Thank you for joining me here for this quiet little conversation, taking a moment to be with these thoughts, words and images.

One of my childhood friends sent me a thumb drive recently holding the recording of an album made when we were in an advanced choral group as teenagers five decades ago. I was surprised how much of the parts I sang came in to my mind as the music played.

It was an interesting demonstration of muscle memory - the practice of performing a movement over and over until the body remembers the moves without conscious thought. We can see this phenomen when sports players practice their drills, and musicians their scales. I use it when I paint the dye on to cloth - letting my body move the marking tools across the surface in ways that create the marks I love in the colours I'm immersed in

Muscle memory can be a beautiful thing to help us play a piece of music skillfully, or play a sports game with ....and yet I have a suspicion that it can also hold us back when we aren't conscious of where we are falling in to long held patterns. I'm going to keep this in mind to see where I'm defaulting to patterns and where maybe it's time to create some new muscle memories.

The cloth paintings of the juxtapositions body of work are nearly complete. Four of five are ready for their photo shoot, with the fifth nearing the end of the machine stitching process. Once they are all complete I’ll arrange for fabrication of their custom metal frames.

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