Cloth, Paper, Memory

At certain moments, I don't realize that I have forgotten who I am, until a photograph or a scrap of handwriting brings it back to me. It's amazing, the vast amount of sensory information the human brain can store: how it clings like sediment to the darkest corners of your memory, only to be shaken loose by an outline of light in chemicals, or a child's scrawl.

Which neighbor's cat was sick but her mother couldn't afford the vet. Which friend wrote letters on paper that smelled like drugstore perfume, mailed from Auckland with an international stamp at the top of the envelope. Which friend slept on her living room floor next to me, how the sun woke me up through the back door and her little red dog was always at my feet. 

I wonder, how did I forget the name of the boy who wrote that I was lovely at any angle?

How did I fall out of touch with the girls from camp who wrote me letters - Chipy and Mouse were their names, but what was mine? I still remember the sound of our voices echoing in the rafters of the mess hall, a chorus of soprano and grit in our throats, hoarse from saltwater and too much yelling. 

And there we were, yelling again, just the same.

Paper in my hands, I'm tempted to tell the ones I still know that I remember them. In my mind they are all six or twelve or seventeen, and their faces still as freckled and smiling as they were that day - that summer, that winter, that fall, that spring - of my remembering. But older now: with medical degrees and babies and fellowships, fewer braces, more scars. My old friends.

Remember when we all rolled up our sweatshirts and fell asleep on the cliff above the canal, whispering and looking at the stars? I'd ask.

Yes, they might say. I do.

<3
c.

All photographs taken at the Mood Indigo exhibit and permanent collection at Seattle Asian Art Museum. (Exhibit closing October 9th 2016.)

The Dog Is Onto Something

  

At night, the dog begs her way up onto the couch and sets her mouth on a little fleece pillow covered with cartoon Yodas. At times, her needs are straightforward: feed the dog at nine and six, let the dog out every four hours or so, make sure the dog has water before putting her to bed. Other times, her needs are more complex, almost human in their ambiguity: the time she takes to sniff around the yard, snapping dandelions off their stalks with winking teeth; the nights when she paces the floor and stops to press her nose into the crook of my thumb, only to turn away a moment later, unsatisfied. All of the unassailable, wordless needs of her tiny doggie heart.

At these moments, I wonder if her adolescent bewilderment is somewhat like my own.

Lately I've been struggling with the twin hydras of art and worth. When you make the one, does the other follow? Does the first contain the second, nested in its core like a matryoshka, or do you find yourself twisting the final doll open to find nothing inside but empty air? And at the end of it all, why does it feel like the measured worth of a job well done is as mysterious and changeable as currency?

I hope the answer is kinder than I believe it is, on my darker days. I hope that worth is something like the smack of air in your lungs on a cool spring day when you're walking across the freeway overpass and the wind starts to blow. I hope that it's something like the the feeling of dancing with your puppy on the kitchen floor while your husband is out of town, when she is looking at you with her mouth pulled up in a pointy little smile and her tongue is flapping like a ribbon and suddenly you feel so joyful you could shout.

I can only hope that much is true. I think the dog does.

<3

c.

Design Notebook: Chirality

 

In the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about chirality, a term from chemistry which I find beautifully descriptive of a different kind of symmetry. Basically, it describes the handedness of an object, which is exactly as it sounds: just as your right and left hand are mirrored duplicates of one another, an object which is chiral is mirrored about a point - making not quite a copy of itself, but rather an equal and opposite reflection of its essential features. (This is greatly simplifying the concept, but you get the idea.)

The whole thing sets me off on all sorts of weedy paths. On the human side of things, it can describe both our internal and external lives: we move through the world while embodying all sorts of polarized traits, and each of us as are distinct as fingerprints despite our shared interests, qualities, or origins. Just as the functionality of enantiomers can be wildly variable despite their shared chemical identities, we all move in paths independent of our bunkmates - even if, at our core, we are much the same.

  

All of this, in turn, connects to ideas that I encountered a few nights ago at a wonderful lecture by the artist Ann Hamilton: of clothing as the first architecture of our lives; of art as the practice of moving experience towards form; of art as a thing both personal and communal in gesture. (The lovely combinations of words are purely hers, which I hastily jotted down in my notebook as she spoke, and I'm still working through their meanings.)

So where does knitting come into all of this?

In the midst all of these Deep Thoughts, I had an idea for a piece of knitting that would create a large-scale chevron-like effect by decreasing and increasing about two axes. In my mind, it would be a normal, flat, round thing, like a cowl. But as I knitted, the fabric began to show its bias, and eventually, its chirality: a two-dimensional object that changed its nature based on its orientation in space; that was mirrored about these two points, creating geometries unknown.

So although I had ideas about what this thing would be, in the end, it was the thing itself that decided what it was. And so, wool continues to capture my imagination; in becoming itself, independent of my hand, it has the delightful ability to challenge and shape my own inner landscape.

Happy Wednesday.

<3

Cory