Here’s some more photos of my Old Man Crow with some close ups of the details
wing tips & tail detail
eye, throat & shoulder detail
at home on the mantel with the Steampunk Crow H 22cm L 30cm (beak tip to edge of tail) W 9cm vintage leather, satin, velvet, lace, silk cord, silk Gütermann thread with special thanks to Louise Saxton for her antique lace around the eyes, the wing tips and underfeathers
made with so many memories bound into every knot and stitch
Ann’s crow pattern is brilliantly thought out & joining the Crow Sew Along really got my mojo working, will make the next one life size with an armature to support the weight as our Australian Ravens are big birds but my heart and hands need a rest, feeling quite lost today. The bush is calling, I need to go out for a long walk, the Waratahs are in full flight!
In October last year Old Man Crow was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer so a lot of memories have surfaced as I slowly stitch this Old Man Crow for Ann Wood’s Crow Sew Along Today a bundle of the most beautiful vintage black lace arrived on my doorstep from the wonderful textile artist Louise Saxton. These beautiful treasures will make some very fine feathers in this Filigree of Memory series of memento mori honouring my magical man.
Yesterday I caught the train into the Big Smoke to see Jane Bodnaruk’sThat was Then: This is Now and listen to her artist talk. Her interrogation of the now combined with exquisite stitching honours the past so beautifully, matching the thread colours of the finely stitched vintage tray cloths from early last century with words from the news of the Covid epidemic from 2020 to 2022. Her integrity of line and depth of thought is matchless, this body of work needs to be housed in a museum for posterity.
Jane produced this catalogue for the show documenting the nearly 50 vintage tray cloths she stitched into
back cover of the catalogue and intro below
Jane talked about her work with such ease and grace
her placement of the texts compliment the colours and forms of the the past perfectly
feeling inspired best get back to stitching my Old Man Crow!
& started gathering all the black leathers, velvets, satins. silk & lace around the place and laid them out on the studio floor
Beth’s mother’s gloves will make the wings for my crow!
have cut out the pattern and underlay for the body & am ready to start stitching it all together when I finish this post! My good friend, the amazing sculptor Bronwyn Berman has been staying 5 minutes walk up the road, looking after the equally amazing sculptor Margarita Sampson’s trio of Siamese cats while she’s seeing Paris, the Venice Biennale and more! Bronwyn and I have been hanging out, making things at the kitchen table whilst drinking copious cups of tea and catching up on life, the universe and everything. She sparked me along to finish this Blue Moon from Glennis Shibori Girl that I started stitching on the March Equinox!
Filigree of Memory I was stitched and unstitched, then stitched and unstitched repeatedly, over and over from the March Equinox to the September Equinox 2022, this is such a long strange trip … with so many memories of Old Man Crow held in each of those tiny stitches and knots, finishing it with Bronwyn’s encouragement and great sense of humour has got my mojo working again at last! Just finished reading “Earth Grief: The Journey into and Through Ecological Loss” by Stephen Harrod Buhner, a book that everyone who has a heart should read. I am hanging this next body of work which will take me the rest of my life on this quote: “The process is difficult, time-consuming, and painful. It seems that emotional acceptance can be achieved only as a consequence of fine-grained, almost filigree work with memory.” and talking of memory look at this filigree work in the Wind Eroded Caves !
Bronwyn and I climbed up to sit for a bit with the ancient stone
true friends are rare treasures, Bronwyn both encourages & challenges my work as well as making me laugh a lot with her great sense of humour! This month she became officially Dr Bronwyn Berman or Doctor Bee to me, love this photo !
To celebrate the Spring Equinox I went for a bushwalk with the mist obscuring and revealing the gateways to the liminal spaces in between, love this glimpse of Horseshoe Falls veiled in cloud.
The path of heart is never a straightforward deal!
after a month of attempting to take two variations of high blood pressure medication and feeling totally strange and disorientated I said to the GP the drugs were not my way and asked my Tai Chi teacher for a transformational counselling session. It was a dance, she circled, I side stepped for quite some time til finally I allowed her into the heart of the matter, “what have I lost besides Old Man Crow?” I closed my eyes and felt deeply, searching and realized my third eye was closed, clouded with a saddened burnt sienna red! She helped me spin that cloud in my mind’s eye until it turned into a flame, in the centre of the flame was a diamond so I drew that and stitched it into the long cloth of grief
I started stitching this beautiful length of Japanese hand woven indigo dyed hemp on February 1st, it will take the rest of my days…
On Monday with magical timing Susi Bancroft wrote “The ‘mark making of grief’ I would love to see. One mark or small step at a time and one day you will take that line for a walk – walks can be tiny steps to big leaps, side steps and take you in circles and even backwards sometimes…. “ Yesterday I took Free for a ride to the Wind Eroded Caves near Anvil Rock and made my first foray down the track down into the Blue Gum Forest from Perrys Lookdown
It's Crow Time 