Thank you for being here for this quiet little conversation, taking a pause and engaging with these thoughts, words and images, creating a moment for serenity, for breath and for respite.

leaps of faith...letting grace influence the outcomes

The way my cloth paintings are created is very different in fundamental ways from the way an oil or acrylic painting is created. Oil and acrylic painters are able to make changes essentially infinitely to the colours, shapes and textures of the painting. It feels very appealing to have that much flexibility, yet the corollary must be that it is incredibly difficult to understand when the painting is complete, since there is always more opportunity to alter the painting.

My process involves painting colour and creating texture on dozens upon dozens of pieces of cloth, building up an inventory of colours and textures. When it's time to make a painting, I usually choose somewhere around 20 pieces of cloth from this inventory - this becomes what I think of as the palette for the painting.

It's a leap of faith really that these pieces of cloth will find ways to gracefully interact with each other. I don't have the option of adding more dye paint to a cloth once it becomes part of the painting. And yet somehow these pieces of cloth created across numerous dye painting sessions come together to make the surface of the cloth painting.

There is an interesting counterpoint between structure and fluidity as a painting comes into being. The structured part is the way I always begin at the top of the painting, and create each 'line' from a series of organically shaped rectangles. The fluidity comes in searching through the piles of cloth for the next piece of the painting, then cutting the long narrow freehand shape. You can see how the surface layer of the third juxtapositions painting develops in this short slideshow

Thousands of little stitches are created freehand by the movement and speed of how I move the cloth across the sewing machine bed, letting the thread flow out on to the cloth in elegant flowing lines. The stitches sewn by hand interact and integrate with what has gone before.

Working this way is a lesson in the gift of letting go of prescribed outcomes...of allowing the synergies between the cloth, and the thread, and the mark of the hand to lead me, having faith that when I remove myself as an obstacle, a graceful result unfolds. 

And as always, I want to express my gratitude to be living and working on the ancestral & unceded territories of the hən̓̓qəmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples.I honour the incredible depths of grace, courage and perseverance of Indigenous Peoples, and look to them as an example as they find their voices amidst the noise and obfuscation of colonization.

until next time,

Mardell