Thoughts on an Election

Trigger warning: rape & sexual assault, racism, the 2016 election.

Dearest friends,

My heart is heavy.

These past days have been difficult and frightening for many people in the United States, myself included. Many people I follow on social media are calling for a wait-and-see attitude about our President-elect, but at this moment, I am not able to see past the murky ground below my feet.

This particular election has been brutal for so many, in depths that I cannot begin to imagine. For my own part, it has touched a raw nerve, in its flagrant dismissal and gaslighting of violence and sexual assault.

When I was 18, I was raped by my 25-year-old housemate, and the fallout of that experience came very close to ending my life. A few years after that, while traveling internationally, I was sexually assaulted for a period of 16 hours over two nights.

The first experience, I have written about here before. The second, I have only begun to speak about in the last year.

What I learned from the first experience was that my sexuality was a weapon that could be used against me. That one man's blind entitlement was more important than my voice, my body, and my identity. I lost the friendship of almost every person I knew, all because they believed - or were not willing to fight against the idea - that I had brought that violence upon myself, simply by existing in the world as a woman. That betrayal cut as deeply as the rape itself, and its scars linger on my heart even still; in these last days and months, these scars have ignited like kerosene.

What I learned from the second was to be quiet.

I cannot be quiet anymore.

We have chosen as President a man who has shown hate and bigotry to be his highest principles.

Who promises to hurt my LGBTQ, Latinx, Black, Muslim, Jewish, women, and disabled dear ones.

Who threatens to take away their citizenship, their bodily autonomy, their marriages, their safety.

 Who has allegedly and admittedly sexually assaulted women, women like me, women who have once again been forced to learn that the only way to stay alive is to stay quiet. And for so many of our citizens - people of color, trans* and queer folks in particular - devastatingly, even quiet has been stripped away as a refuge.

Enough.

I have already seen the powerful forces of compassion at work in the last days. Voices that are calling for change, for community, for coming together in solidarity with those who are hurt and struggling. I have never used social media so much in my life. I have never texted the word 'love' so much in my life. I have never felt so passionately that we have a duty to our fellow citizens to honor and protect each other, in whatever ways we can muster.

This is all that I can think to do: to name my fear and release it among kindred hearts, where it might molt and extend its dark wings into a new kind of hope.

What now?

I have decided to continue my usual posting in the coming days and weeks. It is a conscious choice on my part, to share the beauty and love in my life in response to all this uncertainty and fear. I understand that not everyone is able to make that choice, and I respect the very real anger and hurt and fear that people are feeling right now. We all process things in our own ways, and whatever that looks like is okay.

But oh, dear friends, American and beyond: please know that I love you, and I see you, and I am here with you, tonight and always.

Much love,
Cory Ellen

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.

Rain & Wool

  

Today the rain is coming down in soft sheets. Beading up on car windows, turning the red brick to brilliant orange. Everything becomes more luminous in the rain, its symmetry more apparent, as if preserved in glass or viewed through a kaleidoscope. It's the kind of rain that will soak your bones in a few minutes flat, if you stand outside too long without a raincoat.

And so, inside, I play with wool. I had nearly forgotten about the charm of Shetland wool, its complex colors and crisp hand. How the colors blur together. How sticky and light it is, and yet how bound to the earth it feels. Its outcome is a secret for now, but I hope to start sharing some glimpses with you soon.

In the meantime, it's time to have a second cup of coffee and clean up last night's dishes, then to play Where's Waldo with the cat next door, whose sodden mug is probably lurking somewhere around my basement windows. Poor, cranky kitty. Serves you right for singing cat opera at 2 am outside my bedroom.

Happy Wednesday, friends.

<3

c.

Checking In

 

This last week, I weeded my front yard. My current projects are both secret and all-consuming - work that somehow makes me exhausted and furious and intensely fulfilled at the same time, work that has kept me frustratingly absent from this space - but in between the long days and late nights, I've been driven outside. Mostly to chisel dead grass from the cracks in the sidewalk, but also to get to know this little piece of land around our home.

So lately, the internet, the local nursery, and the neighborhood landscape have been my guide to the unfamiliar language of plants: the cost of a palm; the proper plants for shade; the name of the climbing vine that has taken over the front fence. The neighbor gives us a bag of ripe figs in a brown paper bag and they spoil on our kitchen counter in a day or two. Each day the climbing rose shakes loose a fresh carpet of petals to rot on our front step, and each night the neighbor's cat comes by and uproots our little yellow decorative cactus from its pot. It occurs to me that there is a deep and stubborn wilderness to even the most cultivated of land.

And yet, there is a satisfaction in putting things in order: trimming the hedge, sweeping the sidewalk, pulling the bindweed from the side yard. No matter what I do, entropy will continue its slow-growing sprawl across this particular patch of earth, but perhaps that's the charm of it: the constant growth and re-imagining of space; the reminder of a world untamed by human laws and structures. The opportunity to shape something beautiful from that wilderness, if only for a moment.

Happy Friday, friends.
<3
Cory

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

On Loss

These last few weeks, my heart has been full. Death as a matter of course makes us examine our own lives, to draw warm things and people nearer to our hearts. In realizing the fragility of others, we hew to patterns of comfort; we take time to stop and count each moment as a blessing. We tell ourselves that this has changed everything, though we will forget this lesson soon enough. Unthinkingly, we will return to our daily procrastinations, even while those closest to the loss cannot.

The familiar heft of that feeling sticks in my chest, though my copy of it is old and worn.

 As I stand at the outskirts of that pain, it seems unfair to feel grief when the full magnitude has only hit me in the smallest of ripples. But still, there it is: a flood of memory, and gratitude, and sadness; of anger, that the world should be upended upon two people so dearly, wonderfully kind. Of that overwhelming feeling of wanting to do, when there is nothing to be done.

And so I turn to the things that I can. To my husband, who makes tea and holds my hand without my asking. To my ratlings, who are jolly and round, and who cheer me up just by existing. To wool and words, as in my incapacity to do I can still retreat into the methodical and the generative, in the perhaps vain hope that by makeshift cloth and love, I might protect all of our hearts.

Photoshoot: Bad Religion Jacket

Standing on the floor of a crowded concert, there is this moment when the world feels as if it has turned to black and white: when the room is dark and hung with smoke, and the crowd is moving like a many-limbed animal, and the lights of the stage are so bright that you can't keep your eyes open.

 

The floor and the air and your chest pulse with sound. The air is heavy with heat. And when the right notes hit, you can feel electricity humming through your skin.

 Afterwards, you walk outside into the night air, and the cold of it shocks your lungs. Noise still echoes in your ears like radio static, and color has settled on the world again: the golden backlit hot dog stand outside the venue, the shimmy cobalt dress and spindly black heels of the girl hailing a cab, the smeared red and blue and green of sirens and traffic lights on the wet pavement.

  

And in the ebb of darkness, your calves aching from dancing and the roots of your hair damp with sweat, you nod wordlessly to the mop-headed strangers ducking out of the venue door as you wait for your friends to appear. Their eyes are black with the recognition of that same feeling you're feeling, out here in the dark:

tonight we were here, you and I, and we were cool.

Details

Photography: Cory Ellen Boberg
Model: Marisa Rockett
Bad Religion Jacket: Designed & constructed by Marisa Rockett

The Clara Gown

Every holiday season when I was little, my mom took my brother and me to see Pacific Northwest Ballet's production of The Nutcracker. We'd dress up - me in a pink polka-dotted dress, my brother in slacks and a polo - and drive to the city lit up with Christmas lights. I remember watching the dancers float across the stage from our high-up seats - Clara in her fluttery nightgown, the Nutcracker prince in his red suit, the company in their long tutus and pointe shoes - completely enthralled. 

Then, at intermission, I'd sit in women's powder room at the opera house, the air dark except for the soft yellow glow of the globe lights lining the vanity mirrors. In that moment, feeling the pinch and swish of my pretty dress, waiting to change into the footed pajamas my mom brought, I felt a parallel of things: safety and warmth, the reassuring weight of my fleece pajamas in my hands; and beyond it, another, more darkly lit room, whose features I could not yet see - but whose very existence was electric.

It was the first time I recognized a threshold between the world I knew and the world that is; the first time that I saw beauty and darkness coexisting. That experience has become a touchstone of my identity, and one that has had a huge influence on my work - and on my ballgown in particular.

So when the final runway photos of Clara were released just a few days ago, it seemed very appropriate that I should write my final thoughts about her this time of year.

Well, first off, in August I submitted her for adjudication.

And she passed!

I got to hang out and chat with all my friends & family afterwards, and share the work that had been such an immense time commitment and physical, technical, and emotional challenge. It was very weird to be in the same position that I had seen as the pinnacle of achievement for my entire career at school - this project that I had seen so many respected senior students grow and flourish from - and realize that I had reached it.

Just a few weeks later, in September, I walked the runway at our annual NYFA fashion show. This year, we featured 25 years (!!) of original ballgown designs. I think it really shows how diverse each designer's vision and aesthetic truly is. 

When I look back at this experience almost six months later, I am still totally overwhelmed and proud. Ballgown was a turning point, not only in my design work, but also in my personal life: I emerged from that workroom a more confident, dedicated, and curious person, and I think it continues to expand my boundaries of ambition and creative energy.

And on the other side - even though the process itself was lonely at times, the warmth and support of community I felt by sharing my work on this blog was incredible.

Blogging ballgown was completely unplanned. I didn't expect to have the time or mental energy to write about the experience in any sort of meaningful way, so it was more than a little surprising that blogging became an integral part of my creative process during ballgown. It was incredibly gratifying and humbling at the same time.

So thank you again, to everyone who has reached out to me - then or now - to share an experience, or tell me that you enjoy the blog, or just to say hi. It meant (and means) a great deal to me.

As a last note on community, I also wanted to mention and thank Bret Doss, the photographer who kindly gave me permission to use his beautiful photos for this post (and several others). He doesn't just have a sharp eye and talent for color & composition - he's also fun, and kind, and an all-around wonderful human being. He's contributed his talents to NYFA shows and projects for years, and if I thanked him a kabillion times for all that he does for us, it would never be enough.

Overall, I am so grateful for this experience, and I am so grateful for you. I look forward to the new challenges and experiences that the New Year will bring - and to sharing it with you all.

Happy holidays, and happy Friday.

Much love,

Cory

FO: Magnolia Jacket

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are ruled by forces of water: tidal, meteorological, glacial.

They create a sense of intimacy with our surroundings: a tree in the rain is not just a tree, but shelter; a fire in the damp is not just a fire, but safety.



They remind us of the youth of our geography: our rocky beaches and jagged peaks, carved by the methodical hands of ice and time.

They tell us of the pull of things: that the forces that draw water towards us and away are constant, unchanging, endless.




There is a feeling to all of this, a sense of balance and rightness and repetition. By this definition, there is nothing new on this earth, and there is a measure of comfort in that knowledge: the rain will come down, and the tide will turn, and water will shape the land, each without regard for anything but its own purpose.

And yet, there are small things that locate us in the landscape of this greater design: the wonder of finding something old or somehow familiar, that falls into the grain of your life and grows into something you've never experienced before. A quiet magic in everyday things.

A pair of boots, a favorite coffee cup, a blanket. A stone. A rainy day.

A jacket.

  

Details
Photography: Melody Hirsch
Jacket: Magnolia Jacket, by Cory Ellen Boberg
Dress: Vintage Hal Ferman dress, from the amazing Trove Vintage Boutique
Socks: Waving Lace Socks by Evelyn Clark
 Boots: Fluevog Adriana Nuni

Photoshoot: Melancholia Jacket

Fall is always a bittersweet time of year for me. Each year, the end of October marks the anniversary of the murder-suicide that changed the course of my life. (This year, it's eight.)



In fall, the days grow shorter, and the light of day is tempered by shadows. In some moments, it's easy to fall into darkness completely.

And yet, in marking this time, I feel a sense of comfort. Every October will be another October since the magnetism of my world shifted, just as every November ticks off the years since I refused to let that violence destroy me.



And as strange as it is, there is also comfort in recognizing others who have touched the rim of that same darkness, and chosen to turn their profound despair into beauty. My tremendously talented housemate and dear friend Melody Hirsch designed and constructed this jacket, inspired by the film Melancholia, to reach into the darkness and call it by its name.



So when she asked me to take her jacket into the woods on a hazy Thursday, and told me the story of its origin, of course I said yes.

Happy Friday.
<3
Cory