I think it might surprise you how a laundry list of seemingly unrelated things can coalesce into an individual artwork. To describe this, I’ve selected a list of five things that impacted the making of an artwork I call Leaving.
One: Where did the magic go?
Magician Asi Wind says he envies the astonishment his audience experiences at his performances. He sees their awe-struck reactions while he remains undeceived in his knowledge of how the tricks work. Once, he purposefully caused the audience to share his experience of disillusionment by revealing the trick’s mechanism (an elaborate prop.) By disclosing it, he showed how magic is ultimately a lie. The audience groaned in dismay (but also a sick delight).
Then he went further and performed the same trick without the prop. Magic was revived! Right now, I am like the audience in those few moments of Wind’s performance, disillusioned and waiting for a revival of magic.
In 2022, I began a textile piece I called “Leaving.” Once the background was sewn, I appliqued a single arm to the far-right side. This arm was traced from my own and highlights the smallness of my wrist. I recognize this smallness as a metaphor for my body’s fragility and my being’s sensitivity. It moves off the edge of the composition, exiting the frame.
The making stopped there, and the work sat.
Two: Inconceivable Patterns
I have been learning about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) through interviews with notable people in the tech industry. According to Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), AGI quantum computers will have the breadth of knowledge capable of grasping patterns of relation that we humans are not able to conceive. He asserts that things we describe as synchronicities or what we consider random may be recognized and known to AGI as part of a larger pattern.
Another person (I can’t remember who) described the vastness of this discrepancy of intelligence by comparison: a dog can’t grasp many things in our lives that we think of as mundane, such as what we’re doing with our phones. Dogs have no clue what a cell phone does. Dogs don’t read books, either, or delve into philosophy or art or Instagram. That’s a big intellectual gap, and AGI could excel beyond us to a similar extent. The prospect of not being capable of comprehending what AGI knows is harrowing to me. And yet spiritually, it is already familiar.
Three: Instability
I woke up the other day with a song in my head: Talking Heads, The Overload. The lyrics that rang out were “the center is missing.” When I searched for a possible origin, it seemed most likely to be from W.B. Yeats poem, The Second Coming (1920), one that has inspired multitudes of apocalyptic-themed creative acts. Yeats’ line is “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
When I read the full poem, it sparks the ludicrous thought that AGI could be the Second Coming event. Surely, we are headed toward a paradigm shift: the world will never be the same! The poem aptly describes my feelings of instability and fear of the unknown.
The artwork, Leaving, had been folded and put away. I return to it. On the left-hand side, I had disfigured the pattern of the background. That needed explanation.
It must be a force of nature, I muse. I add leaves to indicate a wind, possibly a storm. I have had nightmares about storms, including one that in retrospect symbolized Covid. Yes, it is certainly a storm. After hours of sewing, I realize it is not wind that is happening. It is not a pushing momentum…it is a wake.
Four: A Void (avoid)
My mother died in March of complications from dementia. Anyone who knew her was aware of her fascination and love of iris flowers. My experience of her final few years was like watching one of those regal, velvety blossoms wilt and shrivel. If you’ve ever seen that phenomenon, you know how the colors deepen as the bloom shrinks and becomes sticky.
I am presently so devoid of a concept of spiritual legacy that I do not look for any contact from her. If the windchimes I took from her back porch as a memento ring and I think of her, I am only thinking of her. And that can be something that moves me to tears. But I do not believe she is there on the wind.
Five: The Unknown
I attempt to hold in my mind the mote that I am and the less-than-a-fragment of space-time that I occupy within the expanse of the multiverse. Unfathomable! This incites a sustained sense of overwhelm to the point of resignation. To counteract, I’m cultivating an acceptance of my equality with dirt. Well, no, I mean soil…in its most positive and scientific understanding.
It irks me that I added leaves to the artwork. The leaves were a quick fix, a guess. Leaving was never about leaves. No matter what, they had to go. I cut them away with a small rotary blade. I cut with a deftly managed attitude of disappointment, cutting away a part of my being. Each leaf had been carefully stitched down; that no longer mattered. No need to be precise, just get the leaves out, out! Nothingness is what is there…for all of us. There is no material or imagery that can identify what is adrift in our wake.
It is something brilliantly intense, something wholly unknown.
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Hello Jan. I hope you are all right healthwise. You seem so frail. I offer you condolences on the loss of your mother. I just finished reading Bittersweet by Susan Cain and found it helpful in thinking about holding pain and happiness simultaneously.
I am grateful to have one of your silk leaves mobile that hangs over my bed. I cherish it and you. I hope your sculpture soon finds the home it deserves.
Much love and respect to you.
Thanks for your thoughtfulness, Sonja! Being small and sensitive does color how I exist in the world. I appreciate the book recommendation and am deeply grateful for your support of my art. I could not be an artist without people like you! Be well.
Jan, A very interesting story of the genesis of this work (which is perhaps not finished yet?). It made me think not so much of the “Second Coming” as of another poem by G.M. Hopkins called “Spring and Fall”, which you may know as well.
“Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.”
As you seem to indicate, the original piece was “Leaving” even before you thought of putting leaves in it, perhaps because of the glimpse of just the arm of the body as it “leaves” the frame. But as it turns out, it is a work that contains an “unleaving” in Hopkins’ sense of losing the trees leaves. Those who come to see that piece as it appears now, will not necessarily guess that the “missing” pieces that have left the work were once Leaves. The leaves do not belong anymore, as they don’t belong to the trees in the Fall. But, as an other poet remarks, “if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” And lo and behold, the latest creating is “Renewal” is it not?
Blessings, Ed
“And yet you will weep and know why”…thank you, Ed. You are such a source of wisdom to me, and always will be.