Stitches

After learning out how to use the rest of my new sewing machine, I figured out how to drawing with the free-motion foot.  This was the feature that sold me on the machine to begin with and I couldn’t wait to try it.  I started by sewing swirly lines, just getting to know how it worked.  I quickly got used to the idea of  being able to move the fabric in any direction.  I found myself going from swirls to spirals to figures.  Then a dog and a house and tree.  More figures set within a contour lined landscape.  As I worked I was  reminded of the  jigsaw puzzles I’ve been doing for the past 6 months.  In another patch of fabric I sewed a woman a house a dog and a flower.  When I stopped to look at it I realized I had created a non-linear narrative of me in the studio at that moment.  I was a bit stunned, it was completely unconscious, like automatic drawing.  Then my mind kicked in and I felt the story was missing something.  I sewed a truck with a man in it (Jon was out for the evening) and a line attaching it to the woman.  There it was, the story of my first experience with my new machine told in stitches and cloth.

The little drawings looked like petroglyphs and I felt a connection to the primitive artists who told their stories on cave walls and rocks.  I was enthralled, I had touched on a primal part of myself I had never before explored.  I thought of fairy tales and universal symbols.   I knew, for the first time, the process of expressing emotion using representational art.    I imagine lots of artists figure this out as kids  reading comic books and drawing cartoons,  neither of which I ever did.  I had an art teacher who believed that, as an artist, you learned different creative processes when you needed to use them to express yourself.    Somehow drawing with the sewing machine tapped into a need within me and also gave me the means to express it.