The Poet and Fiber Artist Goes 3 D

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on a 3 D art piece.  It began with a piece that I created for an Ash Wednesday art project at church.  I brought 3 shelves from a dresser that had been damaged during Hurricane Irma.  I brought lots of other stuff, and we created art with an Ash Wednesday theme.  For more on the original project, see this blog post.

I saw a call for art pieces for a show with the theme of home, and I thought of the piece.  A few weeks ago, I brought it home with me from the storage closet at church.  I wanted to add some pieces to it--one of the requirements for the show was that the art had to be created in the past year.

I created an element out of fabric.  I thought about gluing it to the back of the piece, but before I did that, I realized it might be interesting to pin it to the top.  In the end, I pinned it to both the top and the side.  I like the way it flutters.  It speaks of quilts to me, of quilts that have come apart but can be stitched back together again.

I decided the piece needed more threads, so I also cut apart a small piece of flannel to lay in the banana leaves.  A few years ago, after her mother's death, one of my friends gave me the spools of thread that her mother collected.  I don't want to waste good thread, but some of the spools had threads of the same color.  I will never use that much thread.  So I chose a few for the piece.

I find the image of a box of collected buttons showing up in my poetry quite often, so I pulled out our button box.  Again, I hate wasting buttons that might be useful, so I chose ones that were similar, along with some that were just interesting.

The old drawer that creates a shadowbox container is huge, so I decided I needed another vertical element.  I plucked an olive jar out of the recycling and filled it with things that said home to me:  buttons, yarn, dental floss, small spools of thread, and shells.  I also liked the images of stitching/threads, since I had decided to title the piece "Ash Wednesday in Hurricane Country."

I had to write a statement about how the piece fits with the theme.  One day, I made several drafts:

Home is more than a location on a map. You bought banana trees for a significant anniversary, and the hurricane destroyed them. We stitch our communities together with all sorts of threads to create a patchwork comforter.

Living in hurricane country comes with a constant reminder that our physical homes could be destroyed by wind and flood. But home is more than a location on a map. We keep our collections portable, our grandmothers’ button boxes, the spools collected by a friend’s mother during her lifetime.

We are a nation of dreamers and through our dreams, we are the repairers of the broken. We are a nation of quilters, the ones who can stitch and patch to create a comforter. We are the collagists who create a work of art out of all the pieces.

I ended up with a statement I really liked:

Home is more than a location on a map. We are a nation of quilters, the ones who can stitch and patch to create a comforter. We are the collagists who create a work of art out of all the pieces. We repair the broken to find the beautiful.

In the end, I decided not to submit the piece.  I'll write more about that decision tomorrow.