unmakings

i feel kinda bad that my blog posts are beginning to be diary entries mixed with art desires that arent materializing-- sorry to anyone who reads these more recent posts for the lack of content and artistic fervor. i'm so frusterated with my life right now mainly because i'm not making any art, and don't feel the impulse to make that i had a few months ago. i am totally bored at work and spend most of my off time looking at/stressing about apartments, and preparing for the next working week. i don't want this to continue. i'm thinking of quitting my job and leaving the city. looking for more residency opportunities, working in my parents garage again. i know it would be kind of a regression in the eyes of some cubicle worshipping bar hopping shopper, but in terms of artmaking i think it might be a step forward. i am pretty unhappy how things are going right now.

this weekend i have to go back to santa cruz to house sit yet again. i'm really looking forward to catching my mom before she goes out of town and talking through all these feelings ive been having. im also excited to work on the quilt/map piece that i was writing about a few posts back: 

Wall piece: Maps are sewn into the places on an old quilt where it is coming apart. Brown (hose colored) sheer tulle is layered over about half of the surface, seamed in parts. There are parts where housing insulation is coming out, and parts where plaster is caked on. Panti hose coming off of the bottom, crusted and sad.

i have this old quilt that i got in olympia washington when zoe and i were on tour there perhaps even before i started college, maybe it was after. i got it at this weird big vintage flea market/warehouse thing, and ive slept with it and brought it out on foss hill and ran it through the wash so many times that it looks like it really has been in my family for centuries. there are places where the batting is coming out through holes, it reminds me of housing insulation. at one point last year i tried mending the holes with old clothes i had that were kind of special... never finished doing that but anyway the whole thing feels like a big time map, and i wanted to fill in the holes in places with paper maps, and just kind of keep building onto it with allusions to the body and to landscape and architecture and just get really rauschenbergian with it. i'm interested in the way that with time, and with use, material things (especially cloth) gets broken down and decayed and vulnerable. there is this materiality to things in the world that seems to slowly become fragile and threadbare, yet edit and build, change, as time moves on, as if objects, materials and environments have their own volition. there is also the sentimental connotations of a quilt-- a tradition of using old but memory filled clothing scraps to piece together something that holds you, comforts you, in sleep. in this way, a quilt itself is like a large map of memorys. also: i keep going back to wanting to disclose but simultaneously make foreign the process of making clothes, to highlight our increasing lack of intimacy with our material environment, due to globalized labor and specialized professions.


then, to relate these systematic and age old processes involved in clothing making to the systems that describe the larger landscape-- mapping, building, receding and changing of landscape as time runs its course. i want to make work that speaks to feeling like a tiny speck on the earth but also closely and monumentally acquaints me with the intimacy of objects. like how small you feel, when you are in an airplane and look down sometimes the ground from above looks quiltlike. and when you are in your bed, you can look down at a mini domain of which you are the ruler. and the seams that metaphorically mend fields are roads--arterial, winding, carved out by use.

In just writing this blog post i typed 'map quilt' into google images and i found a textile artist named leah evans who makes quilts after fantasy mappings of land. this is her artists' statement from her site:

"It is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests me most of all. Often people ask me for specifics about the places and symbols in my work. Most of my pieces are not consciously based on specific places. For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes. Through my research and experience I have decided that maps create more questions than they answer."

{photos: 1 & 2 gee's bend quilts from design squish, 3 rauschenberg's bed (1955) from the new york times , 4 google image search for 'farmland aerial perspective' yeilded this pretty baby, 5 leah evans' from dwell.com }