bee balm & herringbone hit the road.

Hello friends!

Just a quick little note to say how excited I am for this piece to be making a journey across the world to participate in Rooting (India) - The Knowledge Project  which brings together artists, activists, and farmers from South Asia and the United States to address the specific challenges faced by farmers and consumers in India as well as in the United States. This “knowledge hub,” shares artistic projects that bring accessible, solution and knowledge based information to agricultural concerns to create a public forum that generates public awareness, discussion, participation, and action. The drawings, diagrams, artists' books, videos, and pamphlets are curated by Chicago curator Tricia Van Eck, with Chicago artist Deborah Boardman and Indian artist Akshay Raj Singh Rathore. Rooting (India) - The Knowledge Project, offering free tea and coffee, encourages casual conversations and creates a meeting space for planned public discussions and workshops around various aspects of agricultural concerns.

Since the industrialization of agriculture is in its early stages in India, unlike the United States where food production is almost entirely industrialized, we believe it is an opportune time in India to gather artists, academics, activists, and citizens to address these issues. Because Kerala has a mix of climates, a strong fish trade, provides 45% of India’s plantation crops, has a rich heritage in herbal medicine and Ayurveda, and tourism related to health and spirituality, Rooting (India) - The Knowledge Project does not aim to offer singular simple solutions. Instead it presents the work of artists and collectives who are redefining the critical needs of their communities and in turn are devising their own solutions for long-term sustainability. 

A little bit on my thoughts behind Bee Balm & Herringbone:

As we, with increasing speed, dismantle our environment, destroy the very biosphere that gives us life is it possible, still, for us as a world community to change our trajectory?  Can we mend our ways?  Can we bring back plants and animals brought to the brink of extinction?  Can we salvage the power and beauty of the dying?  Are there small steps we as urban people can take to treat the land and ourselves more sustainably?

These are questions I have asked myself as I embark on a project entitled, In The Time of Flowers where I explore the history of flower preservation, humanity’s enchantment with botanicals, the sustenance florals provide for us as a race as nourishment, medicinal balm and in their uplifting beauty, and if there is a way for us to mend, to bring back the flowers we have lost. Lost, meaning the flowers that have died because we have plucked them for our own delight and thus they’ve been denied the opportunity to reseed themselves, but also the seeds we have lost through time and in the changing landscapes of agriculture, and flower businesses need to alter that which was naturally occurring to theoretically better suit the consumer markets.

Above is an image of Bee Balm in conversation with embroidery stitches.  Bee balm is an edible and medicinal plant.  The stem, leaves and flower are edible and often used in salads, teas, oils extracted for their scents and medicinal balms and tinctures.  This particular bee balm was grown in a backyard urban garden as part of a long term effort to feed my family from foods we grow ourselves.  On this page the herringbone stitch is in complementary conversation with the leaves of the bee balm, hopefully highlighting the flowers angular beauty and possibly returning some life to its dried form on the page.  The herringbone stitch is a cross-stitch commonly used to secure a hem, and hems being what keep our clothing in tact, possibly prevent a garment from fraying, but also something that can be let down, released to make a garment last longer as our bodies grow and change, thus I am using the stitch to represent an effort to preserve the power and possibility of the bee balm.

conversations with the dead.

It is easy this time of year to slip into meditations on death and dying.  It is autumn and leaves cover the ground, a few trees still cling to their leaves but whips of wind will strip them bare in a few short days.  The gardens have been put to bed and the last of our kale was harvested for breakfast this morning.  We are surrounded by signs of what no longer is, of life lost.  This is the rhythm of seasons, of change, but as I get older I seem to fear this change, this loss of life, a little more each year.  I have spent years living in places where the variation in temperature does not swing it's pendulum as extremely as it does here.  To be honest though, at least then, I craved winter.  I craved the hibernation that never came.  But as we stand on the doorstep of winter's silences, life laid dormant, I am holding, fists clenched, at least for the next few weeks as I adjust to the internal drive to be outside and the psychological resistance to bone chilling cold, on to the vibrant memory of the glory days of Spring, Summer and Fall.

Last summer I spent some amount of time culling flowers from the earth and pressing them between pages of absorbent paper and cardboard lashed together with cotton straps.  As of this week the last of the flowers in our garden have given way to crumpled vestiges of their former selves.  It was the Black-Eyed Susan's and the flowers of bolted Parsley that held out the longest, but now they hang slack leafed and wilted, waiting their turn to return to the soil below.  I have to continually remind myself that flowers, by their very nature, bloom so that they may reproduce.  Their dying is also an act of re-seeding.  Dried flowers stand sentinel on their stalks as the wind picks up their seeds and scatters them near and far to grow anew.   Surrounded by these images of life snuffed out, waiting for new growth and having spent a little too much time recently reading depressing articles on climate change, I find myself compelled to find a way to hold on to the beauty that was last season.

I have slipped the straps off of my flower press and sorted through the flowers found in fields, purchased at the farmer's market and grown in my own back yard.  There are many.  Some have held fast to their colors, others have faded.  Some are hearty and their petals strong, while others crumple at my touch.  I know the names of many, but others are strange beauties that intrigue me and I long to know better.  Thus begins a conversation whispered between brittle leaves and lingering needles.  I stare at these fragile lives quieted by my press and the passage of time.  They are not as vibrant as they were a few short months ago when they stood in full feather on their stalks en plein air, but they are here before me.  Their shape has changed, but they still speak volumes in color and contour. I have meditated on their petals and leaves, pistils and stamen and found stories echoing loudly, longing to be told.  In response to these echoes I gathered needles and yarn, paper and glue and set to stitching conversations on to the page reflecting color and configuration.  

These are the results and I am a bit excited about them.  Sure they don't bring the actual flower back to life, but maybe they give it some new life or harness the essence of what it once was.  I have a stack of flowers waiting to tell their stories and listening to their echoes is sure to help me through these winter months.  I guess it's one way of dealing with the winter blues.  That, and dreaming about the seeds to be planted in the Spring.