my piece, “an invitation”, hanging at the white river craft center in randolph vermont.
When smoke from the fires out west blew in to our valley here at “a bit of earth” and obscured our view across the valley I felt heartsick. That same week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its “code red” report and my despair grew.
For a few years I had an idea percolating and when the Clara Martin Center for Community Mental Health Services put out a call to artists and writers I knew I had to get busy.
This is the artists’ statement I submitted with my photos…
Name of piece, “An invitation”
A tattered Earth flag, a Paul Hawken quote sent to me by my youngest daughter and my despair around events of the summer of 2021 have converged in my sewing studio. “An invitation” has allowed me to process much of the anxiety and grief I have held in my heart lately.
Our 24/7 news cycle will eat us alive if we give it our full attention. It takes discipline to keep things in perspective, and to find antidotes to the constant stream of gloom and doom. So, I have gone in search of hope and strength to guide me through my days.
I am finding hope and strength in a diverse menu of resources…spending time outdoors, in my studio, in conversation with friends and family (both far and near), listening to podcasts, reading, meditation, movement…each of us will have our own list.
Maria Popova has written, “Cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.”
Maria’s quote, along with Paul Hawken’s, have buoyed me through this most challenging summer.
The tattered flag has been prodding my imagination for over a year. In February 2020, I wrote to activist Paul Hawken to ask for permission to use his quote in an art piece. He graciously allowed me to quote him. Prompted by Clara Martin’s Call to Artists/Writers, I pulled out a collection of plastic packaging I had stashed away and began clipping flowers to “plant” in the “dirt” of the torn flag. I used safety pins to help “mend” the flag. My husband Peter helped me to manipulate the handwritten quote sent along by my daughter Gretta Reed (a Middle School science teacher and badass environmentalist). The quilted flag hangs on a section of birch branch, scavenged from our yard up on Braintree Hill.
My hope is that viewers of my piece will be drawn in to Paul Hawken’s “invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius”.
detail of embroidered plastic flowers
more detail
if only we could hold our broken world together with safety pins…
the quote that brings me back to hope, over and over again. with gratitude to paul hawken
On Monday I wandered around the White River Craft Center where the exhibit is hanging through November 14, 2021. I was captivated by all the different pieces that I saw. Poems, watercolors, sculpture, drawings…there are so many ways that we process our feelings! I remain grateful to the good work that the Clara Martin Center does in our community.