It’s a bit like the movie Memento. You encounter a symbol divorced from context, and you don’t know whether it’s true or false, whether it’s part of your core personality or part of a tale dissected and carved up and reassembled. It’s a bit of the old Solve Et coagula, eh? Are these bits and pieces of cotton cloth, too small to be clothes, to be named fabric scraps… or are they the prima materia?
Prima Materia suddenly seems more likely.
At the moment, this is just experimentation. What can be done with these odds and ends left over from other projects? Ann Brauer turns them into hot pad trivets and bags,clothing patch pockets and bookmarks, panels in larger quilts and table runners, and other kinds of mysterious entities. I could do the same. Or I could develop new forms of my own, be those sensible structures or playful new forms. Either way, I can now see my way forward in a new sensibility and aesthetic. There’s something to all of this garbage suddenly turned into useful fabric again. Right now, it’s just abstract experimentation, but something else may emerge from this. Something wonderful, rescued from the trash heap of my own personal history, and about to become renewed.
Solve et coagula indeed.
