Love & Envy

Stop Looking Like a Sweater,

wool, 142 x 65 x 5cm, 2013,

Celia Pym

Dear Dying of Envy,

Oh I know how you feel!  You plod along for years, you think you are getting somewhere, you feel, 'yes, this little square of felt with threads through it is really saying things, this is it, I have made something relevant!' 

And then.  You find someone like Celia Pym and you know that you have wasted your efforts, because here is a her that is really making beautiful, poignant, elegant, expressive objects.  The kind you have always wished to make.

Well, tough cookies.  There is nothing you can do but try to bury your hurt and soldier on making things that are not as clearly distilled as these.  A better one made by someone else is just that; a better one made by someone else, and our job here it to minimize the suffering we cause, and that includes our endless, whingeing self-suffering.  So let's rewind, and re-phrase this post:


Dear Looking Out for Beauty,

Here it is, an artist and maker who is sending me over the moon with the wonderful things she has made!  I know you will love them too.  Let's run and get our needles right now, and start to stitch together the beautiful old broken and tattered scraps.  Let's not worry about it coming out good, let's just let each stich come like a drop of rain, with only gravity to guide it where to fall.  Let's just make little marks until we have daubed out a poem of plenty, an elegant pile of eraser rubbings, a page of smudges that mean that time happened here, and it was.









PS
Be sure you investigate a piece titled Blue Knitting.

Good Morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Disrobed,

 

Are you dressed yet?  I am not; I often write to you first thing, from my bed.  Yes, it is intimate, and you might blush a bit;  I do.  I write to you after a cup of coffee and when the cat has settled into a furry puddle, and while the birds are still singing outside the window.

 

I keep my legs under the covers, and set the computer on my lap- this always pinches my wrists oddly, and I look forward to saying one day "I have these problems in my wrists because I wrote letters in bed for many years."  I have a tatty old silk robe that I put on for cooler mornings, and on warmer ones, like this one, I am usually in a short knit cotton nightgown, a nightie.  Both the tatty robe and the nightie are pink.  I have been sewing my own sleepwear these days, embroidering the binding in small trailing blossoms, because it looks better than the stuff I could buy in stores.  Sometimes I dab on a rose scented perfume before I go to bed.  Think of all this la vie en rose as you read on.

 

Yesterday I heard a compelling collection of short stories on Selected Shorts-  it was from a compendium of pieces on Women in Clothes.  The last work, titled Nothing, is a gem of a poem by Lisa Robertson, and I hope you will take a few minutes to listen to it- I would rather have given you the text to read, but, just like my viscose navy floral short sleeve blouse with the lilac piping I could not find it anywhere.  The poem can be found on the audio file at 50 minutes and 50 seconds.