eine Saite

A rainbow halo around the sun, over the Pacific Ocean at Kalaloch. Here, because somehow I need to share it, and the focus of my wonder keeps shifting like this, from the vast and epic to the miniature and daily - expanding and shrinking, but continuously stimulating wonder and amazement. (And I saw another one again today while composing this post, a rainbow halo around the sun, following a rain storm on an otherwise warm and sunny day.)

Gathering promise from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ *Undrowned* and Lola Olufemi’s *Experiments in Imagining Otherwise*

A glimpse of the table. (Handspun continuous cord from cat’s cradle textiles, a bit of fiber magic)

Daily practice of writing, reading, painting, sitting and watching carries on. Interactions of poetry, paper, paint, birdsong, water, weather, war, wisdom and the lack of it, wrangled through arrangements of objects, words, and thoughts.

I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, a rich, indulgent tome of her brilliance and insight. So much resonance with the backwards-headed people, for those who know this work! I don’t have the capacity to get into it, really - the post title was a working title, but I like it so much I’m just going to leave it at that, with hopes of revisiting the LeGuin when I can be coherent. Let your own mind make the necessary connections in the meantime…

Having cooked two more stitched salvage sketchbooks with onion skins, I once again took an indulgent number of photos while opening them up. The unrolling is the most exciting part, because the colors are most saturated when wet. Each segment has its own serendipitous story to tell, and the unexpectedness of it makes each book a thrill (as I’ve mentioned before). Above and below are all unrolling images from the same two stitched books, as I gloried in the effects, both bright and subtle.

Spiraled to dry in my studio, they look like like a huge rose, and I hate to even move or fold them….

The books, these stitched rolls of paper that are colored and folded and written and painted, keep shifting and growing, in the manner of lichens: multi-textured, slow, subject to weather, force, accident…. One thing I love is the way paper changes when it gets wet, and the way these books can accept water, unlike most books. The texture will change, and things may get very blurry or mushy or require reinforcement, but that’s part of the never-ending assembly project that they are.

The focus on slow growth in silence and solitude is my way of being with the world right now. With offerings of awareness and acknowledgement to Arab women and everything being asked of them. It’s a couple of years old, but I’ve just seen a video highlighting Bedouin women, which features an interview with my weaving mentor from Doha. I knew her as Umm Hamad, but she introduces herself as Noura Hamed Salem Shehayeb in this film. It’s wonderful to hear her stories - we did not have enough language in common for me to hear them when I was there.

Working on a handwoven camel halter in Souq Waqif, Doha, Qatar, 2011

I believe the film accompanied an exhibit at the Qatar National Museum:

Qatar Museums film Woman on the Move

And another beautiful Arab woman whose work I know and admire was interviewed here (Instagram link - the Lebanese film maker’s profile on Vimeo is here). Widad Kuwar’s Tiraz home for Arab dress has been much on my mind, given the continuing destruction of Palestine. Memories of visiting Jordan and seeing the bounty of textiles ten years ago…. there was definitely a sense of needing to preserve and hold the knowledge, history, and beauty of these things, but it did not feel as desperate as now. Nothing from a few years ago feels as desperate as now - is that the right word? It’s a feeling of having the wind knocked out of me, a kind of continuous shock, where it’s impossible to accommodate the understanding of what is actually happening.

But, given that I have the unutterable privilege of peace, home, food, love, and solitude, I make use of it to grow on behalf of all of us, and as I wrote at the beginning of some time alone in February, “The details of things gather around me like patient friends, offering supportive gestures in their mute beauty.”

At first, I was captured by the idea of reusing paper from old notebooks and elsewhere in my studio, recycle bin, ancient book pages, bags, receipts, collage stock, etc, to make long scrolls that fold into concertina/accordion books. The inspiration and guidance comes from India Flint’s beautiful online Salvage Sketchbooks workshop. Ever since I saw the foraging list, I’ve been digging up papers here and there, remembering bits I’ve been saving, (like the sweetly erratic first-grade writings of my partner’s students on the classic school paper,) and ravaging old notebooks (like the journal that became a nest in the last post.)

Painting with lichen on a stick and watercolor. Also shown is walnut ink (brown) and black sumi ink. India Flint makes use of all kinds of natural tools, which has encouraged me to try found feathers as quills - some of the scribbling at lower right is early feather use.

I got so caught up in the joining and decorating of papers, some of them have very little room left to write or paint in - but they make entertaining story books as they are, feeding my morning reflections and chatting with other drawings and paintings and sets of words.

The top is the Hamlet pages (see below), bottom left is the inside cover of the Hamlet book. Bottom right is my first handmade bound book, just a few signatures stitched up with no cover - also part of this current exploration.

It was exciting to have a couple of very old books ready to dissect and reconfigure: a 1912 edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that my grandfather and his brother both used in high school, and an equally old and brilliantly battered and ink stained Seat Work & Industrial Occupations, a book full of ideas for classroom creation which I scored from the free bin at the used bookstore in town. The old paper, especially in the Hamlet, is very delicate, so it’s just as well I painted all over these pages and saved other methods for newer papers. The fragility gives me a good excuse to use collage, and encourages a lack of attachment to any end result - although I’m taking lots and lots of pictures.

The pages were removed, and the covers are used to hold the accordion books, made from the removed pages and other papers. In the case of Hamlet, one accordion book is glued to the cover, but others are just packed in and tied up. The pages turn perpendicular to the spine of the book, as you can see in the photo above.

I love the view of the ends, with all the variety of pages showing their enticing edges.

Hamlet pages on top, with reinforcing collage in progress. Lower papers are being handstitched in preparation for dyeing. Unused pages from notebooks, bits of a book on insurance which I love painting over, and a printed image of Rilke’s handwriting from the Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek website of collected letters. Coffee filters are coming in handy as collage material (hello, Sarah!!)

Then came the simmering of books with leaves, which I had never tried before. The first one I did folded, and not much happened in terms of printing (not leaves, but cedar sprigs - I think they may also have been too dry.)

First cooked book drying. The process changed the color and texture in interesting ways, even though the printing was not great throughout.

First try at printing with Western red cedar (*Thuja plicata*). The distortions of the ink on this page, and the hint of plant print make me rub my hands with glee.

The next one was rolled with eucalyptus leaves throughout. I took advantage of a road trip to Northern California to gather Eucalyptus viminalis and California bay (Umbellularia californica), both of which smell wonderful while cooking. My studio is strewn with paper, in piles and small bits, and sewn together in lengths, and I’m definitely not tired of this yet. Thinking of putting poetry into some of these books. (And onto this website, actually. I may have to work up to it a bit more, but I’m pushing things around to make room.)

Some excellent clouds over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Unrolling of the eucalyptus book after cooking. (*Eucalyptus viminalis* from California was used)

Eucalyptus book drying, draped over a ladder.

A book in a box. This one was machine stitched

I think there’s something about how the paper transforms after getting wet, buckling and revealing its own fluidity, that makes the book feel more imbued with possibility. It’s on the edge of transformation, could so easily return to pulp, and this very tenuousness invites the writing of secrets and spells, codes and invented scripts, messages to offer the forest or the sea.

Today I unrolled the one with California Bay leaves, and it has some very subtle and exciting shapes and movements in it. This reminds me of doing stitch-resist dyeing, seeing the patterns and influence of water as it interacts with materials and their color properties. So unpredictably lovely!

Image is extra blue because it’s morning, shady light, and still wet.

The blue-green here is seeping from the ink of the printed page, which is actually only the one left of the stitching. The text printed onto the next page, along with the leaves.

Suffice to say, I now look at all papers differently, and have the capacity to make endless sketchbooks, notebooks, poetry books, treasure books, magic tomes, that I won’t feel precious about using up (although some of them feel significant to me already, as receptacles of transformative practice.) The stitching, by the way, is a great use for weaving thrums, which I’ve always vacillated about keeping. So many elements are integrated here - and the stitching and interleaving of accordion books gives material form to the kind of looping and circling and joining I’ve been doing in my journals already. There’s this big, multilayered book of life that I keep delving into, surfacing somewhere and lashing thoughts and experiences together, usually in a flurry of flipping pages. Now I’m seeing them seep into one another more like the colors of print ink or fallen leaves.

le guin onion skin all of a piece

marks on paper