Sutured

I talk in my sleep these days. I think it’s all about watching and reading too much news and processing the insanity of our times. One night Jim said I sounded like a drill sergeant. I guess I am trying to fix things.

Let month I made this piece. I called it Disruptors in honor of the dialogue that is happening around disfunction and malaise. I intentionally made this chaotic and layered it with stitch and pattern.

I wasn’t happy with the results. It felt forced and cartoonish. (not that I don’t love a good cartoon) So I decided to cut it up.

The first cut is always the hardest. This practice has taught me that I can always find a way to a new solution. If I don’t it isn’t world shattering. There are too many world shattering things going on right now to worry about “ruining” a piece that I spent time on.

I decided to cut it into 1/2” and 1/4” strips so that I could stitch them back together to create a new pattern. What a pretty nest.

I looked around for more raw material so that I would have more contrasting colors to combine. I sacrificed a beast to this exploration.

I’m reading “The Women” by Kristin Hannah which is about nurses during the Vietnam war. There is a lot of talk about suturing wounds and mending broken bodies. Sewing these scraps together to create new shapes felt like triage to me. I think the world could use a battalion of nurses right now.

Sutured, 40” x 44”, Paula Kovarik, 2025

The piece undulates.

I may turn it horizontally.

Second thoughts

I think I am done with this piece. Problem is I am not sure what side is up. While I was working on it I just let the stitch tell me where to go. It is a drop cloth that I stitched together to create a surface to respond to. I turned it East, then West, then North and South. Each time responding to what I had stitched in the former session. The composition was secondary but it did seem to hold together when I took a breath to look at it.

Zooming in

Each session brought new textures. The fabric is billowy and unstable. It was difficult to tame until I let it have its way with me—letting the billow billow. I think it might be an old poplin sheet. I used a wool batting and a cotton muslin backing to keep it light. The whole piece is 35” x 37” so it was easily finished in a couple of weeks. After free-motion stitching I added a tight textural filling with hand stitching to contrast with the open negatives spaces left unstitched.

When to call it done?

I might be done with the stitching part of this piece. Just not sure which end is up. Each configuration could be the right one. Here are the four for your consideration.

Number One. This one has a large face in it.

Number Two. This one looks like a vehicle of some sort with wacky wheels.

Number Three. Here’s a happy guy in the middle with his arm upraised.

Number Four. This one turns those two wacky wheels into two wacky heads.

Where to go next?

Another piece of fabric, some thread and a little batting.

Remember: It’s Process not Product.

OK, yes, it does take some time

I came home from my residency in Japan with a bucket of ideas. And a bad cold. Despite the sniveling, snorting and hacking I was intent on making progress on works that I had started as well as new works brewing in my mind. The cold won. And I floundered, frustrated. It was another lesson in expectations vs. reality.

The first task was to preserve the work I did in Japan. Like this 18.5 foot drawing on a rice paper scroll. I fused the paper to muslin and now I am considering a wooden roller for it. It’s tricky. I am moving slowly to resolve the challenge.

I left for the residency with a piece on the wall that was unfinished. It’s a challenge in pattern and color. (see previous post) And after six weeks thinking in black and white I had to put it in the “works-in-NO-progress” pile. It just served to frustrate me rather than inspire.

I’m not really good at giving up. But the minute I did that with that piece I felt a rush of adrenaline that gave me permission to think about new things. And open up that bucket to start fresh.

When I am in a quandary about how to move forward I wrap thorns from a black locust tree with discarded thread. Or I fold fabric scraps into neat piles. It serves to slow me down so that I can clear my mind of distractions.

Giving myself permission to fail is something that takes practice. My expectations are high. I am impatient. Judgmental. And distracted. There are not enough hours in my day to accomplish what I want to do. I need to go back to the idea that it is all about the process and not about the product.

Stream of consciousness stitching on found fabric.

After folding a couple of shelves of fabric, reorganizing my tool closet and wrapping some thorns I found this piece of drop cloth that I had saved from a particularly colorful day of playing with ink. It is an amorphous, non-figurative mush of color on a used and reused scrap of sheeting. It pleases me. And challenges me to play. So that is what I am doing. Playing. Responding. Giving my time to that space of no expectations.

Winter is here. A time to notice the shortened days. A time to pay attention to the skeletons of trees.

Join Me!

You might notice that I have a number of scheduled workshops here on this journal page. I’ll be at the Santa Fe Madeline Island School of the Arts in March. The Alegre Retreat in Colorado in April. The Columbia FiberArts Guild in June. Quilting by the Lake in Geneva, NY in July. The Woodland Ridge Retreat in Menomonie, WI in August. Stitch in Durango, CO in September. And the Stitchin’ Post in Sisters, OR in September.

Treat yourself to a workshop in 2025.
We need to play with each other more!

A work in progress

I watch the road beneath my feet for inspiration as I walk. Asphalt cracks mended with black tarlike paint strokes, crabgrass breaking the surface of sidewalks, crumbling edges being eaten by the undergrowth, worms crawling across the surface in search of water and safety. My phone pics have an endless catalog of the earth pushing back and the impermanence of our effect on nature. Here’s a couple of pics I took on my morning walk of some roadway paint wearing away. The forms and line were the inspiration behind this month’s experiments.

Starting with a blank piece of cotton canvas I stitched in some of those lines I saw on the street. The wool batting beneath that top layer of canvas gave me a billowing effect. It seemed to swell the fabric. I emphasized the swelling with tight parallel lines of stitching in thread that matched the fabric color. Then I added a strong double thick line of stitching around the billowing forms.

The tightly stitched surface gave me space to add active linework, color and cartoon. I used watered down India ink to emphasize the red and yellow dotted elements. The contrast between the tight stitching and the billowing foreground added depth. This shows the ink in a wet stage. It dried lighter overall.

Several stages of layered stitch later I have detailed, complicated patterning. When I added the pale blue boxes as a new layer of information they didn’t stand out enough so I added fill and a black outline to reinforce them.

Below is a progression series showing the layering of stitch that transformed the surface of the cloth.

At this stage I am wondering just how much more I can add before the needle won’t go through the cloth properly. I may have to wait a bit to decide. I may stuff the billowing parts even more. I may do more hand stitching. All in all it was a good experiment and I may do this again on a larger piece.

It’s a study in what lies beneath.

mend

I cut things up and put them back together.

It’s process not product right? So why do I save all these “products” in my store room when I can be inspired by them to create new pieces? My work is about transformation and discovery so what stops me from using what is at hand? Nothing. So, let’s get on with it.

I started with this piece. It’s called AHA! moments. I made it in 2010. It has traveled a bit, been shown a bit and has been part of my portfolio for these past 14 years. The fabric is printed with a black and white drawing I did and then enlarged, daubed with dye and stitched. I love this piece. It’s about how the brain organizes and stores ideas.

The second piece is called Layered Chaos. I made this piece two years ago in response to the chaos we are all witnessing in the news. My goal is to merge the two.

They complement each other in a way that inspires me. Those little orange dots in the white piece are reflected in the white dots and dashes in the black piece. They are part of my stitching vocabulary.

First I had to disassemble AHA! Moments from its secondary role as a beast in my installation called the Herd. See a story about that here.

I wanted to cut holes into the dark piece that would allow the white piece to show through. Here I am using white paper to experiment with where the holes might be. I wanted them to travel across the piece in a random fashion. I wanted the final white pieces to look like patches. I soon realized that I would have to cut the white piece in half vertically to show more of the drawing on each side in the final composition.

Then I had to start cutting. It was a scary moment, I’ll have to admit. I had to keep reminding myself that it is all about the process and if the end product didn’t turn out I would still have the raw material to create something else. Here’s the result of the first cuts. The middle image shows the holes cut into the black piece and the right hand image shows what happens when I cut the white piece in half I could show more of the drawing.

Then the fun begins. My basic concept with this piece was to convey the idea of mending and transformation. Nature does that, so why can’t we? As I stitched the white pieces into the black it felt active and purposeful. Like that darkness really needed some of those new ideas.

I love all this detail. The free-motion cross-hatching gives the piece a scratchy energy that appeals to me.

Still a work in progress. Here’s where it stands for now. I’m still thinking about how much white should overtake the black. The piece measures about 65” x 65” for now.

Mending. Transformation. Our backyard is full of examples of one thing taking over others. Rebirthing new miracles. Mending what is injured.