Art with a Life of Its Own

I just discovered that this post I wrote last week never actually got posted.  Here it is now:

Getting ready for this big move has been taking up a huge percentage of my time lately.  Last week it was the beginning of the clean-out process for our house in Maine.  We had to chip away a couple of inches of ice to get access to the crawl space underneath, but we got the water turned on again and the house heated up.  The movers will come this Wednesday to remove the things we're taking with us.  Then we hope to get everything cleaned up for it to hit the market at the end of the week.  We've got our fingers crossed that by then the weather will have warmed up enough for people to start thinking how nice it would be to have a house on the lake this summer.

Though most of my time has been spent on move-related things, I am still managing to carve out a little time for my art.  I've been concentrating on my submission for the Threads of Resistance show--stitching on it while watching TV at the end of the day.

I've noticed again with this one, that each piece really takes on a life of it's own.  I don't always know where it will go when I start.  I think I explained before that this work started with four panels of words recycled from a piece I did in response to Trump's call for a border wall.  The four panels represented:

• The power of words
• Words of "welcome" and acceptance
• Words of exclusion and hate
• Groups of people targeted and excluded

Now I am stitching in even more words.  I keep a diary of words and phrases that occur to me about the current political and social situation and then add those to my quilt.  As I go along I am finding that it is a chronicle of my longing for harmony, cooperation, and working together.  I don't know how we are going to get there, but we have to keep trying.  If we're not moving forward, we're falling behind.

When I did the Trump wall piece, it was really the negativity of that idea that loomed for me and came through in the piece.  But I am an eternal optimist, always tending to a positive outlook, and it is coming though again in this work.