Yesterday I added to this piece but felt unsatisfied with it until I envisioned the circle, which is when it really came together for me, as did the quilting design. It's called 'Both And', and I will enter it in an upcoming juried show at Coast Collective gallery called 'Peace and Conflict' - hopefully it will be among those selected. I will sew the sleeve on today and block it. It's a mandala and speaks to wholeness and how life holds both peace and conflict - external and internal - and somehow we must navigate through it all. I was also thinking about how it's interesting that the crosshairs of a gun have a round view with four quadrants (not that I've ever actually looked through one, but I've seen movies :) That use for this symbol seems counter intuitive, yet destruction is also part of life. I have been to the art show in Sidney recently, where I saw about ten fibre pieces as well as the hundreds of paintings, sculptures and other mediums there. And some other exciting news - I've bought a piece of fibre art - one of Jude Hill's spirit cloths, which I'm excited to see and touch in person, as I really love her work. I notice I have a different feeling for those pieces of mine that I have handstitched and I am going to gather materials to hand sew while on an upcoming brief trip. You can see Jude's work here:
http://www.spiritcloth.typepad.com/
The weather today seemed suitable for the theme of the opening of the 'Peace and Conflict' show at Coast Collective Gallery - back and forth from sunshine to pouring rain all day, as you can see in the photos that I took from inside the gallery, of the rainbow and rain running down the window pane. I met three local fibre artists as well as talked to friends, and also got out to the Sooke Harbour House gallery to see a fibre show there. I took the photo of the nest imagining representing it in stitch.
