Before I left New Orleans to start this program. I had unrolled an old painting that I didn’t like as a means for instigating movement. There were no looming creative deadlines, and lots of life demands outside the studio. So this was a way to get moving. To try and move forward. To innovate beyond what I had been doing previously. Because I wasn’t attached to this painting, I felt free to cut it up into 4 pieces. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but they were the only thing I had in process when it was time to leave for Chicago. So I shipped them to myself and hung them up on my studio wall.
Before I had a single class, I had a studio visit with Pamela Sneed. She and I sat and looked at these painting pieces and talked and wrote a poem together. Until this point, I had seen them as separate pieces. She saw them as one, and she was right. They still belong together. She also saw them as a woman’s body. And she was also right about that. I had seen one piece as related to female reproductive anatomy, but I hadn’t seen it as one body altogether.
Since then, I’ve gone through iterations of how I think I’d like to move forward with this piece. I’ve thought about mounting them on wood. I’ve thought about quilting them. Lately, I want to sew and stuff them in sections and potentially surround them with lace. I’m leaning toward utilizing a material language that may reference a young girl coming of age. Starting to understand her body, her sexuality. Understanding herself as desiring and as desirable. Questioning what it looks like to manage that.
This project will take some time. I’m learning to sew for the first time and exploring how to sew different types of fabrics and what the process is for constructing the end product I’m envisioning. The next two weeks will be full of mistakes and surprises, pleasant and disappointing. I’m already seeing ways I’ll need to improvise. My goals are to keep working this next week. Keep moving forward. Sewing one part of the piece. Experimenting. Uncovering the improvisations needed and making decisions to shift directions when needed. Then moving onto the next. And making a plan for how to move forward when I get back to New Orleans.