of work. When I first saw one of the towels, which are machine stitched in a grid design, I knew that I wouldn't be using them in the kitchen! I was immediately drawn to the idea of combining my 'mosaic style' stitchwork onto their surface, thinking of the pre-stitched threads as the 'grout'. I like that I can compose images using the boundaries of a grid, especially since I'm continuing my exploration of translating thread into a reflection of traditional mosaics. They are companion pieces both in subject, size and medium, and are part of a group that I’m calling the 'dish towel tapestries'.

Palestine Flip Map

I See Palestine Apart-Hide (This) Map, hand-stitched cotton thread, linen, 2018  21" x 16"

"Memory adds to the unrelieved intensity of Palestinian exile. Palestine is central to the cultures of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism...there is no forgetting it, no way of overlooking it."  -- Edward Said, from After The Last Sky: Palestinian Lives 

I created this map as an outsider and especially as an American whose government is directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; I don't claim to speak for Palestinians or to portray the Palestinian experience. As I've learned about Palestine and the false Zionist narrative that allows its Apartheid project to continue unabated, I've found that I can't look away. I refuse to not see Palestine or to dehumanize Palestinians. I refuse to be willfully ignorant about its erasure or complacent about the myth that it never existed. 

As Palestinian writer Nada Elia states, "the Zionist logic would also deny that Native Americans existed, because they did not have nation states recognisable to Europeans." 
In 1948, almost 80 percent of the Palestinian people had become refugees, an estimated 750,000 people expelled from their homes, their towns and villages, and hundreds were massacred. This is what is known as the Nakba, or catastrophe. 

My map depicts, on the right side, Palestine both before and after the Nakba, filled with images that I stitched in the 'mosaic style'. They include ancient mosaics and architecture, an olive tree, Jaffa oranges, fishing boats, a roundabout in Ramallah, the sculpture of a horse that stands in front of the Jenin Freedom Theater--that has been raided by Israeli soldiers numerous times--and the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. I also represent the three major religions in the area of Jerusalem, and I did my best to be geographically correct with the placement of particular images that I chose. 

The map on the left side is not a real place but represents an ideology which is based on supremacism and separation, enforced by the machines of war that maintain Apartheid and colonization. Its shape is Palestine flipped backward to symbolize Zionism as devolution, and I stitched within it objects that include automatic weapons, a drone, fighter jets, bombs, a tank, a surveillance camera, the Apartheid wall, a helicopter, and a bulldozer.

The two map shapes together reminded me of a butterfly, and it came to represent the unseen collective soul that underlies the activities of human life. The right wing of the butterfly is outlined by olive leaves, the left by bullets, depicting things of the world that are either soul nurturing or soul killing.

I based the line design that fills the background on the Palestinian scarf called a keffiyeh, and it represents two things at once: the veil of forgetfulness that allows humans to be separated from their higher selves and to forget the oneness that connects us all, and the oneness itself, the unified whole where all of our lives are intertwined. I framed this piece with the keys that stand for the right of Palestinian refugees to return. The title has a dual meaning - I see Palestine apart -- hide (Apartheid) and hide this map (this map should be censored because it doesn't fit the mainstream narrative).

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-10-18/how-israel-seeks-to-erase-the-regions-history/

https://mondoweiss.net/2016/02/palestine-and-the-anxiety-of-existence/

https://972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/118408/

  

Tyche And Her Wheel

"Tyche And Her Wheel" 2018

"The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"  from Shakespeare's Hamlet, 1603 

I stitched Tyche And Her Wheel in a modified mosaic style, using lines as well as square shapes. I was originally going to title this piece Fortuna And Her Wheel, but I changed it to the lesser known Greek version of the goddess. I also created my own idea of the wheel: it contains both the color scheme and images of vessels from ancient Greece, with depictions of a cornucopia, a hammer, a house, a bomb, a crutch, and a dollar sign. The image of Tyche is based on a figure in a French painting from 1605 by Thomas Artus.

Quoting E.S. Whittlesey from Symbols and Legends in Western Art, the goddess is shown with "a wheel as an emblem of chance, the turning of the year, the juggler of fortune... on some she heaped gifts from a horn of plenty, others she deprived of all they had; her overwhelming aspect was her uncertainty."

Although this piece is mainly influenced by Western mythology, its theme also relates to the wheel of Samsara from Eastern philosophy. In Buddhism, saṃsāra is the suffering-laden cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without beginning or end. It is often depicted as a circle divided like a pie into six realms.

I added other elements that represent both the impermanence and transcendence of mundane human experience: the goddess stands in front of the Tree of Life, holding an hour glass and preparing to spin her wheel, on which a bennu bird -an ancient Egyptian deity linked with the sun, creation, and rebirth - perches. This bird may have been the inspiration for the iconic phoenix that rises from the ashes, symbolizing resurrection and immortality.

The Vanishing Kingdom

"The Vanishing Kingdom"  15" x 24"  2018

                       

“It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.” -  Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History



This map is about the human-caused sixth extinction that is happening right now on the planet. I included animals that are already extinct and those that are threatened. I created it in its entirety in what I’m calling the ‘mosaic style’ by stitching squares, rectangles, and triangles that approximate the shapes of mosaic tiles. I envisioned this piece as a future relic portraying some of the animals that used to live on the planet.

I titled it the Vanishing Kingdom because visually it reminded me of a painting I knew from my childhood called the Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks. The placement of the four sea stars on the sides is a nod to the formal symmetry of ancient mosaics, and the letters N S E W on the lower left to indicate direction are surrounding a thermometer that represents the heating planet.

I fashioned the design in stages, using the iron transfer method for the general outline of the continents, then drawing all of the figures directly onto the fabric with a disappearing ink pen, and filling in the land and water around them. It was difficult to choose which animals to include because I had to consider the aesthetics of the overall composition; I began with five and then made decisions about which ones to add from a relatively small list. I based my choices on species diversity and endangered status as well as on color, form and the animal’s geographic location on the map.
   
Out of all of the animals that I chose for this piece I’ve only seen dragonflies and sea stars in their natural environment, so some, like the rhinoceros, have assumed an almost mythological status for me. The unfathomable loss of this extinction event begs the question: how has the majority of the human species become so disconnected from the natural world? The ecologist Paul Ehrlich states that “in pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches”.

The thirty-four animals in The Vanishing Kingdom, listed in alphabetical order:

Adelie Penguin, Barbour’s Seahorse, Black Footed Ferret, Black Rhinoceros, Blue Racer Snake, Dragonfly, Dall’s Porpoise, Elkhorn Coral, Euphrates Jerboa, Fin Whale, Giant Armadillo, Glaucous Macaw, Great Auk, Gunlack’s Hawk, Hammerhead Shark, Kawekaweau Gecko, Krill, Laysan Duck, Leatherback Turtle, Malaysian Snail, Monk Seal, Narwhal, Numbat, Panamanian Golden Frog, Pangolin, Polar Bear, Pyrenean Ibex, Quagga, Red Breasted Goose, Sea Star, Siberian Crane, South China Tiger, Tecopa Pupfish, Walrus


Here’s a link to The National Geographic’s Photo Ark website to see some of the astonishing and immeasurable beauty of the biodiversity on the planet, and to connect with the #SaveTogether campaign:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/photo-ark/

Resident Map of Seattle

Resident Map of Seattle, hand-stitched cotton thread, linen, 16"x23"

“We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”  Anais Nin 

I took the idea of a tourist map and created my own subjective map of Seattle, using images that resonate for me on multiple levels. I reoriented its direction so that East is on the top and framed it on the left side with a construction crane and on the right side with crows in a winter tree.

There are at least 25 stitched symbols within the Resident Map which include:

Herschel the sea lion in Shilshole Bay

Red-eared Slider turtle at Golden Gardens

Ballard Railroad Drawbridge, Ballard Locks

Ballard neighborhood: my house, Ballard Library, playground, Corners Park

Lenin statue, Fremont

Gasworks Park

Greenlake Park

Magnuson Park, Soundgarden

University of Washington canoe rental

Black Sun sculpture, Noguchi, Volunteer Park (space needle inside)

Elephant Car Wash

Louise Bourgeois Eye Bench at Seattle Sculpture garden

guinea pig, Seattle Animal Shelter

Washington State Ferry

Giant Pacific Octopus

Smith Tower

Beacon Hill Veterans Hospital

Mt. Ranier

Boeing Field

Hat & Boots, Georgetown

Duwamish traditional lands, Longhouse

Alki, Statue of Liberty

Harbor Island, shipping containers

Amtrak Cascades

ArtXchange Gallery

Memory Map

"Memory Map" 2017

The child I was is just one breath away from me. - Sheniz Janmohamed, Firesmoke

The concept for this piece began in a class on art and intuition that I took years ago when I lived in Taos. In one of the exercises, we drew the floor plan of a childhood home from memory. I chose to draw the house that I lived in from ages 2-12, and this allowed strong visual images to arise from that time as a child. Memory Map is the result of a long incubating idea for a finished piece.

I stitched the floor plan on two-thirds of the piece starting on the right side, filling the rooms with objects and images. Some of these I created in simple line while others are much more detailed, referencing both photographs and my own recollections.

The general design of the left third of the piece is created from a photograph of me and my sister on either side of our two cousins, posing under a tree in the backyard. To this I added pets, the iris, and my bicycle. The varied colors of the leaves represent the changing seasons and the passage of time.

A white fence extends from the backyard into the center section floor plan and signifies the malleability of memory and a child’s deep connection to imagination, nature, and outside play. The swing set, framing the bedroom, acts as a symbolic representation of my sister and me. A print of Renoir’s painting "A Girl With A Watering Can" hung in our room, and my detailed reproduction of it became a central image by default and not necessarily because of its importance. To me, it depicts an idealized world of order and childhood innocence, thus both intersecting and contrasting with the real life represented around it. The framed mushrooms above it portray the first and only needlework project that I made from a kit when I was around 8 and that was displayed in my parents’ bedroom for years.

Mela Insana

"Mela Insana" 2016

A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken. — Terry Tempest Williams

With the exception of the tornado and a few line work details, I created this piece in its entirety by stitching small squares, and variations of the square, to evoke mosaic tile art. I consider "Mela Insana" to be a natural evolution of my some of my earlier thread pieces that utilize the square as a design element as well as my glass tile mosaic sculptures. 

I originally titled this piece "Aubergine" in reference to the dark color of the tornado and in the figure's dress, but because this piece is based on Raphael's painting "Elisabetta Gonzaga", 1504-06, I thought the Italian word for eggplant would be more appropriate. I discovered the name "Mela Insana", ("bad apple") which was folk-etymologized* from the Italian melanzana. I liked this play on the word and how it relates to the visual metaphor of the tornado. As an aside, Raphael also designed mosaics, most notably his ‘Creation of the World' in the dome of the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, executed around 1516.

The landscape on the left side represents the past and its relatively untouched natural world. The right side represents an unknown future, with a tornado that symbolizes constricted energy containing the potential for both great destruction and expansive awareness. 

* http://languagehat.com/the-multifarious-aubergine/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_of_the_World_(Raphael)

Woman with Scarab / Grace

"Woman with Scarab" 2016

"Grace" 2016

I have immortal longings in me.  —Shakespeare

“Woman With Scarab” and “Grace” were each hand stitched on a hoop frame. Because they are a smaller size than my usual work, I brought these pieces with me to work on when I traveled. With both of them, I’m interested in playing with contrasting and harmonizing patterns and colors and I chose the images and designs more for visual reasons than for any particular symbolic meaning. Although the Egyptian scarab and the Islamic motifs evoke distinct cultures, here they represent “Culture” in a general way, just as the portraits, taken out of context, no longer represent a specific person. 

The figure in “Woman With Scarab” references the painting “Portrait of a Young Woman” by Antonio Pollaiolo, 1475. She is stitched with small squares that mimic mosaic tiles and is juxtaposed on top of a geometric pattern. I created the design of the dress using an Islamic floral pattern and added a large scarab to her hair. 

The figure in “Grace” comes from a photograph of an unnamed woman in the book “Portraits of the Insane, the Case of Dr. Diamond”, who I used as my model. I find that there is an incongruent and transcendent joy and grace that emanates from her, and I wanted to capture some of it in my stitching. I worked on this piece when I visited my dying mother, and that changed the way that I came to interpret its meaning. The background is an imperfectly copied Islamic geometric design that I think perfectly symbolizes the pulsing energy of the universe. I added the chicken because I liked the way it related to the pattern of the dress, but I later thought: the chicken is going home to roost.

Demiurge With Map Egg

"Demiurge With Map Egg"  2016

“In the Mysteries, the Universal Egg was likened to an egg which the Cosmic Goose had laid in space.” 

— Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

“What the Greeks and Gnostics called the ‘Demiurge’ is a Universal Intelligence that fashions our world. One way to understand the Demiurge is to think of it as the World Soul.” — Tom Montalk 

In many ways “Demiurge With Map Egg” is an introduction piece for my future series of stitched maps. 

I refer to the egg form as a ‘map egg’ because each of the six delineated sections of the egg contain images that correspond to a separate map that will be in the new series. The egg works both as a specific metaphor - within it are the embryos of finished work - and as a more general symbol of Universal Egg, described in the book ‘The Secret Teachings of All Ages’: “in whose transparent depths creation exists…the perfect image of all terrestrial activity.”

The swing-set depicted in the central section also works on two levels. It will be one of the images in a map entitled ‘Memory Map’ and it refers to an actual swing-set from my childhood that evokes strong memories and associations. As a simple visual icon the swing-set, with its two side by side swings, also represents the duality of the manifest world: an individual ego identity and the named and defined world surrounding it.

In researching the Cosmic Egg, I came across the idea of the demiurge. Plato described it as a subordinate deity who fashions the sensible world in the light of eternal ideas. To the Gnostics, the demiurge is the immortal mortal, responsible for our physical existence (and the suffering we must go through in connection with it) by fabricating the world. Both of these definitions worked well with my intention for the figure in the piece to be a larger than life mythological character who’s inextricably linked with the egg form.

The figure and map egg are overlaid on a design that was influenced from Egyptian iconography. This background symbolizes the unified energy field on which the created world plays out.

A Thousand Tears

 "Anput Dreams There Is No Afterlife" 2015 

                                       

"Maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us" - Mary Oliver

"There is no death, only a change of worlds"- Chief Seattle

I have been drawn to the jackal sculptures associated with the Egyptian god Anubis for a long time. Anubis is the Egyptian god of the afterlife, often depicted as guiding individuals across the threshold from the world at their bodily death. Anput is its female version. I had been thinking about making a sculpture of this jackal, but I had no personal context for it. This fabric piece "Anput Dreams There Is No Afterlife" arose from my experience of my mother's illness and death, and it ended up being very much about her life too. The 'Anput' of the title represents an aspect of my mother's higher self, dreaming that the manifest world is all there is.

I took an often reproduced image of the Anubis animal sitting on a funerary tomb and slightly altered it. I stitched tiny tear shapes on it that represent the suffering my mother underwent, a thousand tears of pain, fear, sadness, and anger. On the tomb underneath the figure I stitched small images that I associate with my mother's life. These images, an obvious allusion to the visual language of Hieroglyphics, are simple pictorial representations of objects, plants, animals and people. 

While these depictions have varying degrees of specificity, and many are simple and mundane, none of them are arbitrary. They are more or less read chronologically from left to right, beginning with her early life and ending with her illness and death. A few of the images on the far right also signify transcendence: butterfly, spiral, blossom and heron. The collar around the neck and the cuff on the front leg are stitched with knives that represent anger and resistance. The jackal is chained to the tomb, weighted down to the right by all the things of the world and by the fear of death. In the background I stitched yellow threads of concentric circles that symbolize both the light of eternal consciousness and the passage way to the other side. The border is made of spirals that represent the path leading from materialism and ego to cosmic awareness.

This piece is being shown at ArtXchange Gallery through September 26th, 2015.      www.artxchange.org

  

Dancer

"Dancer" 2015

"The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves."  -Terry Tempest Williams

I made "Dancer" using both fill and line stitch on a design that was transferred onto the fabric by the carbon paper method. The central figure is directly influenced by the image, shown below, from a painted fresco mural in the Quseir Amra castle in Jordan (early 8th century).

In the mural the female figure is topless and she holds up a bowl. I added a full dress for design reasons and changed the bowl into a walrus. The background is a modified Islamic geometric pattern.

The "Dancer" In this piece represents the Great Mother archetype, rescuing a drowning walrus. I used the infinity symbol on the border, which mirrors the shape of the figure and the belt design, and refers to the divine mystery that surrounds and underlies the dream of the world.

Link to World Heritage Conservation about Quseir Amra

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/327 

Link to information about the Pacific Walrus endangered status

http://www.endangered.org/animal/pacific-walrus/