I recently returned from a trip to spend time with my family in Hawaii and California, where I was born and spent the first years of my childhood.... It takes some time to land after travelling. I'm going to post a more personal blog here, as I'm sure this experience is something I share with many others.
After two weeks it still felt my soul was trailing strings that longed to reconnect with the land, people, experiences and my own childhood left behind.
We arrived in Fryerstown to stormy weather and given that the road to town was washed away in the last rain, it seemed like the perfect time to stay in and try to make something of this experience - to help process, digest, remember, say thank you to, hold close and then let go of.
Any good creative process in my home begins with a big pot of tea. And then a hunt amongst the boxes of materials in the studio.
Using a cut up bicycle inner tube as a base, I began to weave these travel stories together, wrappng coloured wool, shells and beach glass collected on the trip. It began to remind me of layers of earth or the rings on an old tree.
This technique is really easy. You just literally wrap coloured string around anything you can coil into a rope (like bike inner tubes, old rags and cloth, grasses etc). And then you coil the rope you've made by turning it into a spiral and sewing it into place. The stiches you can use are all easy and can be googled. This piece uses a combination of techniques learned from my dear friend and fellow inspirer Trace, a group of lovely women I worked with from Uganda, and sitting with some Pitjantjatjara elders under a tree....as well as my own experimentation. I love learning things from special people in my life! It makes it fun to continue to practice on my own.
making the 'rope'
the finished piece
So I just sat and added coils and drank pots of tea all day until I felt enough was in the work. It feels comforting to have it inside my home. And it now feels good to be home, to feel this earth beneath my feet, to smell the wet forest, and for my ears to be entranced by the calls of the animals here. Like the mole cricket, for example, which is reknowned for creating a chamber inside the earth that resonates its call exquisitely.
Here are some images of the places that inspired me in making the piece, and which I can still hear calling from inside it. I like to think I have made them a nice chamber :)
