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Ordinary Cloth with Stella Reed

10/27/2014

2 Comments

 
RECAP: PLAY + WRITE + MIX WORKSHOPS
October 12, 2014, Zona del Sol, Santa Fe, N
M

by Bridget Green

    Ten women graced the sunny table in the front room of Yarn and Coffee.  We each arrived with our own thoughts, ranging from chaotic to calm, our own stories from the morning and years of mornings, and our own vision of what each of us might stitch into “Ordinary Cloth.”  
    With Stella Reed’s lead, we sent pens sailing and scrawling across the page in open response to single word prompts, from body parts to universal themes.  What is the eye, the mouth, or loneliness, really? The group shared selected phrases, while keeping the bold shapes of other words and stanzas mollified by the page. We shifted like this time and again, from solitary moments of reflection and sculpting words to spoken moments, listening.  Metaphors brought distinction to more nebulous thoughts, like a child capturing a monster by painting its portrait. 
    Messages created for family members were subjected to dictionary translations that flung the counsel to the winds of alphabetic fate.  Some of us cheated wildly as we skipped clusters of words away from our original text to find substitutions, creating a mishmash of plays on words we wouldn’t have been capable of doing intentionally. The coding practice reflected times in women’s lives when it’s deemed appropriate to hold the pillowcase up to shield our plans, to hold the book close to the chest, to keep secrets safe.
    We arranged works, one word, one phrase and perhaps another to put in writing on cloth. We stretched ourselves on paper to invite our imaginations to play.
    Stories poked through like bright colors of embroidery thread and created lines both raw and refined upon which to connect.  When participants were each following threads of their artistic plan, thinking half-stolen by action opened up to associations.  Free commentaries soon sprang out from behind the coyote fence of formality.  Good fences make good framework for collaboration.
    In our daily lives we do what we need to do, whether we skip five nouns away from what we aim to say or not, as in coding messages, or whether we forego eroding our topics with prattling paths, instead selecting a single word or phrase to encapsulate thoughts, as when curating pieces for the cloth.  In a workshop such as this, we as artists, daughters, mothers, captives, clowns, lovers, readers, healers, friends, and teachers, craft as we choose.  

images - Edie Tsong, Stella Reed

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Codex-Making Workshop with Israel F Haros Lopez

10/25/2014

1 Comment

 
RECAP: PLAY + WRITE + MIX WORKSHOPS
October 12, 2014, Zona del Sol, Santa Fe, N
M

by Aly Kreikemeier
   
    Walking into the art space at Zona del Sur last Sunday-- cold cement floors, neatly chopped vegetables and hummus, scattered markers and paper, and a projector looping illegible symbols against the back wall -- I had to wonder what was in store for the three hours ahead of "codex making".

    "I am a Chicano artist", Israel introduced himself, cycling through a snippet of his story: the political implications of identifying as Chicano, the barrio that raised him in L.A., how he squeaked through high school with a sub 1.5-something GPA. "They were ready to ____ me by the time I was done" he said, smiling warmly as he lifted his leg to kick dismissal into the air.
    We began the cryptic workshop with projected images of "asemic writing" -- a post-literate exploration, having no specific semantic content. Israel had me when, in just ten or so minutes, he led us into an exploration of how violently we've come to communicate with one another; the importance of making space to come back to the heart in a language where labels invite division.

Abstraction, is the doorway to the unknown. 

    We dabbled with these profound questions for just a few minutes: how can communities come together and really listen in order to communicate from the heart? How does art, whether asemic writing or abstract painting, offer a medium for desperately needed connection through truer communication? It was a dribble of curiosity, an opening from which we could launch into creating.
    The next three hours were spent drawing, painting and creating, seated together but engaging our distinct voices. We practiced poetic communication, guided into writing prompts around identity and engagement. We constructed our own enigmatic languages and symbols. We came together outside in a standing circle, whipped by the cool fall breeze, to move our bodies and bring our voices together.
       As the workshop drew to a close, we came together and wove our codices-in-progress into a collective story - reading aloud the words that wound around our pages -symbols interspersed with spattered paint, geometric markings and bursts of color before pegando them to one another in order to form a unified piece over twenty feet long.
    As we listened to each other, we folded our individual pages into a unified piece. In that space we practiced, if only for a few hours, a way of connecting and communicating that invites humanity. Laughter, freedom, and play marked an afternoon of strangers coming together, suspending cynicism and difference, in order to step into play, creativity, and connection. 

i
mages - Israel F. Haros Lopez
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Poetry Texting With Elizabeth Jacobson

10/24/2014

1 Comment

 
RECAP: PLAY + WRITE + MIX WORKSHOPS
October 9, 2014, St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art

Elizabeth Jacobson writes:
     This workshop employs phone texting to create compact, immediate and spontaneous collaborative poetry. Taking inspiration from Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions, and a few other poets, we will write our own questions and responses. Next, from the work generated by this exercise, we will partner up and use texting to create collaborative poems.
     My daughter and I were reading The Book of Questions together, and communicating about it one night via text messages.  We started to create our own lines back and forth in response to our conversation, which culminated in writing some short poems.  We used texting as the sole construction method, which we both found completely inspiring and interesting!
Workshop participant Lonnie Rankin writes:
Text a line. Get a line back. Line by line, a poem is born. Elizabeth Jacobson’s Poetry Texting workshop introduced a brilliantly innovative way to bring poetry into everyday life. Something we definitely need more of. Loved it!

Can you catch a fish in a net of sunlight?
Only when wandering the mountains at night,
stepping cautiously over streams of tears.
Where is the wall when you need nothing to look at?
What is the thing that never changes?
Wind pushing the world before it.
That place, my seed, born as a sprout.
Grass lying down beneath the doe.
                                ~ Lonnie Rankin and Elizabeth Jacobson


Who organized the committee of exits?
Is someone always trying to flee their situation?
Or are situations large birds who prefer anyplace but here?
How many sizes do birds come in anyway?
I'm not sure. You might have to ask the google bird.
I think it's flown off to find the exit ramp.
So then are all my regrets planted on this continent?
If that's so, are they then in-continent?
That's between a laugh and a sigh like leaving a body you love
    to fend for itself.
A body in motion tends to fend for itself.
                            ~
Margaret Lubalin and Joan Logghe

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