Bird Woman

I was recently asked about the inspiration for the piece bird woman (see below...it is the first image):

I had been sketching birds in my studio, as a way to begin the day. The connection to birds is spiritual in the sense that i have found bird feathers (owls, blue jays, flicker--it's like a woodpecker) for many years. This has also been possible because of my deep connection to land and the forest-- i spend a lot of time hiking and listening. I am also fascinated with the way birds seem to be both physical and spiritual--flying and singing--how incredible, that really is the ultimate. The bird sketches are also ways for me to look at gestures, significant gestures and then to translate those onto figures. So, for example, dancing/fighting birds and rituals of courtship. Or the shape of flying--towards the sky or towards the sea. With this piece I wanted the woman to more directly embody the gesture/the bird. She becomes, the bird becomes. And they are both divine.

...this was a really hard piece for me. When I made it I had such a hard studio day, nothing was flowing and I was actually going to put it away in a pile of mistakes that i have. But then a friend entered my studio and really loved it and that gave me new eyes. And then, as you know, I thought I would sew the entire piece, but the white of the sketch really grew on me. And I began to really understand the importance of the sketch, and the partly-stitched image, the way that it allowed for movements and openings in the work. The piece became very significant to me--it is a legend of sorts for other work. I still feel I have a lot to learn from it. Oh, and it is also about vulnerability, being open to being a vessel, to change, to being physically embodied, to being divine. All that is about vulnerability I think.

birds, women, conversations with elegua, and a list of the impossible

These are my winter to spring stitches, along with a short film of me sewing:





And a favorite question from my sketch journal this time around: what
is impossible? what would it look and sound like? write about it,
then do it.

The question makes me think of Elegua, the orisa of the
crossroads—choices and destinies, and also equinoxes and eclipses.
Rules and their breaking. I keep having this conversation with the
road about the impossibility of drawing. So I am following this
instruction from my drawing teacher. When you draw a face, or a body,
or anything really, try not to name it or think about it in words,
instead think about shapes, curves, shadows, lines, movement. So you
can get to know it without saying what it is, without limiting what it
will become. It's amazing to be able to engage in something so
difficult, to feel the near impossibility of that translation from eye
to body to pencil to page—and then, says my teacher, eventually you
become fluent in drawing the way YOU draw. Words of the divine
trickster I think.

so here is my short list:
running five miles a day
enemies loving each other (i am thinking a lot about laylah ali's work here)
me, a dj
and sometimes drawing

The sky is earthbloodorange

I have just returned to Austin from New York and am waking up with a book about Tàpies called Witness of Silence by Alexandre Cirici (1972). There is such a freedom in the work of Tàpies that I hope to achieve in my own one day, a kind of trust for the unknown which I believe every artist should embody, walk from, live with. And then there are the colors in his work which move me so deeply. The oranges that speak of something pungent, internal, like blood or love, and also earth. I am staring at this piece called Painting.

Painting, 1954

There are artists that I come back to that I feel somehow related to—artistic ancestors—we have some kind of shared elemental connection—these include Antoni Tàpies, Ana Mendieta and (recently) María Magdalena Campos-Pons. We see their work and think ‘these are my people.’ It makes me think about this idea (this message I heard) that ‘there is no imagination without the ancestors and where we come from.’ And I am thinking of ancestors in all possible forms: blood relations and artistic ancestors as well as place and land.

¿Como Andas?, 2003

While in NY I had this amazing conversation with a friend of mine, Ayano Ohmi, who is a clay artist. She uses clay from all over the world and makes totems with that clay that she often installs outdoors in the same places where the clay was found. The clay comes out of the earth to find a home on top of the earth. How beautiful. So we had this amazing conversation about travel and art and Ayano said something that I keep thinking about: “Clay, fiber and glass are age-old materials, so I feel they should be together, must be together to make something very important.”

And we continued to talk about this elemental connection that we have to materials. The materials know us. We know them, but they have known us longer. Think about that. That the materials have sought us out. So our connection to the materials we use as visual artists stems from something very deep. Ancestral, elemental, fundamental. And so for our work to be powerful form must embody content. The form is history is our past, present and future.

And our deep love and excitement and breathlessness about seeing the color earthbloodorange used on a painting may indeed come from the fact that one of our ancestors was impressed by that color as it painted the sky with the setting sun hundreds or thousands of years ago. We must be incredibly old to be artists.

The birth of mythical birds

Sea Bird (2007), Thread on paper, 10 x 9 inches

Hummingbird (2007), Thread on paper, 10 x 8 inches

Hummingbird, Ruby throated (2007), Thread on paper, 10 x 8 inches



Bird (2006), Thread on paper, 9¾ x 8 inches

I recently began a daily ritual of stitching as a way to enter my studio and begin work for the day. I have been sewing a series of birds, mostly mythical birds (related--and not--to the phoenix, quetzalcoatl, sankofa, thunderbird...i’m sure there are more...) that have become the palettes for my other stitched pieces (Monuments) as my hand learns about gestures, movements, colors, and the meanings and language of different stitch lengths. The daily sewing is like a prayer which sometimes happens quite quickly (well, for sewing...1-2 hours) or can take much, much longer (like most of the day).

It’s amazing how the sketches, the prayers, these birds become the work itself—the sketches have a kind of opening and vulnerability to them—they seem to speak so easily about what it is that I’m working towards, their language flows without being self-conscious. So they are not only reference points for larger work, but I have become very interested in the visual language of the birds themselves and the stories they tell. The writer Ana Lara recently asked me if I consider the stitches to be poems—they are in many ways, certainly a language I am trying to learn, trying to speak, sometimes broken, sometimes fluent, all the while working to understand the thread and its ever-changing form and relationship to land and the body and the story.

And so I find myself in Austin, TX. Yes, Texas! A city of birds, hundreds of grackles break through the sky each night and hang heavy in the trees. Parrots stream through the sky with their bright greens, nesting in the electrical towers all over the city. A police officer told me the parrot ancestry goes back several years, that they were once pet birds that escaped. Some say they were waylaid on a journey south one year. Or maybe they weren’t lost at all, but arrived here because they had to. They had to return, remember, re-live something important and powerful. And this land is old, there are fossils every where you step—over 300 million year-old fossils that you can hold in your hands. It’s incredible. And I almost forgot to mention the wild peacocks. I actually found a peacock feather the other day. Sometimes the sky opens that way.