Transitions began with playful experimentation. I wanted to try some new techniques: Stamping, Stenciling, and Painting. I wanted to try a new dye: Wasabi color Fiber Reactive dye by Dharma Trading Company. I wanted to play with the new art tools Kristiann Bonn had gifted me. That was in late July. My life was amid transitions: Menopause, Empty-nesting-or-not, COVID-19 pandemic, and a whole lot of career changes for me and my partner. The studio was a Haven away from all the transitions and challenges I faced in the rest of the world.
Then transition came to my studio, too. I ordered a Long Arm Quilting Machine in late August. Due to shipping and the like, I knew it would take several months to arrive, so I turned my original experiments into a series about transitions.
I spent September 2020 ice dyeing for the series, then built the tops for each piece in October and November. The central piece, Bone yard, is the only one that uses commercially dyed or printed fabrics. Part of the transition I’ve wanted to make in my art practice has been to move to using only fabrics I’ve marked myself – so eventually I will eliminate all commercially dyed or printed fabrics from my studio entirely.
I’m a way from achieving that end goal, but this series gave me the opportunity to see that it’s definitely a realistic goal should I choose to continue in that direction. One of the wonderful aspects of the transitional moments in our lives is the ability we have to catch glimpses of what we might become before we’re fully committed to the change we’ve embarked upon. Rarely do transitions propel us suddenly into a whole new world. More often, they’re gradual, with bits of the old and bits of the new mixing together along the way. You’ll find a lot of that in Transitions.
