Seven Sculptures Reimagined

"The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."    Charles Du Bos 

All of the sculptures, with the exception of Amphitrite's Son, were begun in Taos. Several of them have objects on their head that act as an identity marker or that symbolize an emotion. As I reworked them, with the help of time and distance, I reimagined their meaning and allowed new stories and interpretations to emerge. Many of them have been retitled as well. My two-dimensional stitchwork evolved gradually from experimenting with thread on some of these.

Square Squash, paper pulp, rice paper, wood, 26"x11"x8"

Square Squash

This piece was once the top part of one sculpture titled 'The Burden of Joy' along with what is now George As King Kong underneath it. It's one of the pieces that went through different versions as I experimented with materials and techniques (including glass mosaic tiles), and is unrecognizable from its original form. I decided to make the whimsical final version using hand-cut rice paper on the surface, playing with the contrast between the squares and the organic squash shape on the head. The surface closely resembles traditional tile mosaic but it's all paper, and it sits on an elegant square base. 

George As King Kong, paper pulp, paint, rice paper, wood, 21"x10"x18"

George As King Kong

Originally the bottom part of a sculpture titled 'The Burden of Joy' with what is now Square Squash on top, I set the pug free and approached it as a portrait of my pug George who was the direct inspiration for it. I added the Kong (toy) to his head along with a crown, making the visual joke 'King Kong' that refers to his love and even obsession with toys and suggesting that it's a role he's playing or that I'm projecting on to him.

Playing Vixen, Paper pulp, paint, rice paper, wood, 25"x20"x12"

Playing Vixen

This sculpture was originally a portrait of an aspect of myself, depicting an identity story of feeling judged and shamed for my sexuality: William Tell's apple on the head as a target and the term 'vixen' used to describe a certain kind of woman. Later, I understood the piece to be a more general expression of the archetypal feminine itself attacked, Eve and the apple and its associations of sin.

For this final version, I retitled it Playing Vixen to indicate that so many of our personal identity stories and collective beliefs are not solid or true, but are instead just the roles we've been conditioned to take on. I added hand-cut rice paper leaves to the figure that represent Spring and renewal, the idea that every moment is fresh and fluid. Now the apple represents the abundance and generosity of nature.

Blue Pear, paper pulp, rice paper, thread, wood, 27"x15"x11"   

Blue Pear

This piece is similar to Playing Vixen because it's another portrait of an aspect of (and/or an emotional state about) me. Like Square Squash, it has been through many surface changes. I tried different materials: from paint to glass tiles and beads, and now in its final version, stitched thread on rice paper and small cut pieces of rice paper. 

Originally it was about my depression personified, a portrait of a seemingly fixed identity story. As I reworked it, although I didn't retitle it, I found a new understanding of it. I added the stitched ants to represent the acronym 'automatic negative thoughts', breaking up the solidity of its initial meaning and adding some humor even if it is a private joke!

Pughou, paper pulp, glass beads, rice paper, yarn, wood, 22"x8"x17"

Pughou 

I now understand this sculpture to be about the relationship between a human and their pet, both how we project ourselves onto our companion animals and how they reflect ourselves back to us. I began it during the Iraq war and it was originally titled Buraq after a hybrid creature from Islamic tradition because that war got me interested in Islamic culture. I wanted to make some connection to it in reaction to the overwhelming propaganda and demonization of Islam during that time but I now see that it was a much more personal piece. I changed the title to Pughou, a play on the Chinese mythological hybrid  'Penghou' which has the body of a dog with a human head.  It is based on my own pug dog, so the Chinese reference is fitting because pugs are thought to originate from China, but really it’s a self-portrait of sorts.

The surface is mostly how I made it originally except for the hair which was fabric that had faded to grey. I covered it with blue rice paper and added some yarn. I also added rice paper to the legs and feet to freshen up the color. The main body and face are covered by glass beads which I applied in my typical painstaking way (which I love) and I think it was influenced by Islamic design. This is the only sculpture from Taos with the original glass beads on the surface. 

The Passion, paper pulp, rice paper, wood, 35"x10'x19"

The Passion

Although I began this sculpture while my dog was alive, he died in 2008 and I now describe it as him in the afterlife. Putti are secular representations of passion, and toys were his passion. I imagine them playing on the 'other side', and I like the tension that it depicts of waiting and anticipation, the putti looking down, and the pug looking up. George had a favorite pink ball once that was lost in the house, I looked for it everywhere and I just couldn't find it. I now know where it went!

Originally the medium was just paint on paper pulp, with glass covering the ball, but for this final version, I added (mostly squares) of hand-cut rice paper to its entirety. 

The dog's legs were unstable and awkward, so I replaced all of the legs and added the base.

Amphitrite's Son, paper pulp, rice paper, thread, wood, 24"x11"x13"

Amphitrite's Son

This piece was begun after Taos when I lived in Portland. I originally planned to make it a glass tile mosaic like The Sacrifice of Gaza, and I started it that way but at some point, I knew that my energy enthusiasm for that process just wasn't there so I stopped working on it. I also conceived it as an anti-war piece, and it had a rocket on its head. I have the rocket and I plan to use it in a future piece, but this just wasn't the right one and it became an entirely different sculpture. I made a paper pulp shell on the head and I experimented with using a round punch for the rice paper on the face to mimic bubbles and I stitched thread shells for the hair. I consider it to be one of the transition pieces into my two-dimensional stitchwork. 

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.

Preview

                                                     

I am currently working on many projects at once. In addition to creating new thread on fabric pieces, I'm also reworking earlier paper pulp sculptures that I made - with the exception of one - when I lived in New Mexico. This photograph shows them in varying stages of completion.

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/

Trees Are Poems

"Trees Are Poems" 2014

"Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky" - Kahlil Gibran

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

- Greek Proverb

This piece is hand-stitched on fabric, and is relatively large at 24"x16". It's the first time I used carbon paper to transfer the design directly onto the fabric from the template. I got the main image by combining two photographs from the book "Portraits of the Insane" (subtitled 'The Case of Dr Diamond'). The book contains photographs of asylum patients from mid-nineteenth century Britain. One of the photographs was captioned "Acute Melancholia", and I chose it for both image and subject. The mosaic pattern of the dress is my design.

My original intention was to use only line stitch, but I ended up doing a type of fill stitch in the figure's face and hands and in the Palestinian sunbird that rests on her lap. The figure is surrounded by the outlines of olive leaves and olives, with repeating birdcages as the border. On reflection I like that the leaves and olives are rendered only in outline, making them seem less solid, like ghosts.

The subject of 'Trees Are Poems' is a response to my deep sadness about the desecration of Palestinian olive trees since 1967, both officially by the state of Israel and by its illegal settlers. It is estimated that between 800,000 and 1,000,000 trees have been uprooted, burned, and cut down. Thousands are destroyed each year; in October 2014 hundreds of trees were burned down by illegal settlers near Jerusalem that are believed to be some of the worlds oldest, trees from a lineage that are mentioned in the Old Testament. 

Besides being an integral part of the Palestinian economy, the olive tree is deeply connected to Palestinian culture, heritage and identity. Their destruction is a huge part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine and has been compared to the destruction of the buffalo in the genocide of Native Americans. This ongoing devastation is also a tragedy for the entire world: these trees belonged to the planet, a heritage that is lost to of all of us. 

'Trees Are Poems' is not a portrait of any particular person, and I'm not trying to represent a Palestinian woman. I intended the figure to personify an Archetypal Feminine, mourning the loss of nature and the suffering imposed on a whole culture. But of course she also symbolizes an aspect of myself, coming from my own feelings of grief about this indefensible destruction.

Update: On January 1, 2015 Jewish settlers uprooted 5,000 olive tree saplings near Ramallah on Palestinian land. They also broke the roots so they can't be replanted. The saplings had been planted in mid-December in honor of Palestinian official Zaid Abu Ein, who died after being beaten by an Israeli Occupation soldier during a demonstration to support tree planting and against land confiscation.

http://electronicintifada.net/content/heritage-uprooted/7126 

http://www.zaytoun.org/