My photos are all out of order and I'm too frazzled to fix so here goes: I'm briefly home after a wonderfully nourishing stay at
Oak Spring, easily my favorite residency, and I don't do favorites. This was a day where the clouds were moving fast, here I'm facing one direction,
and here, I turn around to see what's directly behind. This is how I felt in the week and a half that I was delayed involuntarily when I met the worst dealer ever, which held my car hostage, called it a lawn ornament, and in the end called in a locksmith to do what I could have done immediately if I had known the dealer could not do the job. Then once I was finally able to hit the road with less than 24 hours notice, I got caught in a WV speed trap, so I arrived extremely frazzled.
Fortunately, this place is powerfully healing and calming and creates a bubble (here, literally, in a greenhouse). After getting a tip about playing Tetris immediately after traumatic situations like when a cop is screaming at you and you are screaming back, I was amazed to feel the distress dissolve as I settled into what always feels like home, in the best ways.
However, I do need to stop eating here like I'm being fattened for slaughter. It's SO HARD to resist all of the amazing treats that Jason makes for everyone. This was a particularly incredible dessert that disappeared quickly and was part of a giant batch of meals he made for us to take away because we got snow and that shut the place down for a couple of days.
Something I learned early on in this return trip (#4!) is that there is a church thrift store in town and we all went together on my first Sunday to shop. I was delighted to find fun pants.
Much more important was my housemate and studio neighbor,
Frauke Materlik. She was perfect from the start, exhorting me to relax and calm down in the house. This is the first time I've ever had to share the house and studio buildings (because of pandemic, and last year, visa issues for my original assigned person), and I was apprehensive. But this was the most ideal pairing. In the depths of my car despair, I worried that it was unwise to go, but my body knew I had to make the trip to be taken care of. I had no idea it was Frauke who would be doing the care! She's an incredible person, artist, gardener, landscape architect, performer and sculptor, German who has lived in multiple countries and now hosts artists in her own country space near the west coast, daughter, sister, and aunt. Sharing space with someone nearly identical in age also was so helpful. I could go on and on but I am so grateful to have met Frauke and hope to see her again soon!
We had a tree in common, a black walnut behind the house. At its base, she harvested fallen hulls that I thought would not work for dye. But they DID, and marvelously so. She gave me some and I dunked the bark weaving and a strip of milkweed paper (they are drying on a sheet that is already messy with kakishibu, which is a different brown). I was overjoyed one night to come home and smell the walnut pot, to be living with someone who was willing to do these tests and then use the dye every day.
I brought kakishibu powder to mix and coat paper and also imparted color every day. This is a two in one: bark lace being dyed on top of hanji.
Another daily task was to knit a page for a book prototype that I've been dreaming of and was working on in
my last residency in Michigan in Kalamazoo.
The daily task that I think provided the most personal growth: drawing the same walnut tree while outside. This is the final drawing in my sketchbook. I began there, and then realized that I could make blank books to fill with enough pages to include over a week of drawings, to show the cycles of life/days/weeks/time and encourage the process of putting one foot in front of the other, even in difficult times. So I went from one daily drawing of this tree to six (my sketchbook plus five books, sometimes a seventh drawing because I'd come back to my sketchbook at the end of the session).
This was my view, minus the septic tank directly to the right. On certain days when it was too hard to sit (like when chairs were freezing and covered in snow or rain), I leaned on what I think is the generator unit box behind the septic tank. We had wild ranges of weather and when it got frighteningly windy (like, the house is going to tear away windy), I thought, I cannot possibly go outside. I tried one day to draw from indoors and it was so distancing and felt too separated that I just bundled up and braved the weather even though it was a short drawing session. I had a lap blanket and everything. Frauke only saw me doing it once, on a bad weather day, and said I was crazy. High compliment!!
Final daily task: processing milkweed. Here is my booty from my stay. I know, seems like so little! But it was so much.
So much because part of the task was to really slow down and spend time with this plant that I've had a relationship with for over 20 years. I wanted to really get down to where which fibers were, and different approaches to separating layers after winter retting. I drew the milkweed daily until I was done (and only processed one stump until about a week in when I got tired of that and did the rest of the batch the last day).
This is why my batch was small, I only harvested a handful! I did that my first day, sad that they had mowed so much that I only had bits to work with, but in a way glad. This is my first stay where I had to really consider my body's limitations, and this was the perfect approach. I knew I couldn't make paper this year here, and that I had to really pare down what I transported. I gave myself rules: only one dye/color (kakishibu), and only what could fit into one bin. In the end, even that was too much! I always forget that I really don't need much to make art. In fact, it's easier to be fully present when I have less stuff.
This was my grounding activity from the start. The big plain bark panel at top right was the first, and then I used up my stashes from there. Only the lower left is paper, the rest is all beaten bark bits that were leftover from grids that I took apart. It's amazing how satisfying this is, something I learned in kindergarten, and how much time it takes.
Every arrival, I make the space my own. That meant clearing old bones from the nook outside my side door to the studio, and stacking what rocks were left behind. I saw this a lot in Korea, all over, at Buddhist sites, beaches, mountains, and so on. It wasn't until now that I understood why people do it. Here, I finally let myself let go of the dreaded and poisoned word/idea of "productivity" and followed Frauke's encouragement, which in the end was what my body was telling me all the time: stay in bed longer if you need, rest when you need (I napped every day except the last two, and really felt the difference when I didn't), enjoy long slow meals, and commune with the outdoors. This was, as I always knew it, the perfect remedy to my always frantic and intense Januarys.
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