Lately I am feeling the call of the algorithm. I suppose I have been feeling it since posting every day on the internet during my van search. So many people responded so well and helpfully to my call for help, either sending me van listings, supporting or resharing the raffle, and in some cases (unhelpfully) advising me that the ford transit connect is a stupid car to buy. Either way, it feels incredible to be in various styles of communication with many folks. If one thing is clear from my recent times of posting-a-lot-on-instagram-dot-com, it is a reaffirmation that everyone on this earth is creative and capable and doing really cool things in their little corners. So many people are and sharing as they go.

The process of making content is a practice in itself. It helps that my first hand, as Ann Hamilton would say, in art making was as a photographer from a very early age. I had a hand me down digital camera in the early 2000s that I would take all manner of artsy photographs on, teaching myself a visual language and composition. A moment of pride and affirmation on this path of becoming an artist was winning an honorable mention ribbon in the youth category in a photo show for a picture of foxglove I took at age 11.

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I also have long yearned to make films of varying lengths. I took a filmmaking class in my final year of undergrad and had a great time. With every practice of mine, I tend to struggle with the ease of entry into the craft. Much of the capital-A artwork I make involves time in a screen shop, photo editing, digital archives, and in front of a light box. Video too often requires specialized equipment that is quite sensitive. Cameras, batteries, and tripods, susceptible to heat and cold. It requires more intention to organize, often a team. Though as with any practice, there are cheaper and easy ways in, I find video in particular is most difficult for me to access, particularly as it demands time on screens which I both seek like a moth and slink back from throughout the day.

I am drawn to spinning on a drop spindle and knitting because they are small and easily interruptible tasks that I can manage in public and social spaces without diverting too much of my attention (it helps that I have been knitting since age 9 thanks to grandma Joanne). Per Women’s Work, the reason making textiles has long been relegated to women is because of how easily these tasks lend themselves to the task of childrearing, that they are: interruptible, safe around small people, and able to managed along with other domestic tasks like cooking/foraging. These qualities also provide ease of access in the public sphere (within reason, though I have been known to bring a full quilt to the function). Fiber has always been available to me in grad classes, social settings, meetings, and dates. Something to occupy the hands and quiet the mind.

Filmmaking on the other hand cannot be done casually, or at least I have struggled to strike a balance with intentionality and the rest of my life. Whole films have been made with the iPhone and I do feel like there are lots of options! I also am inviting more long term projects including some music videos for the first Ah the World album. Being in a band and making music to put out into the world is just another reason to dip into the ecosystem of the internet!

The best way I have found to make content as a practice is just to prop my phone up for 3 minutes or so as I am doing a fiber craft and then chop it up. This means I am now inviting people in to observe my morning hour of quiet handwork. I’m not sure it is meant to be shared necessarily. My most basic hope in posting on the godforsaken internet is that viewers become inspired to cultivate and consider their own routines and the craft that they take up into their lives. It is a strange relationship I am trying to navigate. Human faces and voices on camera create a one-sided experience of cathexis inherently. We are social beings. I too have to remind myself I do not know someone just because they are talking to me through the portal. It is a constantly humbling process.

If I were to influence anyone, I would only want them to know that I am not special. Craft takes intention, material, tools, and most of all knowledge. Often the knowledge piece is the first step that is missing in people’s awareness. Yet craft is deeply necessary and possible way to work in the world.

Creation vs. Consumption

I am noticing two opposing energies that are encapsulated in the inner turmoil of instagram posting. Consumption and creation are in a circling dual star relationship. My creative practice synthesizes the things I have consumed (media, living, music, archival information, research, anecdotes) into new formations and it is because I consume so much of the world that I have this heap of compost turned endlessly in my head.

Creative objects, ideas, writing, concepts then in turn are consumed as they enter back into the ether and world from whence they came. At any point in this food chain, the scale can tip into too much of either. Creation in a vacuum can quickly disconnect from the world (why the art of the rich and famous is so boring, in my opinion). On the other hand, overconsumption can create a feeling of having done something or learned something without the integration of the knowledge into one’s own hands.

Interested consumption is not bad at all. I had affirming experience a few months ago when I started to turn wood on a lathe. Because I had watched so many lathe turning videos on instagram dot com, I took to the craft so much quicker than I would have otherwise.

I hope I have cultivated a better balance in recent months. I have been watching very little TV and only the occasional film, listening more to long form audio like books rather than podcasts, and full albums rather than random playlists. I have also muscled my way out of being on instagram simply because there is too much on there and I get overwhelmed by the volume of it. Another key difference in recent months is that I no longer feel I need to escape my own life.

Always my impulse (which became muscle memory) in opening the instagram app was to connect or the be inspired. I began to ask myself, “What am I seeking on here this time?” The answer was often a feeling of humanness. How strange, like going into the mines looking for sunlight. In inviting myself into a gentle noticing of my needs I have started to meet them more head on.

If I am seeking inspiration or information, I do some research or one of my favorite hobbies which is reading Wikipedia pages and following where they link out to. I also do this IRL with my collection of encyclopedias from 1945 but it is more accessible on the phone of course. If it is connection I am seeking, I try to go into the agora (the same 3-4 places in this small town where I am sure to run into at least 5 people I know at any given time) or call someone to check in. These modes are not foolproof and I certainly spend a lot of time on instagram dot com still. It is simply a practice of noticing that I work on sharpening every day.

I am in a very open and abundant time in my life and feel called to share a lot of my work and life widely. I have been so heartened to connect with many people on instagram who are doing wonderful land and fiber work in their own little corners of the world. In essence, this is the opportunity that social media was supposed to be about. Not ads, AI slop, agitprop, and looksmaxxing. Instead, the early internet was a node of social connection, mimicking mycelial networks and spiderwebs. I often try to subvert the norms on instagram (to be a passive observer) and do so by reaching out directly to people in comments, DMs, with encouragement, questions, or trade proposals.

I also want to show off the hard work of people in my community, my friends, and loved ones. The internet of today is such a one-sided portal. I am letting you peer in at me as I write this at my desk in my studio, a view which is commonly featured on my instagram page. It is one thing to show my space and very much a different beast to invite that viewership indirectly. As with many things, consent is important to ask and honor. I am doing my best to walk the sticky line of privacy in this weird digital age.

I anticipate this continued conversation with the writers and photographers in my life as I undertake the next leg of my research on craft ecology. So much of this work is related to oral tradition, fieldwork, and conversation which requires other people to trust me and share their processes. I take this ongoing process very seriously, it extends to many realms of my work.

Until next time,

It’s been a while, and since I last wrote everything in my life that could be different is now.

The last few months have included: leaving my job at the college (rather choosing not to return in the fall), prepping and completing a big move out of a three bedroom farmhouse and into my van/studio, a journey across the plains to learn stone lithography, leaving my long-term partner, installing my first solo show Grief Object, a journey east to the mountains and beyond for various artistic collaborations, and now a series of house sits thru the summer.

All of these big changes seem destabilizing, and in some ways they are. However, mostly the feeling I am left with is a sense of enlivenment and gratitude that my life is now taking shape in the ways I have always wanted it to. I have felt deeply out of alignment for several years now, working a series of seasonal jobs and dealing with the depression and heaviness of knowing.

I draw my old house recently and a line emerged, “A house is a net that holds and traps.” Living up on a lonesome ridge as my partnership drifted further and further in different directions, I found myself caught in the furrows of my mind and unable to move into action. The housework was hard to keep up with, my own work suffered from a lack of ideas. Nothing stirred me, it was hard to remember to go outside, to drink water. I have been really ill, with emotional anguish rendered physical. My body has suffered, shrunken, and my confidence in myself and my place has been whittled away over time. Now, deeply confessional I offer a counter narrative to the assumptions one can make from social media. I have been miserable and far away. And yet—these lessons are invaluable. I am finally coming home to myself

Reader, I am learning so much about what I need from a house. And what a beautiful space I am in to discover this as I, 1) do not currently have one and 2) am starting work on a house of my very own in the fall. In many living situations previously, I mingled my work and life in a domestic space that looked like piles, clutter, and was difficult for people I have cohabitated with. I am learning a small home space with a few project baskets in combination with a large studio space is my ideal. I will seek this out to the best of my ability going forward.

In the meantime, a van as bedroom is a very tender way to live. I am outside so much because I have to be and that is a good push to be more active. It also means (and I especially felt this in Philly) that my home is so tenuous, especially when traveling which is an added layer of anxiety that most of my precious earthly possessions are in a metal box, liable to be broken into. The cost and stress of car troubles is also of stronger concern.

Being away was a balm to the mess of my life I left at home. It gave me space to breathe and begin to disentangle the past few years. Our town is like a fishbowl and news has travelled fast. I am shying from observation (while posting every day on instagram dot com, a contradiction of course), and retreating into my work and studio as a refuge. My methodical, repetitive, and tedious handwork gives me ample and productive space to wade through these depths. I am tied loosely to my routines but finding deep joy in rooting into them.

Upon my arrival from my sojourn, I had a small artist residency by form of house sitting for my ex partner. I am grateful for the time, though it was very difficult and emotionally taxing to sort through our belongings. I wrote 8 songs. I removed the top of the first bed quilt I ever made to be recomposted into a new form that I will share in the future. I emerged more settled and grateful for my newfound sense of agency.

The batting of the quilt that was made out of pure love has transformed too. I pieced a found shape quilt from a red linen dress that I got at the thrift (with a very feminine cut and shape) paired with white linen. This top was included in Grief Object, which was deinstalled at the end of June. There was a moment when rebasting where the top did not align with the full size of the quilt I made for two. As a commitment to myself and my autonomy, I trimmed the quilt to be sized for one. It is a very thick winter quilt and it will serve me and my little dog well this winter in our (presumably half-finshed) house.

In this gooey time, I have been revisiting an important book to me, the Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson. Robertson is an art historian by training but this book is a dense and explorative work of fiction. It has always met me in different pivotal moments of my life. For example, this passage:

My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.

I have been long looked for meaning and signs from the world around me. For example, an unsavory experience in south jersey told me when it was time to return home even though I did not have a strong deadline to do so.

I’ve made no plans for this summer, having just quit my job and committed to building a house. Now that everything has ruptured, I am fascinated how easily everything I have been working towards is clicking into place. I will jury a show at the Dairy Barn and be a weaver in residence there this fall. I have been offered a booth at Pawpaw Festival in exchange for a demo. I have been soliciting more quilt commissions and people are receptive (two spots are still available for the year, details below). I will go to Maine in August to help a family member with their house. I will go to Montana in September. These are the benefits of living no where and being flexible.

Of course there are trade-offs. I want to remind you that this is possible because I have no regular shower access (beyond the kindness of my dear friends and community!), no kitchen, no toilet. These are the realities of living like a rat. For now, through the summer, I am content to be challenged but I do foresee a moment when this dance becomes grueling.

Juniper has been my root through these changing times. Even at my worst I have to tend to him intently and often he takes me for walks, an arrangement that suites us both. While I can easily become engrossed in my work and lose time, Juniper gently reminds me of my body with devastating eye contact and soft nose whistles. We have worked particularly hard over the past year to build a relationship grounded in complete trust. This has included off leash walking and attending work in the studio together. I love him more than I could ever express. The day we met in Texas was fated in many ways.

My goal is to return to a more regular writing practice here, which has certainly waned over time. Already my executive function faculties are returning to me so this bodes wells.

Take care of yourself through this demanding time, summer which takes and takes and takes. Rest easy and I hope you find pockets of joy in the long days.

As it stands, I am the sole professor of art history which is offered as a minor at the school. Everyone in the art school must take at least three art history classes for their degree. And yet the best that the college has to offer me as a lowly adjunct is a pay schedule that hits once a month and 16K a year before taxes. While meanwhile the coaches of this D3 school make six figure salaries.

And yes, to anyone thinking “Obviously this is the state of academia, Aubrey!” I know!

I actually never wanted to teach in the college setting. It was never part of my life plan. Being in academia in this current moment especially feels like being moored at sea, chained to dead horse, spinning in circles. The actual moments in the classroom are fine. It is all the rest, the constant squeeze on resources, the heaping plates of my full time colleagues, the bloated administration, and the university politic. This is the wave that keeps crashing over me.

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So, thankfully I quit in the same email that I was able to recommend my dear friend for the job. A win-win, I hope.

I am leaping into the unknown.

Prior to quitting, people did not ask me, “What will you do now?” even as staying at the job would require me to endure 5 months without pay. Now that I have quit and the time runs out on the last semester, the answer of what the summer holds is still “I don’t know.”

Years ago, my grandfather (also named Aubrey) died. He left the money from the sale of his suburban home to be split among the grand kids after the back taxes and hospital bills were paid. I have a small fortune (to me) of 20K dwindling even in a high yield savings account that cannot keep up with inflation and this brewing economic crisis. It had always been a goal to let it sit and try to buy or build a house. After a year of moderate rent as prices soar around me, it’s time to stop out.

Readers, I bought an 18-ft double axle trailer. It is the foundation of my future tiny (10x18) house. In the meantime, Juniper and I will be living in the van as we build through the summer (this chihuahua of mine is a great foreman!), melting and learning and cooling off in my large air conditioned studio space in the meantime. I’ll be making ceramics for little markets throughout the summer. Who knows what else! I love to build and I love to teach, these things are important to the broader scope of my practice.

Before van and building time, I have made a class called Landshape. It is based on quilt guilds “quilt in a weekend” style workshop. Hosted on land in the humble foothills of southeast Ohio, this two day class teaches how to make a quilt from start to finish as well as how to draw inspiration and color from the land around you. Join a small cohort of other future quilters on May 23rd and 24th.

The skills taught include:

• machine sewing

• hand-quilting

• applique techniques

• composition planning

• improvisational patchwork

• mark making

• close looking

This class is ideal for someone who has a bit of machine sewing experience. All materials and equipment is provided but feel free to bring your own special fabrics/threads. I will have plant dyed fabric scraps as well as other scrounged yardage.

We will sew, drink tea, take walks, draw, and quilt from 10-5 on both days. I have attended this kind of workshop before and have been so heartened by the sudden community that forms when making and learning together. It will be an honor to facilitate that space.

Sign up by May 1st by emailing contemporary.hand@gmail.com. $100 deposit is required to save your spot (which is refundable if the class has to be postponed and/or you suddenly become unable to attend up until May 20th).

Scholarships available, as is camping if you are coming from further afoot!

I hope to see you then!

There are so many more of you! Welcome to all stick lovers and makers far and wide, I’m so glad you are here. It has been a year since I defended my masters thesis on craft ecology, a subject that I don’t think I have given proper attention to in the months since.

Craft ecology offers a framework to reduce our consumption and put material waste to use. It looks like:

• sourcing our materials communally, locally, regionally, bioregionally, continentally

• building relationships with intergenerational community

• using our scraps or sharing with those who work at scrap scale

• composting our materials when they can longer be used

• Living with attention to our watershed, soil, and seasons

• trapping plastics into useful textiles

• gleaning trash and waste streams

  

My goal is to compost my 50ish page thesis (written entirely in we/us tense) into a shorter reader and a much much longer book. I honestly haven’t opened the document since submitting it to the school (and applying to suppress the research because it is not close to ready). But now here is an excerpt for you:

We have come to use the term craft ecology to summarize the potential for craft as a practice to join a web of life relationships in ways that tend and care for our fraught ecosystems rather than further extract from them. This is what craft has historically meant.

In response to the cheapening of the materials of our lives, craft ecology, which is derived from indigenous knowledge and appalachian lifeways, may offer ways to engage outside of an economic system that remains extractive and disempowering.

Instead of participation in craft as it is colloquially understood (ie. through craft stores, plastics, buying new materials, individually creating for the sake of pleasure), craft ecology encourages the responsible foraging of materials from the margins of our built environments, the places where plants still grow despite our overgrowth. We offer different frameworks for integrating into nature, as we once belonged there and remain in our belonging, even if out of reach.

I am working on many other bits of writing that I hope will become physical with the recent rescue of a risograph printer from the former Columbus Printed Arts Center. Last week in the new van I ferried the printer to its new home at Tend Space in Chauncey under the care of my friend Len. Among the bits of writing is an old old collection of poems called ‘hopeful remnants’ that almost doesn’t feel relevant anymore, a songbook of my lyrics for my band Ah the World, a primer on craft ecology (the short text), and the following essay, a guide to the seasons. My hope is someday to offer a missive for paid subscribers that will mail monthly.

Seasonal Rhythms

This is my own guide to seasonality in practice. It is deeply informed by my particular bioregion, the humble hills of Ohio. The work begins with a deep attention, small shifts in your yard, on your walk, commute, etc. This is the process by which we become grounded to place, to season.

• March: mud.

  The year begins in March, the light changing, a new world becoming. March is the end of the hungry times, the return of green, nutrient dense “weeds” to eat, the time for planning, of taking stock after the winter months. March is mud season where I live, where the edges of what is certain become gooey. Since the weather and light change, I have found myself intuitively pulled from quilting into wool washing, spinning and carding.

• April: seed.

  April is when our seeds sprout, gentle and delicate before they are hardened off. April is for enacting plans, putting pieces into place, for sorting, building infrastructure, making and sourcing needed tools. Our rain barrels collect and fill from the abundant downpours, our things get moldy, we air them out. Rainwater is collected and stored best in our landscapes, in trees and in cat litter containers from friends for dye pots. The modern approach to water management is counter intuitive (move it away as fast as possible and flood creeks and rivers in the process).

• May-November:

  As yet to be determined! I have been noticing these rhythms in myself for a few years but each cycle of the sun makes them stronger and more certain. Sheep are shorn in May. A time for shedding and planting. Ceramics call me in the summer to work outside in the shade with the cooling mud (pieces dry so well in humid heat!).

• December: bone.

  The season of dropping temperatures, raised expectations, obligations and a hollowing.

• January: stick.

  January is the season of the willow harvest, the time when sticks are best gathered for weaving baskets, when oaks and orchards are pruned to prevent disease. I was deep in many knitting projects on the long cold nights of January this year.

• February: sap.

  The trees indicate the time for slow movement. The sap begins to flow and is tapped in a good year. The sap is boiled, wool is boiled, fabric is mordanted in preparation for a year of dyeing from plants ahead (and from the boiling our homes stay warm and humid against the drying air). Loose ends are woven in, items mended.

The work is still unfolding. This is my earthy astrology, taurus that I am. I hope to work with Len on the risograph soon and get these things in production. But, after all, there’s a season for that too. I’ll leave you with a bit more of craft ecology:

We write of the baskets made from honeysuckle vine and autumn olive, mimosa and kudzu, salvage fabrics from decades of hyper production, cordage from nettles and other roadside plants. We write of building from fallen lumber, scales of work that in community networks can eliminate waste by collaboratively sharing materials. We write of hotel sheets which are frequently thrown away in vast quantities. The relationship between craft and nature is a longstanding tradition. We are gleaners on the margins of the plastic world and fragmented ecology, weaving with the abundant materials of our regions.

There’s a beautiful song by Hello Emerson (a Columbus, OH band) that starts soft and builds to the refrain that repeats and repeats “there’s a first time for everything.” The world waits patiently for you to sink into it, noticing. Begin now,

A craft historian looking at paintings of the Baroque period would be hard pressed to find evidence of peasant-tended land. As wealth and land were consolidated in the trajectory toward colonial market capitalism, evidence of peasant life in wane, especially in painting. Farm fields would provide evidence of land tending like the peasant life of Breughel’s The Harvesters (1565), though these harvest scenes were largely left in the late Renaissance. Landscapes of the era depict vast swathes of nature rather than the patchwork of farm field and cultivated nature that made up the European landscape. As the economic and ecological character of western Europe was shifting, the attitudes about land itself and evidence of agriculture waned in favor of other painted themes.

Prior to the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Much of Europe was organized into kingdoms that were controlled by one lord and were tended and planted by peasants, tenants, and serfs. In the feudal states, a commonperson’s relationship to land was through a process of cultivation. As Craig Pearson and Judith Nasby write in A Cultivated Landscape, “It was beyond the wall gardens of the manors, palaces, and monasteries where human activity had the greatest impact on the landscape. Manors and clusters of hut dwellings for peasants and animals were embedded in widely cultivated landscapes.” Much of the land was thus tended and adjusted to fit the needs of its inhabitants. Though land was owned by the lord, land use was shared among the peasants and the lord was responsible to them. Nature is not a conglomeration of all things other than human, which is generally the western perception. Much of the “nature” of Europe even at the time was highly cultivated, resulting from the boom of agriculture in the 11-14th centuries and the desertification of European landscapes. The population boom decimated Europe’s native woodlands for firewood and changed the character of the land. The baroque period saw continued heavy use of land products like timber to support growing city centers. Painting was studied and taught in city centers too, which were supported by the unseen agricultural labor of the peasant class.

Wealth, which was consolidated throughout the Renaissance and into the Baroque period, bought one proximity from “true nature.” Peasants grow medicinal herbs and food in gardens near their homes. The garden movement was a product of rising interest in horticulture and the consolidation of wealth. This is seen in the gardens of Versailles, sprawling estates, the enclosure movement and the rising popularity of the lawn. Enclosure was a slow process of coercing peasants off their land and consolidating it into lots of hundreds of acres that were owned and controlled by lords. Where once, peasants shared common land in exchange for work, money instead of labor was becoming the primary form of exchange.

The Baroque period is known for history and genre paintings, especially those that emphasize Christian morals and middle class values. Nature became something other than itself, transmuted into a symbol rather than as a pure depiction. Painting of the period was considered to be a mimesis of the natural world. Painting, which can lean from pure representation into romantic ends, was liberated from the realm of pure reality and therefore never included the reality of the land and nature. Though nature is consistently transformed to meet human needs, Baroque painting emphasized a form of nature that was allegorical, merely a backdrop for middle and upper-class scenic depictions, historical paintings, and subjects that were dressed up for high class consumption. The work of the period is also characterized by a romantic flair for the tended landscape. Still lives and other paintings that include baskets can be a stand in for the material culture of peasant life, practice, materials and tended land in the Baroque period. By examining the materials and weave of baskets in still life painting, we may better understand the interaction between craft and land in the Baroque period.

Baskets

Baskets are found in all cultures and traditions. Prior to metalsmithing, weaving, and ceramics, baskets were used to carry water, food, and to cook in. During the Baroque period, cloth was difficult and laborious to produce. Baskets were most often used for carrying food and other items. Particularly in the Baroque period, wicker became popular for use in furniture, especially for baby cradles among the wealthy. In the 17th century, baskets were used not only of hyper function purposes (fish snares, harvest vessels) but also for more fashionable ends, as the purses or carrier bags of today. There are many different styles of basket and many materials that are able to be woven into baskets.

Wicker, a woven pattern, is divided from weaving willow. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a basket is “a vessel of wickerwork, made of plaited osiers, cane, rushes, bast, or other materials. Bast is flax, hemp, jute and similar plant fibres. Osiers or withies are specifically flexible willow twigs or branches.” The terminology can be intermingling and at times interchangeable, but this description is useful to understand basket architecture, that is how they are made and the materials they are made with. Baskets are made with many different techniques, some of which involve the counter-twisting method of making cordage and other the use the properties of straight fresh twig shoots.

Much of osier is purposefully cultivated by coppicing willow, hazel, or dogwood on a short yearly cycle. Coppicing and pollarding are similar practices of cutting a tree either to the ground or to above grazing animal head height respectively. In searching for evidence of peasant activity on the landscape, in addition to farmfields, I was searching for trees that have the knobbly appearance of pollarding, and I found two within the period.

Different trees respond better or worse to this kind of treatment. Willow is particularly receptive to this cycle of cutting. In coppicing, the tree is cut to the ground in winter, when all the energy is stored in the roots during dormancy. In spring, the tree sends its energy into producing shoots for maximal leaf production. The shoots tend to be quite long, reaching up toward the sun. These sticks are flexible and have a higher water ratio than older woodier sticks. William Bryant Logan explores this altogether lost practice in his book Sprout Lands, writing,

Not only are sprouts ‘important’ in pruning, I found, they are the reason there are any trees or shrubs at all, and they are the reason that there are any people at all. For all but the last two centuries of human history, the whole point of pruning was to produce sprouts … for when these sprouts grew up they gave people firewood, charcoal, building wood, ship timber, fence posts, slender willow whips (called withies) to tie knots with, hedges, fodder, fiber, rope, and baskets … without them, human beings would not have made it past the Neolithic.

Baskets are still made from cultivated plants, though the craft like much of creation in this current global climate is obfuscated through a series of mechanical processes that have severed the tied between hand and land wince the industrial revolution. Peasant interests and the changes the land people experienced through the long shadow of history are worth studying alongside the elevated and canon visual culture because we live in a time that calls us to pay closer attention to the land, something that we have shunned since the conglomeration of wealth and power allowed us to. As Patrick Joyce writes in Remembering Peasants, “At one time, not so long ago in the greater scheme of things, the vast majority of people on the globe were workers on the land, so that it can be said that almost all of us are in one way or another the children of peasants.” This time of ecological devastation that far beyond the scope of our imagination calls us to the land, to recall our latent ancestry and practices. The time calls for basket making.

Still Life Material

By examining the baskets found in still life paintings, a scholar interested in peasant material culture can begin to understand different craft techniques and materials, adding meaning to the interpretation of each painting and the class associations that the painter of each was interested in. Different styles, materials, and techniques of basketry offer incite into available and prized plant material and fashions of the Baroque period.

The first example is Judith Leyster’s Still Life with a Basket of Fruit (1635-40). This basket is propped up and highly staged with fresh fruit. It differs from the more extravagant still lives of the period and yet the basket is a very technical in its weave. The material is likely willow woven as wicker. The border is four rod wale which indicates the basket is made by an artisan and as such likely was expensive. Much of what we lose in an overly available material culture is the understanding that every material and item before industrialism was made by hand. This scene seems dated and as though it could be assembled from a thrift store. However, the basket at the time was likely a marker of wealth. the wicker of this basket is bright and even, suggesting that either a yellow varietal of willow was used or the willow’s bark was scraped fresh, prior to drying, resealing and weaving.

The second work, Still Life with Dead Partridge, has a rougher woven basket. The base of the basket is likely made from gathered twigs. The rim of the basket also indicates this, especially in the small, unclipped sticks and a simple three stick twist of the handle. The body of the basket appears to be made not from sticks but from reed or grasses of some kind that are twisted and woven in to the form. This baskets suggests that its construction is more utilitarian than the last which was highly ornate and stylized. The basket’s setting also indicates a lower class home with a dark stone background, dim light, and more common fruit bounty. The material of this basket point to the types of baskets found in peasant and land tending homes in the Baroque period.

The next basket in this case study is Simone del Tintore’s Still life with plants and a basket with flowers and fruits. The basket in this still life is rendered very clearly. It is likely made from pounding young green wood (perhaps hazel) and stripping the wood layer by layer. I am reading the material as such over reed or another material because of the way in which del Tinore rendered the nodes, spots on the wood where new branches form inside tree branches. Though the weave of the basket suggests more commonplace use, the laborious process it take to make this type of basket indicates a more specialized and skillful hand made this. The surroundings of the basket also suggest a sumptuousness of material wealth. The overcrowding of fruit, flowers, and vegetables indicate ample resource or, at the very least, a bountiful harvest or growing season.

The final basket of this case study expands the range and style of baskets explored so far. Roloef Koets’ Still life with Parrot features a dreamy and lighter scene overall. Pink is at the forefront of the color presentation of this painting. The basket is arranged at an angle similar to the Leyster painting. This basted similarly is made from light or debarked willow or vine in a twining weave. The embarrassment of riches, jewels of fruit, and the parrot suggest a more globalized cultural knowledge and a higher class sensibility. This basket too was likely made by an artisan and has a tight, kept woven look to it.

The study of historic basket types, fashions, and material culture can allow artists and scholars to reconnect and understand a culture that is land based in a time where land has been forgotten and abused in the name of progress. While hardly comprehensive, this study aims to provide a brief overview for further scholarship on the interactions of land and class in European culture. While this type of study is not typical in the art historical discipline, interdisciplinary may provide more insight for a discipline to more inclusive of all types of material culture, rather than sorting them by class distinction.

I (in my artist hat) will continue to make baskets in Appalachia and learn more about types and materials of baskets and where they have come from. Even in Appalachia, there are different styles of white oak basketry that can place a basket to a particular county over another based on an overhand twist. The culture of basketmaking is global and has much more material to write on for a scholar in search of a better understanding of material culture.

Works Cited

Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Kochan. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Joyce, Patrick. Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World. New York: Scribner, 2024.

Logan, William Bryant. Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Pearson, Craig, and Judith Nasby. The Cultivated Landscape: An Exploration of Art and Agriculture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780773574908

In February, I was in a car accident that totaled my vehicle, which many of you are already aware of because of instagram. I hosted a raffle to raise funds to recoup from this loss through March 1st. The raffle prize is a custom made quilt that will be made over the course of the next year. We far exceeded my goal with 309 entries! I decided to draw two names, congrats to Jason and Jaclyn!

I have made custom quilts like this before and it is very much a mode I like to work in. I am currently working with friends on 2 separate quilts for their lives, tailored to their tastes and homes. I break down the payment over the course of months to years while I am working on the quilt. This allows for accessibility and for sustained support of my practice.

The work is conversational and developing, laden with story and memory, which is always so present when working with cloth. Working together looks like phone calls and voice notes to share progress and history as a quilt emerges. I have four spots available for custom quilt work this year, please reach out if you would like to know more! I have batting for one king-sized quilt!

Often people ask me if I have any stock. At this moment (and truly maybe forever), I have no business or time to make a quilt without an intended home. Not having things at the ready to sell is antithetical to the way people buy things now, we have a wide array of objects that already exist to choose from. However, in the near distant past, a textile like a quilt would be made with deep intention by someone for her home or community. Each textile is imbued with symbolic, personal and historic meaning. It would feel like a half-practice to not include these lives of textiles into a quilt with devotion.

How lucky are we to live in a world of meaning! I am so lucky to have learned these skills, to coax dye from plants and to sew quilts of these remnant scraps. This is my inheritance—it is all of ours. These fibers are abundant for us, the world is full.

I feel lucky to have found the perfect vehicle for my work and life, the ford transit connect. In a country where cars are essentially required, this vehicle has been my home, my mobile monastic chamber and altar. I feel silly for feeling so sad about its loss, it is just a vehicle after all, something that burns carbon and travels at inconceivable speeds to any being that is not a modern human. And yet, we have these little chambers that ferry us safely (for the most part) despite the immense risk we take on every day we get behind the wheel.

I had my van for a little over 5 years. We spent 112,000 miles together, with many more ahead. It provided me shelter in Maine, Texas, Louisiana, and many other places (the only way I could have travelled as much as I have in past years). It fit a 4x8’ sheet good juuuust barely and allowed me to glean materials, haul lumber, several years of christmas trees, and a floor loom most recently.

I put care into insulating it with wool, building out the floor and bench in the back which was modular for intermitted trips as a camper or as a truck. Before the van was no longer mine, I ripped out all my work. My intention is to buy another of the same type, the silver fish will ride again.

History of the Quilt Fundraiser

Note: I have been inspired and informed by many quilters who work in solidarity with good causes. Namely Cait Nolan and Jess Bailey of Public Library Quilts.

Quilts and fundraising have been connected (in America especially) since early 19th century. Needlework was a prevalent strategy for raising funds during and after the civil war. The rise of quilting as a mode of fundraising was especially seen in social movements like temperance as a way to raise funds for charities. Quilt fundraisers were especially used during World War 1 to raise money for groups like the Red Cross.

In 1917, a Sunday School class of 9-year-olds at First Methodist Episcopal Church (University Place) now First United Methodist (Lincoln) and taught by Edith Wing made this quilt as a fundraiser for the Red Cross.

Each child was responsible for collecting signatures and embroidering a block with those names along with his or her name. The class collected 240 names and raised a total of $24 for their cause.

The popularity of quilt fundraisers gives us a view into the communal roles that quilts often play. Mara Witzlig’s wonderful essay “Quilt Language: Towards a poetics of quilting” offers a view on quilts from an art historical lens, providing a foundation toward the interpretation of quilts as art objects without ignoring their intricacies.

The summarize the long held art vs. craft divide, male critics as late as the 2000s were (and perhaps still are) looking at all manner of textile works as lesser than in the hierarchy of medium in art history (painting at the pinnacle). It wasn’t until the 90’s that people (namely scholars who are women) began to be more widely published on the subjects of disentangling the misogyny of the art world (not to mention colonialism as well). In a 1994 essay by SJ Markowitz, writes of an unnamed male art critic who, when looking at a Diné Navajo weaving, declares that to consider it art (and thus give respect to the work), he must look at it only for its formal qualities as though it was a painting. In art history, medium and technique are incredibly important to the understanding of a work, so basically the prior approach is bullocks.

Witzlig, on the other hand, writes of a way to research and write about quilts with respect to their medium. Quilts “speak” to us and we can understand them by analyzing the following:

1. Their formal qualities—purely how they look, their graphic wit, their piecing, lines shapes colors.

2. The cloth—what actual fabric makes up a quilt? Something the maker had around? Something bought specifically? A scrap given by a friend? Strips of a lost love one’s clothing? This is the soul of the work. Fabric is never just fabric. It is soft and touches the body and thus is ample ground for assigned meaning.

3. The social context—we tend to think of quilts (especially those of the 19th century that Witzlig’s essay focused on) as isolated domestic pursuits made solely in the home and for the home. However, especially in the 19th century, quilts occupied a third communal space outside of the home, connecting women together, even across many miles.

In the examples Witzlig gives, album quilts especially exhibit these principles. Album quilts show the modularity of quilting which so differs from painting. It is made in pieces, often by different people and sewn into one quilt. In some cases, it commemorated an event, was used for fundraising or as a gift to someone who was moving away from a community. Different bits of fabric in each block would be a snapshot on each maker’s life.

A quilt is something human, it is connective between people but also to the land. I am so excited to offer custom quilt work to tend the flame of this living tradition. I am also thrilled to announce a one-time quilt in a weekend workshop in June! To sign up, email contemporary.hand@gmail.com by May 15. Details below:

I write songs of the end days, of personal loss, and ecological destruction. But I am hopeful! This weekend, the debut show of my band, Ah the World, at Tend Space was so beautiful, so community filled, so freeing, so grounding, so delightful! These things too, in their small way, in combination with other actions are an antidote.

There’s this feeling I get when I am able to drop into the flow of a song, when everything is going right. I feel that out of all my mediums, I am most able to be free form and flexible in music. The feeling is so pure, like deeply uncomplicated childish play.

When I write music, the lyrics culminate over months and years from snippets and images of my life, of what I read, of images that coalesce, and stories told. These things collect over time and I usually write my songs in one short burst when I feel very strongly about something, usually in the luteal phase of my cycle.

After this weekend I am yearning to be a musician full time, to quit my day job and lean into this feeling. Instead, I will teach my three classes tomorrow and continue to cut up my life into small bite size pieces.

I am concerned in the rotation of things I do that I do not put enough time and attention into certain things. It’s hard to know where to put my energies. Tattooing pays off. Ceramics pay off (more or less). Music on the other hand notoriously is impossible to live off of, canonically, in fact. But if I look at these skills not by their live-supporting ala moneymaking potential then my priorities can restack from the bottom up.

I have so many goals for this year. I am getting so excited about them. I am trying to record my first album with the band (my first EP is already almost available! watch this space) and shoot some music videos to go along with them.

Here’s a clip from the show!

Here’s a quilt I made as part of my residency at Directangle Press many moons ago. The poetry book I printed whilst there “The Goya Lepidopterist” is still available!

The world is dark and scary but I am heartened by the conversations we are having collectively. This moment, These Times, feel like one of deep reckoning with our current shape of the world. A new world struggles into being.

I’ll leave you with the lyrics of “Ah, the World” which feel as fresh as when I wrote them two years ago.

running with a plunge of wind

as a wave comes tumbling

over sea and grasses blue

in blows a gray storm

knocking all the towers out

as I dream unknowingly

ah the world that I have known

surrendered lovingly

darkness came though it was day

a cloak pulled over sunny skies

leaves turned brown though it was spring

things are mysteriously shifting

merry mausoleums fells

paintings marble dust debris

panic met the banker’s heart

stocks and cities start sinking

do lonesome swans pray for the moon?

do wistful kids play in the street?

stacking blocks of currency

papers burn off the presses

the fearful ones they built a boat

as their books told them to do

I just hid under the quilt

hoping that it would save me too

fingers came out everywhere

pointing blame at other folks

in their hilltop fortresses

kings laughed till their heads rolled

money bought their safety once

in a world long mined to death

the emails are collecting dust

still we’re waiting on answers

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It’s been a long time. I have so many drafts (a common refrain in every intro of every draft) and struggle to finish one before I get choked up, get off theme, get too hard on myself and give up. My brain has felt scrambled by the descent into winter this year (although maybe every year?) but now firmly settled in, I am loving the dark season.

Where to begin. I just turned wood on a lathe for the first time last night after witnessing a beautiful ridge sunset and I am in love. So many of the crafts that have really stuck are ones that focus on the circle, centering. I just read Andrea Arts’ beautiful Winter Dispatch and she names her god a circle. I wholeheartedly agree.

I started adjuncting at Marietta College almost immediately after arriving home from my residency in Maine. I spent the following four months trying to compartmentalize my time according to pay, which you may imagine was difficult. My off days were spent in my studio or on a job site on the ridge which buoyed me until the winter. I am still on my season grind, many jobs many hats and little to no security in any of it.

I am now preparing two new classes for the upcoming semester. Teaching (at a college level) is something that I never envisioned for myself even as I was getting a masters degree in a topic that is often siloed into the world of academia. I know I like to teach in community, to children, in craft schools and museums. Teaching in this manner merely fell into my lap at a time when I was waffling. I am waffling still.

Fundamentally, what makes me happy is carpentry. Without my job this winter I have been channeling my woodworking brain into a beefed up fancy dog house because I lack the means to build a tiny house or other infrastructure I am dreaming of. My partner and I have gleaned all the material from our and other scrap heaps.

Having a cattle dog is the most insane choice I have ever made. We have highs and lows every day. Cedar is so smart and I know there is a very good dog in her and also she is so willful, so free thinking, so mouthy, and so aware of how to make me react to her. Raising her from a pup has been a deeply altering experience and has made me think about patience, purpose, raising small beings who push boundaries as they are learning about the world. Seeing Juniper come out of his shell and be a more playful and social dog has been so beautiful. When we found him in Texas, he had a weird haircut and was very uncomfortable around people, feet, loud noises, smoke and never played with toys. His baby dog has taught him the joy of bones and toys and sticks. They have moments of puppy love like this and it is all worth it.

While the puppy was growing, I was supervising her mornings and knitting this sweater that self-drafted, made from merino wool that I spun in the summer. I still haven’t blocked it but I hope to dye it green with nettles or some combination of overdyeing with a yellow plant and indigo (notoriously one of the hardest colors to dye). It is a 2-ply yarn and already starting to pill but I am so proud of it. I am starting to spin dark wool for a cardigan with the same fit and dreaming of a dark wool felted coat.

I also made quite a bit of work for two markets in December, one at the Canaanville Art Center and the other, a flea at Tend Space Art Center. It felt bizarre to be in the holiday making cycle again after two years away. I do find markets energizing and I love talking to folks around town who I wouldn’t otherwise meet but who usually look familiar. Since the College only pays me monthly, I have a huge gap in pay until the end of February so the markets have buoyed my income a bit.

There is a deep sense of seasonality in my work. I prefer to throw ceramics outside in the summer. The humid and hot air dries the pieces well without drying my hands too much. Washing wool seems to be a summer task after the spring shearing (though I just did a batch last week). Spinning and knitting are very much winter crafts while felting feels very spring to me. Foraging for dye plants and dyeing have their own seasons of course and quilting is lovely in the winter. Tattooing also is becoming a winter craft since people are usually not swimming or soaking (except those into cold plunging). Willow is cut in the winter and generally woven and planted in the spring.

These things root my life in connection with the earth and the cycles around me. I am so grateful (even in the hungry months we are entering when money and green things are scarce) to have the flexibility to contact these seasons not only in myself and interests but also outward as I am just one node of a large ecosystem. I am forever humbled by the vast abundance around me.

2025 Highlights:

In the interest of communicating clearly (in bullet points as per my student evaluation) here are some other things I got up to or made this year:

• bark tanned a navajo-churro sheep hide under the guidance of Callan Burton-Shore (aka )

• Sewed through 1000 yards of thread on the queen sized quilt for John and Katelyn that is almost done! and dyed with marigold and goldenrod

  

• I grew a big dye and flower garden outside our bathroom window that provided color and joy until late October

• My quilt got into the OH+5 show at the Dairy Barn which opens on January 16!

• My studio is all set up and feeling so good to be in. It is a big old classroom and very modular with all the crafts and associated tools and items! Sorted!

  

Looking Ahead!

The promise of a new year can feel disjointed with out seasonal rhythms. I think Imbolc is a better marker for when it’s time to reawaken for the year. Nevertheless, the change of the Gregorian number is a good time to make lists and intentions. These are mine!

Other things of note:

I’m playing a show with my band ah the world (our first!!) at Tend Space on January 31st. The Peel and Eleagnus are also playing. I am also teaching my seasonal class Print & Patch at the Dairy Barn starting next week on Tuesday evenings.

If you’ve read down this far, thank you! I love you! If you put a heart on this post I’ll put you in a drawing to win one of my 2026 tea towel calendars.

All my best,

What difficult and beautiful days we live in. I have just awoken from a 6 month deadened state, the natural fallout of a master’s thesis process, big move, and working a dead end office job that was both consumed by stress and ennui in the down times. My life felt so closed and I, asleep moving through it, hardly able to lift my head for a moment in recognition of the season, the sky, the wind.

Summer is a brutal time. While through our school days we have come to hope for summer as a social and free time, the increasingly brutal heat, corn sweat, and worsening water quality have come to redefine the once hopeful, languid days. This summer felt quite akin to my summer 2021, immediately post undergrad, lost and spinning out in a yet still terrible economy. I spent my days in a clay studio in Columbus, eating very little and rarely going outside, crashing into my twin bed in an artist squat at the end of the day, throughly crashing out. By the cicada season, I realized that though the warehouse doors were open, it was not enough to have spent my days working partially outside. I craved quiet exterior to the city and accompanied my friend on a trip to Kansas, part of his effort to visit every state.

There is nothing quite like wandering, time away from home, to awaken the soul. I was so lucky to spend two weeks in Maine at Watershed Ceramics as part of a group of artist residents. Prior to arriving, I was able to make several stops. I visited my friends Jason and Elizabeth who were on the precipice of a huge change, both moving and beginning grad school in Virginia. We shared a brief evening together and a delicious summer meal before I received a side quest—to deliver a precious curly cherry credenza Jason made to its new home in Connecticut.

The more I engage in the craft, residency, and folk school circuit, the more people I know all over the country. These are deep and making-based friendships, instilling a confidence that all over this land, people are thinking through their bioregional and making relationships, and that I am just one node in a web, as I have always been. Even better, any long trip can be truncated when I drop briefly into a place-based relationship cultivated by someone I know. In the case of my friends in PA, I got to see many homesteading communities and a model (25 year farm lease) for non-kinship based inheritance, ensuring that the next generation of farmers has access to land and don’t have to start from scratch. These things are possible.

At Elizabeth’s recommendation, I listened to Sheila Heti’s Motherhood on my route. I brought 200 lbs of clay with me but did not necessarily have a plan for its use. In all things I prefer to let the material guide me. Matt Wedel kindly gifted me sculpture clay mixed with local clay, and terracotta which I haven’t used since my failed high school ceramic days. The project crystalized through a question throughout Heti’s book, which is filled with indecision and the deep interrogation of motherhood, especially as an artist. One of her questions, is if she wants to brine a baby. Another is if it is possible to be both a great parent and a great artist.

I have also been struggling with this deep indecision in ways I cannot easily articulate, especially yet, especially here. It is part of a deeply personal process and while I have so much time (Heti’s narrator has 12 years on me), it is still one that weighs greatly. The project emerged through the line about brine, conjuring the ocean which is the eternal mother (or in pagan tradition, grandmother). All life emerged from the ocean. The vessel, formed from 40 pounds of terracotta, became an womb to consider these questions in a locus external to my own body. The dialogue with myself became safe and calm, rather than the deep bodily anxiety I usually experience.

While it is true that I work in very meticulous modes, I would not describe myself generally as a patient person. I intuitively medium-hop working in a series of flow states. Often as my interest in something wanes, I will change modes and resolve to return to the task later. Yes, I have ADHD. I usually throw and trim my little vessels in a day, never having to cover them or return to them once they are ready to be fired. Rarely do I work big or over multiple days. This was a huge learning curve.

On my first night at Watershed, eager to jump in, I built the vessel fast. Each time it slumped over, too wet to hold its own weight and blobbing into the wrong shape. The third time took 5 days and more patience than I thought I had. It was an exercise in extreme perseverance, the more I wanted to abandon the project all together, the more I knew I could not. I finally handled the vessel on Lionsgate, the full moon, a powerful deadline indeed.

The next part of my contemplation was the firing, chaotic and unknowable, filled with mystery and fear. Apt was the process of release after my patience in the studio. I was terrified I would open the kiln only to find rubble, especially firing from wet greenware straight to a vitrified temp, a cool 2080 degrees. Thankfully Hannah, one of the organizers, hooked me up with a candling program that ferried the vessel into rock form safely.

Meanwhile, I spent my days taking walks with new friends, swimming in the ocean, digging marine clay, doing the dishes (my penance as a work study), and wrestling with god. I am a recovering know-it-al and I am trying to meet the world with acceptance, grounded in love. Some might read god with a wrinkled brow but I mean only to speak to the infinite and unknowable ways of the world we inhabit, and the worlds beyond. I don’t believe in a particular god of sorts but rather the presence of life force, from the soil to the sea to the sky. I also don’t believe in a god as one entity who is watching me in judgement. It is just an anchor to the way my ideas are merely caught by me as they float through a creation space. Many artists feel this way, I have come to understand.

Many of the residents are thinking through similar forms of life, emerging, all queer, all interesting, all my age. The space felt like an alchemical gathering of ideas and exchange. It is hard to put into words, only pure gratitude. What does it mean to be an artist in a country that hates intellectualism, creativity, nonconformity, and life? How can we survive as the margins we inhabit are squeezed and squeezed by a technofascist oligarchy?

We come to no conclusions. I came to no answer to my specific quandary either. And yet the process can be the prayer. When we come to a situation with no apparent action, we bow in surrender, recommitting ourselves to refusal and care in the face of immense and multifaceted grief. I am currently revisiting How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell which feels, as always relevant.

My final piece of the work with the vessel is time based. I allowed myself a two hour performance with the vessel, myself, and the ocean before I filled it with brine and sealed the lid on with beeswax. Over time, I will see how the vessel holds up and if the water will evaporate or stay sealed for as long of a forever as I can imagine.

I experience summer, especially in its end like the plants, my neighbors, do. The golden rod and ironweed are desparate in their output to produce the seeds of next year. They give their all in beautiful flashes of color that are their final push before dormancy and death, the conclusion of the season announced in technicolor. It is also true that the language of the yearly die back is a dramatized version of the going back to school feeling, which even know I cannot escape. Instead of my brief stint as a graphic designer, I am teaching two classes in a town on the Ohio river. And as any Athenian can feel, the vibes of our sleepy summer town have shifted yet again for our population boom of students, like locusts descending on the town.

As the goldenrod tells us, nothing gold can stay. If townie summer were yearlong, it would not feel so special.

This is a rough draft and I am releasing myself from the need for perfect outputs. I hope it will still land somewhere in your hearts.

In summer’s end,

We have come to use the term craft ecology to summarize the potential for craft as a practice to join a web of life relationships in ways that tend and care for our fraught ecosystems rather than further extract from them. The culture of the united states is fractured, one side filled with the eco-anxiety of a dying planet, the other in denial that anything is wrong. Much of the lamentation on the one hand creates a sense of powerlessness, the idea that humans can only bring harm to their environment as everything declines and natural disasters increase. The world may be burning, but a new world is emerging from the embers.

We have been students of indigenous and appalachian knowledge and know there are other paths forward beyond the dispossession of eco-anxiety. These are cultures who have moved forward in response to overwhelming histories of exploitation. In response to the cheapening of the materials of our lives, craft ecology, which is derived from indigenous knowledge and appalachian lifeways, may offer ways to engage outside of an economic system that remains extractive and disempowering. Instead of participation in craft as it is colloquially understood (ie. through craft stores, plastics, buying new materials, individually creating for the sake of pleasure), craft ecology encourages the responsible foraging of materials from the margins of our built environments, the places where plants still grow despite our overgrowth. We offer different frameworks for integrating into nature, as we once belonged there and remain in our belonging, even if out of reach.

None of this is new. It is, in artist-weaver Jessica Green’s words, “both remembering and trailblazing.” We have lived in this region, a strange outpost of Ohio, for three years now and feel deeply impacted by its history and culture. All around us in north central Appalachia, there are people who care for and live close to the land, people who use what they have and share what they can. Moving here has felt like coming home to a sense of place. It has enlivened and deepened our relationships with the materials we use in our own craft practices and allowed us to go to the root of those materials. The soil is what all life emerges from and returns to. Even when our materials are inorganic and plastic, they enter the soil and the water in harmful ways. We offer an alternative to this never ending barrage of new things, even materials and products that are marketed as good for the planet. Every inorganic object that has ever been made still exists. There is no new product that can change our course. There is only the work of building soil and tending to our neighbors, the Anishinaabe “all my relations.”

Enough, the World is Abundant

In the west, we often think of nature as something separate from human life. Typically in Indigenous languages, there are not separate words for nature from humanity. In our very language we have severed ourselves from the web of life, seeing the world as something we move through, seek control over, are separate from, and visit on occasion. Throughout the extraction, industrialism, and subsequent deindustrialization of the united states, people’s relationship with land and soil have been severed. Local identity and economies have been abandoned in favor of big industries and corporate interests which have poisoned the land, air, and water. We have lost sight of our dependency on the top six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.

Our relationship with material prior to the last few decades of our brief human history has been defined by scarcity. Now, even as millions of tons of waste materials are deposited in landfills in the united states and elsewhere, the sense of scarcity prevails, coercing people into consuming more and amassing impressive quantities of items. In fervent collection, our objects have lost usefulness and meaningful connections in their lack of longevity. It is beyond an unsatisfactory selection of products. Our wanting has become a void that cannot be filled.

We are living in the downfall of the economy as a driver of material relationships. The market economy, its invisible hand, and those who study it are interested in scarcity as a driver of human behavior, commodifying every object and interaction through a fickle language of money. Our attitude toward material have become irreverent. This attitude has seeped into every aspect of our daily lives: how we assign value to objects and materials, our hyper-individual attitudes about work and our frantic commercialism, our urge to gather things that are plastic, poorly made, and quickly discarded.

The word economy comes from the greek works oikos meaning house or dwelling and nemein meaning to manage. Oikos is the same root of ecosystem, a system of dwellings. We are much more interested in thinking of the human home as a node in a system and of managing systems between the human and more-than-human world, rather than mere commerce between homes and corporations. Like Robin Wall Kimmerer in her writing on the serviceberry, we are seeking a reprieve from an economy where everything must be valued according to monetary worth in a capitalist system. Such a system does not privilege sustainable work and growth. It does not value the slowness of tending a successional landscape, where each year the forest shifts, one year further into recovery. It also does not value the maker or the well made thing if that person doesn’t participate in the economy of excess, either through purchase or sale. Other economies, like the economy of the serviceberry, the gift economy, offer different ways to engage with the world around us. It assures us that there is enough for all.

It is a radical mindset shift to live with less and to recognize our abundance beyond that which is manufactured. Our cities and jobs do not often allow us this perspective. It is only when we escape from the noise, the scarcity and the excess where we realize how rich the land is and how much we can offer it in a mutual relationship. All around us are wild foods and landscapes that house millions of lifeforms. We may become part of that web again, all our relations. Kimmerer writes beautifully about reciprocity, Indigenous science, and land tending in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Following her lead, we are focused on the reciprocal relationship between land and craft, the ways that people make place from the earth around them. This is a relationship as old as the hills where we write.

Land Relationships

As we trace the intertwining histories of material and land and advocate for intentional craft, we are seeking a way out of the quagmire of waste that has been dug for us. We take natural materials themselves as our guide. Gathering and processing of natural materials along with the gleaning and reuse of waste materials can be part of a vital ecosystem and local economy. These are skills which are cultivated, land intelligence and material intelligence. They are waning skills not entirely lost to us, available through intentional practices, connections to multigenerational community, conscious sourcing, reciprocal harvesting and patience.

In the west, we often think of nature as something separate from human life. Typically in Indigenous languages, there are not separate words that distinguish humanity from nature and the environment. In our western language we have severed ourselves from the web of life, seeing the world as something we move through, seek control over, extract material from, and are separated from, only visiting on occasion. Labor historian Chad Montrie writes in Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States that, “People are part of nature, but nature is outside of humankind, too; and it is the object transformed to meet our most basic needs and accomplish all manner of other ends.” This book was influential to us as it traces attitudes toward the natural realm as people were pulled into industrial jobs. Our general attitude toward nature as a separate entity from humankind, an adversary even, is a hand-me-down from the european history of landscape, enclosure, and literature.

The spread of christianity in europe stigmatized many regional folk traditions and persecuted the practitioners. Where once european peasants had access to stories and seasonal rituals that connected them to nature, christians began to regard the earth as a holding place before eternity and emphasized seeking entry to the heavenly world. This value system laid the groundwork for the removal of people from land relationships and promoted of the individual purity of the soul. Instead of tending to the land as though it were already paradise, christians relied on the promise of heavenly paradise, a return to eden for their good behavior. Nature, since the expulsion from eden, has come to be described as an adversary throughout the history of western literature.

Much of our attitudes about land today are still influenced by european attitudes of control over the environment. The lawn is the most glaring example. We, the author, were taught conformity by the politics of the suburban lawn, the eradication of weeds, the planting of invasive street trees, and the control of common spaces. All around us, even in urban and suburban environments, there are old world plants that our european ancestors brought with them as seeds to sow in a new settlement. The dandelion is a common example but there are many others: bittercress, nettle, mullein, plantain, chicory, lamb’s quarters, red clover, wood sorrel, and purslane.

Becoming land aware is something that requires intention. If we learned about the water cycle and carbon cycles in our science classes they quickly became abstract concepts. The more one learns about ecology, the more strange and scary the environments people have made in this country seem. The better one understands the relation of all systems through roots and mycelial connection, the less a lone tree in a nutrient starved yard makes sense. The less ornamental gardens and non-native grasses make sense. Our lives are rarely structured with attention to the soil that feeds us and rain that falls, even though we owe our lives to these things. We’ve whittled down our natural abundance in service of industry and parking lots. And yet, we still have so much on the margins and in the cracks of our built world. And yet, our religion is in the soil, our prayer is spinning wool, our eden is found in the woods of our backyards, a burgeoning food forest.

The goal is not to mimic a bygone nature in the spirit of nostalgia and “simpler” time. There is no going backwards, no way to put progress back into pandora’s box. We live with the myth of progress, the result of industrial extraction. There is no going back, there is no restoration to a better time. Our goal is to tend to the barren lots of real estate developers, to prevent clear cutting land, to promote building practices that are less invasive, it is to care for the young woods on former coal mine land, it is to promote clean watersheds, it is to build the top soil, to prevent erosion and fires, it is to grow and harvest materials for our craft, to use what we have, to make things intentionally, to recognize our abundance. We are working with land that has been scarred through extraction. We can cultivate a way of making home, making things, and making food that benefits the land in reciprocity. We may only move forward with what is on hand, the mess, the webs, the imperfect solutions.

When we are aware, we may recognize our surroundings with reverence, and to know the names of our more-than-human neighbors. With our hands in the soil, pruning, harvesting, and observing, we may better understand the connections of plants, the soil, and how they become materials. We may enter into relationship with that allows us to deepen into a relationship with our place in the world and offer something in return. On reciprocity, Kimmerer offers,

What would it be like, I wondered to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.

Before industrialism, people related to land and material through craft. Any object had some tether to the living world. This is still true, though the ways in which these organic compounds have been used are disguised through industrial processes. May we still give our attention to the vast web of life that brings comfort to our own.

The land provides vines and shoots to weave textiles, stems to ply into cordage, clay and stone to make vessels and tools. Wild food is abundant. Most people have not had the privilege of becoming land aware, learning the names of their neighbors, human and more-than-human. It takes guidance, a community, a cascading series of events to remind us that we are part of the ecosystem. May we feel gratitude for the abundance all around us.

Material Reverence

The objects in our lives rarely have relationship in their making to us. Most people no longer carry the skills of repair needed to maintenance well made items. Instead, our objects are designed to break and be replaced by better models. Our culture is fast moving, organized around convenience. We are coerced into a wasteful culture, it is marketed heavily to us. Trends and micro trends convince us that we are always out of fashion. Planned obsolescence keeps us in the cycle of purchase, of being obedient consumers. Craft historian Glenn Adamson writes about these issues in Fewer, Better Things, citing a lack of material intelligence as a component of our mindless consumption. Part of the way people gain material intelligence is through working with, repairing, and building objects in their lives.

Like our relationship to our environment, our relationship to material has become obfuscated through a series of mechanical and chemical processes. Our lives are dominated by plastic fabrics, materials, packaging, barriers, interiors and exteriors. Our knowledge of where these materials come from and how things are made has been greatly limited as manufacturing has been taken from the domestic sphere, slowly automated over time, and offshored to formerly colonized countries.

Material intelligence is a way to describe human knowledge of material properties and yet it does not fully describe the relationship between a person and a material. Within a material relationship, there is a process of discovery which may feel spiritual, guided by the autonomy of the material itself. In Centering: Poetry, Pottery and the Person, potter and writer MC Richards explored the relation of material to our process of discovery and spirituality. She writes, “Part of the training we enjoy is craftsman is to bring into our bodies the imagination and the will. We enact. The handcrafts stand to perpetuate the living experience of contact with natural elements—something primal, immediate, personal, material, a dialogue between our dreams and the forces of nature.” We seek a dialogue with the material and in that process, we find reverence. Our materials can be ordinary, grown in our gardens, dug from a park, cut from a downed tree, and still hold a portal for deeper understanding. Especially when our materials are made available to us by relationships with people around us, we may find a preciousness in them.

Material reverence is not hard to understand when you think of an heirloom, your daily coffee cup, a well worn sweater, a rock given to you by a lover, an object made for you by a parent. Preciousness may be imbued in common materials, not because they have monetary value but because they have soul, especially we when have direct relationships with their origins through harvest. When we harvest autumn olive shoots, not just to destroy them but to make baskets, we imbued them with spirit and help the land around the plant recover. We receive the shoots as a gift and are compelled to pass along the gift. As Kimmerer writes, “Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together. By using materials as if they were a gift, and returning that gift through worthy use, we find balance.”

All around us, there are opportunities to engage with our world with reverence. There are thickets filled with invasive vines and shoots, edible fruits, tannins and dye plants available on roadsides and in fields at no cost, if only one can recognize them. Fabrics and fibers of all kinds are available in vast quantities in second hand stores, warehouses, and landfills. Byproducts from our manufacturing and agricultural industries may also be gleaned from our waste streams. There is ample wool abandoned every year. There are trees that are downed along roadsides and building sites. There are huge, low or no-cost streams of material that lay rotting and fallow. They are hidden from us as we go about our busy lives.

We write of the baskets made from honeysuckle vine and autumn olive, mimosa and kudzu, salvage fabrics from decades of hyper production, cordage from nettles and other roadside plants. We write of building from fallen lumber, scales of work that in community networks can eliminate waste by collaboratively sharing materials. We write of hotel sheets which are frequently thrown away in vast quantities. The relationship between craft and nature is a longstanding tradition. We are gleaners on the margins of the plastic world and fragmented ecology, weaving with the abundant materials of our regions.

Chapter 2 is still cooking and will be available next week!

A few weeks ago, I went to Louisiana to meet my friends Taylor and Jordan of Wild Altar Farmstead. There’s nothing like a long drive to sort out the tangle of mystery with ample time for reflection and voice notes. Space provides a longview from the life one lives. My time was brief but compact, our days dedicated almost purely to creation, the perfect artist residency. I recorded 6 songs for an EP, did two tattoos, started a quilt to trade for a rocking chair John Wood made for me.

I seek a fresh breath to last thru the winter, a 72 degree day and a walk in the sun. I have felt so energized in my return home. The house looked foreign, almost completely different from how I remembered it for a brief moment after the long drive. Now, I am settled back into the familiar setting with a new found gratitude. Nothing gold, not even the golden light in every corner of this house, can stay.

In ancient Roman religion, genius loci refers to the spirit that protects a place, centering the site of genius not in the human mind or body but in the land itself. Rather than someone being a genius, they were instead visited by the spirit of genius. This concept has been important for my partner and I in our land tending practices.

In contemporary understandings, the phrase is used to refer to the vibes or local atmosphere. I feel this interpretation falls flat, dehumanizing landscapes as unrelated or places to move through. This also indicates the separation inherent in the very language of western cultures which consider humans separate from the rest of the living world. I feel so fortunate to travel into different worlds, to soak up the energy that lives within. It was the strange suspension at the beginning of the year before the inauguration and the subsequent rampant parade of authoritarianist insanity in the time since.

My love and I chose not to resign our lease, to no longer pay a man who owns two teslas any more of our money. It will be bittersweet to leave the house I lived in the longest in my adult life. The next step is still fuzzy though taking shape. Still in our town, more connecting to the geni here in Southeast Ohio, hoping to put the next pieces in place in spite of the current state of the country.

I am trying to be empowered by the despair. I do feel I have been in this mode for quite a while. Thankfully, I gave up on the idea of an arts career years ago and I have been working ever closer to the land since. Art and its institutions are usually deemed frivolous and first on the chopping block for those who want the safety net frayed even farther and eradication of all public good.

Art & People

I want to trouble the notion that I’ve seen on social media recently that art is stripped by authoritarian regimes because just the very act of creation is powerful. The post, while good intentioned, encourages the reader to make art even if it isn’t political because act of making is. It is true that regimes tamp down on expression but it is the work and expression of movements, of networks of people more than the individual. It is also true that at every threat of reducing the size of the government involves cutting programs that feed people, house people, provide care, provide important services for vulnerable people, provide support for research, support farmers, etc etc. all things that do good work to support art and life. Notably missing from the cuts are swelling police and military budgets which far outweigh the government spending on any aspect of the social safety net.

The idea of the inherent power of art making plays into the neoliberal hand, emphasizing individual success and the purity of expression. Art is often talked about, especially in the climate-controlled Art World in this vague manner of expression and resistance. Don’t get me wrong, art can certainly be a channel for resistance. But merely creating, and creating in a vacuum serves none but the individual. ismatu gwendolyn writes about this saying, “Art isn’t radical, people are.” Her essay The Mythical Black Artist is a rich read on Nina Simone’s politics. Worth a read or watch.

I have felt for a while that good art, responsible art is one that can somehow both respond to a current moment and join a web of pre-existing relationships that pulls seemingly disparate ideas and communities together. That is what makes Nina Simone’s work ever present, both of her time and timeless. Work for water and climate justice, abolition, food security, equitable housing can take many forms—a song, a quilt, or basket—but the work doesn't end in the making, it only begins there. The threads of radicalism that people notice throughout the history of art are not in the art itself but in the people and communities surrounding the making of the art. Art is not radical, people are.

Community & Resilience

If you’re tapped in already you know the antidote to whatever is coming is community, not in its vague form, not in a neoliberal term for populations, but in difficult, entangled, local community. We need to lean into networks that are already existing in our regions. We need to grow food collaboratively, rather than alone so that everyone doesn’t end up with a surplus of tomatoes and zucchini. Staple crops, dry beans, may we learn from the indigenous land tenders who lived here for centuries without extraction.

I am blessed at this time to live in Appalachia and much of my land politic is filtered through our peculiar Ohio lens. As Irene describes:

I’ve filtered a lot of my education about the area and the culture through its food. If you live in Athens there is a good chance you’ve been invited to a maple syrup boil, traded or been gifted seeds, bartered, fermented, foraged, had someone you just met give you fresh deer meat. What these experiences have in common is a culture of exchange, generosity, and interdependence—a way of life where value is measured not by what you own, but by what you contribute and share with others.

You can read more below:

Hei Hei

A View From The Food Truck.

January 29, 2025…

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2 years ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Irene Kim Chin Vincent

Making art is important, it is an indication that people are able to live beyond mere survival. And through it all, through genocide in Palestine and unspeakable horrors around the world and at home, the human ability to make art demonstrates a resilience and yearning for deep connection to earth and something bigger.

After three weeks of sitting on this draft, I am noticing the soft changes that bring spring home to us. I am heartened by changing light, the promise of seeds, of good trouble, of community in resistance, the exchange of gift and skill among the people I know who work so hard. I am sending light to you, dear reader and the feeling of this spring garden in Maine.

Dear reader,

I am so tired. I’m tired in the way that January in the mid-states demands of my animal body. I’ve been waking up late into the morning and trying to take it easy for the remaining break. My fervor of making has slowed and sometimes I am content just to sit. If these could be the conditions of the rest of my winter, I would be satisfied to nest, make quilts from the pieces I’ve gathered, and plan for the spring garden. Unfortunately the demands of work and bills and soon school will ruin this peaceful bubble. It’s obvious that our seasonally blind approach to work in this world does not promote a sense of actual wellbeing.

I have about three months to write and defend my thesis. So far I have a roughed out five page introduction and very little feedback. My new year’s eve tarot card pull for 2025, the chariot, indicates that this is a path I will have to walk alone. Common sense against my hopes for a better program also indicates this.

I’ve been watching Hoarders which originally aired in 2009. It’s a weird window into an aspect of gleaning and the ways that resource gathering in a nation that is highly individualistic can morph into these hazardous conditions. Hoarding is a severe symptom of scarcity culture. Often, people on the show speak of times in their lives when they didn't have what they needed, extend periods of time when they were hungry and stretched thin. While gleaning is a gathering of useful materials and implies the use of those materials, hoarding is an excess of materials to have rather than to use.

Working class hoarding and hoarding in poverty is also deeply pathologized unlike the gross wealth hoarding of America’s elite. Hoarders and shows like it also are a very thin safety net wherein exposure to the world for content allows people to access brief therapy and financial resources to clear out their houses in time to avoid eviction and other consequences of a razor thin living in America. Our media landscape has latched onto human suffering and poverty for views.

In a less severe and more specific example, fiber craft material is known to be gathered in stashes of potential energy. Certainly I have a stash of materials, some that I have coveted and moved around with for years. The founder of Swanson’s Fabrics in Massachusetts writes:

Textile and Fiber artists are the most generous people I have ever met, and yet they hoard resources like no other community. Every sewer sheepishly says (while their family rolls their eyes), “Well, I SAY I’m going use it all, but I never seem to do it!”

What we CAN do is be sure to pass those supplies on to the next person who could use them - use them to learn, use them to make something precious and incredible, or use them to decorate their own shelf for a decade, too, before handing them on again. I want to facilitate this passing-down of sewing and fiber-craft wisdom and resources. It has only been a short while that this natural cycle has been interrupted in America, and I think it never really went away.

There is a particular cheeky shame in fiber hoarding. The shame comes from the way craft is so individualized and atomized into an isolated pseudo domestic sphere. Surely there are craft groups, some of which meet in neutral places, but many of which are hosted in stores that sell new fabrics. Our gathering places are dictated by commerce and our access to public goods and places are mostly filtered through transactional relationships.

I also believe that as much as our culture has rewarded individual successes in hoarding, deep down there is an understanding that materials are meant to be shared and used in community. I also think that the hard thing about letting go is the fear of not having what you need when you need it. This has been true for me and it is an ongoing process of release and circulation. Thankfully, I have access to the Community Makerspace which has a similar craft thrift store model to Swanson’s. Materials are usually and reliably available when needed. They are held in common by way of commerce.

Thrift stores are one of the few ways that gleaned material is recirculated (well I suppose Facebook Marketplace too) through this culture which demands new blood, new plastics, new new new. I am content to live in a region of this strange country that is further removed from this shiny consumerism. Old appalachian values prioritize self reliance, a result of centuries of exploitation no doubt. Still there is something wild about these hills, the first frontier for settlers that has remained closer to the land. As the first line of my working draft reads, “We were once people of the land and we can become them again.”

Take care this slow season,

I am also filled with grief for the goldenrod neighbors who were mowed across the street. These are much different scales of grief, but they are connected.

If we cannot respect the lives of those beings closest to us, how can we make sense of the abstract terrors of the world, to understand beings we’ve never met, to stare at the largesse of climate disaster? I’m trying to think of what a hundred people milling about my yard would look like, how they’d step on sweet gum burrs and spill out into the street. The scale of losses is continually unfathomable.

What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

A large part of my thesis (which is still largely unwritten) is about material reverence, or the soul imbued in material. Today as I write this, I am babysitting a paper beater worth more than my car. I am making paper from over three years of quilt scraps:

• blue striped shirt cuffs

• remnants from Hazel’s quilt who is now almost 1!

• from the Blaney Farm quilt that is dyed with onion skins

• from Alina’s quilt dyed with indigo and Bradford pear

• projects from old, dead collaborations

• part of a rug I am making for my mom’s studio

• bits of red for dear Mary

• bits of rings from engagement quilt for my honey

• bedroom curtain remnants from above our bed

My pack rat behaviors are paying off after a patient run. For me, the material holds the soul of all these projects, the memory of progress in my work, of new connections. It also holds the labor of factory workers, designers, and sewers who have passed this material onto me. The paper to be made from this grayish purple slop will also embody those memories of the cloth. The synthetic and natural dyes gathered in the pulp mush into new beginnings.

In the dark season when my body is seeking deep rest and slowness, I am chewing and chewing on this thesis that is hard to dislodge from my head. A chunk of it has to be done by the end of the week so I hope to share sections of it soon. I hope the dark season allows you to be gentle and slow.

Through the summer, I have been chewing on a thesis proposal that I now feel petrified by. Oddly, the substack interface feels like a helpful container. My friend Diane suggested that I start out writing a paper like a letter. I can think of no better place to stir these thoughts.

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This thesis (known as “the thing I’m writing” to make it feel less scary) will examine gleaning, first in its historic and legal contexts and then expanding for a trash-rich world. The right of the poor to glean the fields after harvest is written about in the Bible and subsequently was codified in early European law. Gleaning was common practice until a court case in England in 1788 which marked the beginning of the cultural shift away from common lands and toward the privatization of everything. By the time French impressionist François Millet painted Des Glaneuses in 1857, gleaning was no longer a common practice. I much prefer the 1855 etching of the same title and subject.

The privatization of common land and resources is rampant under this type of individualist American capitalism we find ourselves. I’m not convinced it’s not rampant in other strains, I speak only from the culture I know.

The redistribution of resources is funnel through that system and the prohibition of common spaces. For example, our waste items end up in thrift stores if not in the trash which bend to a commerce system with the goal of profit. Clothing swaps, free stores, and the like are a result of specific efforts against the waste stream through intentional social networks. The necessity is for us to let go of “worth” in terms of profit (I spent $10 for this coat and I’d like to get at least $8 for it) and rather from the worth of the item in its usefulness to someone else.

Similarly, the victory garden model of suburban vegetable garden often results in 10 families each with more zucchinis than a whole neighborhood could eat. We have an atomized existence so defined by a faith in the privatization of land and resources that it is hard to see out of.

Gleaning is not an entirely lost practice, and various non-profit efforts in the States save thousands of pounds of food every year to donate folks who are food insecure. This is a wonderful continuation of the tradition. My goal in invoking gleaning and its history is to expand our definition and our ability to prevent waste.

My own interests, as you’re probably aware by now, are in textiles, wool especially, and invasive species (autumn olive and honey suckle vine). I have worked on a farm as a covert gleaner, saving onion skins and seeds for personal projects. My hope is that in any forest-clearing effort, in any farming endeavor, in any craft shop, gleaning and redistributing resources are the secondary goal. I want my job to be a gleaner.

In part, this writing project is a justification of my own practice, a way of reframing a collection to show its potential energy. The key to gleaning is in the way resources are distributed for use, relying heavily on communal networks. Beyond hoarding for an individual use, the goal is to spread the wealth of objects for use by those who need them.

A big part of this argument relies on what I have termed “material reverence.” It’s not at all an alien concept. We know it by our regard for gold, ivory, lapis lazuli etc. I’ll touch on that more in the next letter.

Meanwhile, we’re in a historic drought in the same year of historic flooding. I curated an exhibition at the Kennedy Museum of Art on this very topic. Tonight it rained for a short while and I am filled with hope.

May you have rain, may the plants grow.

My craft gleaning works in two rules, scale and parameter. What was a two inch table leg becomes shrunk down for a knife handle. With only a scrap to work with the cuts become precious and intentional. The smaller the scrap, the smaller the scale of the project.

I think even in my undergraduate art history program, I was bored by works without parameters. I specifically remember writing poorly of an installation I’d seen in the Boston MFA, a Tara Donovan work fashioned from hundreds of new styrofoam cup. This work had no material restrictions, it was simply made for the sake of filling a big space in the atrium.

I want to see work that indicates labor by honoring its material components. On a non-museum scale, I am making a variety of quilts to be sent to homes of lovely people. When I do natural dye vats, I tend to dye small amounts of fabric at a time to get better solids and because I want to limit how much I spend on new muslin. The center of this baby quilt for a new family member is dyed with Bradford pear bark and stretched as far as the little scrap I dyed would allow. The border in its wonky whimsy would not exist had I been able to simply buy more Bradford pear bark cloth. I often feel that the material holds the spirit of the work, it tells me what it wants to be. This is something I pinched from Ann Hamilton’s material spiritualism and perhaps the best thing I was left with after working for her.

I am most certain many makers follow the principle of parameters, only having so much of one material and making it work. This is also why I think rich people, trust fund babies, etc make really boring art (beyond of course, having no connection to any kind of collective struggle, purpose or sense of community).

Gleaning in its historic definition was mainly the process of gathering food from the fields after a big harvest. By the time Jean-François Millet exhibited his painting Des glaneuses, the practice was going out of fashion. At one time, however, the right to glean was codified not only into European laws for the poor but biblically protected.

Gleaning was also a very important part of early American settlement life. Woolgathering in particular was the difference between warmth or deep winter on a farm with only a few sheep. A special basket was made to collect whatever wool was lost or blew into the brush during shearing. This is the seed of Patti Smith’s Woolgathering and also where I think I will let my thesis roost. My program is highly unorganized and I often joke that this apparently 150 page document I am supposed to write in the next eight months will be a print-out of every substack I have ever written. (I had better get back to writing more consistently!)

I’m still sorting out how craft, gleaning material, ecological attention and spiritualism all intersect. I used to be a collector of material rather than a gleaner. Redistribution of gleaned things is essential to the process. I want to glean waste wool to make insulation on a one-human industrial scale to sell at low cost for those who need it. My only career hope is that I can be a toolmaker and professional gleaner. I want to drive a big truck around, gathering materials from the many piles of possibilities, as we call them at Solid Ground. Materials are not scarce, we are rich, RICH!

In the meantime, I am certain of the satisfaction of the soul that comes from saving materials and then using them. On that note, I am going to go finish this poplar table I gathered from a firewood pile, the shape and design of which is entirely determined by the wood itself.

Start a hundred projects! Take care of your people!

I have often thought of craft as a balm. As a practitioner of many different craft mediums, I can always find within them something to soothe, to chew. I work my hands to untangle problems that are intangible.

During the outbreak of the ongoing bombardment of Gaza and the distressing response this country has had to endless calls for ceasefire, I found myself scrolling and scrolling through videos of injured people, starving people of all ages, think pieces, tidbits on the history of the region, opinion essays and the backlash of them. I’ve seen institutions of art and many other sectors silence Palestinian voices and others who have spoken out. The anguish of the world has become much more visible, even to the margins of a dying empire from which I write.

I am already of the belief that our government will not protect us or any other folk of the world from violence. I know in my bones that where there is a dollar to be made and resources to exploit, the imperial-industrialist war machine will destroy everything in its path. The response I have seen from my beautiful community— consistently showing up to vigils, to city council meetings, to calls to actions—has only confirmed what I know. We must protect and care for ourselves.

If you’re here for writing on craft, welcome to the ecosystem where our craft lives. On one hand, craft can be a salve to soothe the burns of a world on fire but it cannot be a shield. I am learning to hold grief in my body in a way that does not wear me out. I want to use this immense sadness as a push toward a more just future.

I have been inactive on Substack obviously and overwhelmed beyond digital space. I’ve been having conversations with my relatives and students. I’m trying.

I am thinking now of the ways in which we can share our gifts for the benefit of change, how we can work in ways that tend to the future of our collective imagining. There is a long history of quilt as fundraiser. The International Quilt Museum provides a brief overview and Jess Bailey of Public Library Quilts has an outline on their website.

There have been such beautiful quilts brought into the world in the last six months. Most notable is a lovely crew of quilts for Palestine, organized by Tenille Fatimah. Also of note is the quilt that recently stretched across the steps of the Met Museum, implicating cultural institutions as they are arbiters and make claims to organize culture, shaping our understandings through subtle curatorial choices.

Much closer to home, the Mountain Valley Pipeline efforts have continued despite the efforts since 2018 by Appalachians Against Pipelines to defend the Land from such ecological devastation. I’ll be putting together a quilt fundraiser for their efforts, particularly bail and legal support is needed. I’ll be following the PLQ fundraiser guide. More info soon, and please reach out if you’d like to be involved.

I have so much to share, so much more to write but my mom will be disappointed if I don’t just send this draft soon.

Thanks for sticking around!

More soon,

When someone has a replication of a Van Gogh sunflower painting on their mug, when they use it for their coffee in the morning and their evening tea, they bring their own meanings onto the object. Perhaps they think fondly of the person who got it for them or the day they got it. They are reaching not only for a commercially produced object but all of the tangible stories that the object holds.

When the object is not mass-produced, something even more interesting happens. The meaning-making is not one sided, instead the maker also holds stories about the object: things they were thinking about while making, what they were listening to, where they made it, etc. The object holds a full life. This is the reciprocity of craft, a twofold relationship.

In my home, two dear ceramic items by two wonderful artists, Annie Russell and Dominique Ostuni, live together on the dresser. Dominique’s Still Life candle holder and Annie’s metamorphic vase both hold stories for both my partner and I as well as the artists who made them.

I watched a climate change film a few weeks ago that was really quite bad but one moment stuck out to me. An Indigenous man described a relationship to the earth where one presses their hand to the soil and feels it press back. This is the knowledge of reciprocity that I am pulling from, a deep and ancient knowledge which does not come from my cultural tradition. Nonetheless, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes,

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children's future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depend on it.1

I am seeking craft reciprocity in my life as a maker and owner of handmade objects. I am seeking to become indigenous to place through relations of craft and nature.

Research begins

This past week, I have fully immersed myself in the research process of the academy. I prefer the research of an artist in the field, of making gestures and digging through archives. The academic process looks like requesting 40 books from the library and its mycelial network, and of course having to read them.

It is first a review of the literature and its niche facts:

1. The Arts and Craft movement started in industrial Britain and came to America for the same reason—the realization that industry, labor, and its products do not measure up against the quality of handmade objects or “handicrafts” nor provide the quality of spirit in terms of the dignity and pride of one’s work

2. The Appalachian region was first conceived of in the early 1900s through a complicated cultural positioning of east-coast-industrial-urban against untouched-quaint-mountain-country

3. This positioning was decisive for the way the American Folk was created: it was a rewriting of the history of that region, pulling out specific values such as thrift and crafts like quilting to create a newly formed Americana identity

4. The Appalachian Craft revival (1896-1937) was photographed by Doris Ulmann among many other wealthy folks from outside of the region who used the images to show the rich “untouched” mountains and their people

5. The impulse for the craft revival employed moralist and colonial logics. Assumptions of “drunk hill people” squandering their resources, directly “losing” crafts brought much attention to the region. The resulting action was the founding of many settlement or mission schools where Appalachian people were taught their own selectively Anglo Saxon crafts. The women’s temperance movement was very vested in this endeavor as it was thought that craft raises one’s moral and communal standing.

The settlement/mission schools have become the folk schools of today and still offer us a promise of land- and place-based learning in a communal setting. I’m interested in the tension between what is offered to us by the folk school model and the way accessibility to these schools informs the way people engage with them. After all, folk schools still are subject to the failings of institutions, poor labor practices and hierarchies.

In addition to many volumes of the history of craft, I’ve been reading Fewer, Better Things by Glenn Adamson which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in material and meaning.

My research interests crawl around the gooey areas of community in its organic formation through a complex web of relations to land and all its inhabitants. There’s something interesting in a comparison to the institutions which seek to replace, revitalize, or revive these communal aesthetics. I’m applying for a grant this week which will hopefully make these things less vague.

This was long one! Thanks for following along as I try to prevent my writing from becoming overly academic, reader.

Holding center,

P.S. I am rolling out a new mending service that is just me and just creative/visible mends. Email me at contemporary.hand@gmail.com for more information!

One discussion in my contemporary art theory class has led me to a new understanding of the field I’ve chosen to roost in for a few more years, though not to any credit of the program. In one of the assigned readings, art critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing,1 the argument is that when a work of art is reproduced t…

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The obvious facts: graduate student labor is way cheaper than adjunct or professorial wages, tuition is a made up number that holds no pertinence to services rendered, paying some $725 per month with the condition they take a full course load of 18 hours is criminal. Yet here we are.

I have lived in Athens for one year, completely unsupported by the university which runs the tides of this town. Our populations swells into double or triple the number of residents every fall and everyone forced into renting has to contend with student housing rates and schedules. (Just this week our landlord demanded to know if we’d resign our lease that ends in May 2024)

My patchwork life of stitched little teaching gigs has held my head far below the poverty line and I’m afraid none of my hopes for grad school changing that reality are true. To live in a college town outside of the university’s gates has proven to be an intense challenge. Still, I’m here for a piece of paper that will allow me to teach in modes that provide more sustainable growth. With my tuition waived, I have a fervor for studio access that will launch me into new horizons. The only barrier now is the work. It comes down to my agility to navigate this system while holding true to what I believe.

I think this is where the book version of Meaning/Making will form. I will cloak substacks in overly academic wording only to whittle them back down, making a concentrate of well-researched appeals, such as: handwork is crucial for emotional processing, communal aesthetics glorify the dirty work of sustaining a community, and the folk school model presents a fascinating revival of craft and its communal logics.

There is much more to come. In the meantime, I am doing copious readings, learning new methods of making, and formulating new ways of teaching to interrupt the blasé reality of our isolation. Thankfully, I stay on the farm until October’s frost.1

A leaf is turning,

Thankfully, the farmer that I work for is sympathetic to my weariness and the heat. I have been finishing my day by lunch and starting earlier in the morning. My state of mind is sinking—I am alarmed by news of the southern wet bulb, the hottest day globally. I have felt heat of hopelessness settle into me.

I am ever so grateful at the end of the day that I can return to an artist’s house that I am taking care of. The house is lovely, the studio hallowed and the land ever so wildly tended to create a feeling of Eden. I have been reading both The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry and the Care Manifesto in the meantime and thinking about caretaking in regards to ourselves, communities, land and practice.

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Care is a forgotten thing

Care is one of the most bastardized words to enter anew into the capitalist lexicon. Some others include real, community, health, environment (eco-friendly etc), and offshoots of these concepts. Corporations have turned these words into ways to convince us to buy their products. Something especially discussed in the Care Manifesto is how the language of care (especially during the pandemic) was promoted even as public care turned apathetic and health care systems were stripped down, stretching far beyond their limits. Having just been to urgent care for a minor infection, I can attest with timeliness that the goal of the healthcare system is not care at all, rather getting patients out the door as fast as possible on whatever medication will make them be able to return to work the next day. Not a single moment of my five minute interaction with the nurse practitioner focused on prevention of the infection or care to alleviate the infection besides another pharmaceutical.

I learned recently about the difference between individualism and individuation. The former is our pathologized version of the latter. Individuation is the process by which we distinguish ourselves from our group and is always in flux between being unique and blending in. Individualism is a thought process to separate oneself entirely from our environment and communities. Within our individualist culture, we have wholly forgotten how to care for other beings. Our care is currently stretched thin over the world with NPR (also known as the Doom Voices) broadcasting lists of constant global tragedies. The deep care that we have the capacity for almost dissipates without a geologic grounding. We have forgotten how to care for large groups of people of differing politics, backgrounds and beliefs within the locales we reside in.

While walking through the trails of a 10-acre property with the artist who has been tending to this land for the last decade, our conversation comes to the cul-de-sac. There is perhaps no more distinct image of individual un-caring than the structure of suburban neighborhoods. Having grown up in that context, I can recall the strained isolation I felt among the neighbors. Seldom were there close relationships—issues were only discussed in gossip rather than from a helpful point of view.

Care is difficult. It is hard to sit with difference and discomfort to work toward resolution and understanding when the internet has given us digital space to gather a chorus. Care takes a lot of energy. In a society of burnout and obligation, it is hard to cultivate. And yet it looks like many different things: making a meal for your friends, buying someone groceries, having multigenerational community, using garden herbs for health and healing, playing with children, creating space for people to create in, or checking in with people about their pain points in the words of Esther Perel, the way they are hurting or the way they are harming others. I can’t get into all the complications of community accountability but I do firmly believe that healthy communities have a process for mending even though I am still searching for ways to get closer to this.

Caring through teaching

There are little cracks in the concrete of an uncaring society and I grow in them.

I have found over the past year that caretaking is a vital part of my creative practice. This realization became clear through talks with my artist friend which recontextualized my substitute teaching job not as a flexible yet draining side gig, but a way of caring for my city’s children in a subtle way. By sewing in front of them, I expanded their creativity and understanding of what is possible. I hope that the seeds I have planted have started to take root and the kids I’ve had in class are able to explore their creative brains by whatever means . I hope to work with children in a more direct and sustained way—indeed I already work with two amazing kids in a home school setting. My dream is to be involved in an alt school and in library programming. Well, really my dream is for the structure for public school to loosen and expand to accommodate creative practice and different ways of learning.

While the largeness of care in education is daunting, I am making classes that interrupt rigid learning structures. I am overjoyed by the cohort in my Dairy Barn class this season. All five of these students are so special and come with widely different backgrounds and interests. I feel honor to steward a space in which we can come together and explore our ideas in a creative way. In multi-week classes, I encourage my students to care for and tend to their own lineage and identity through their making practice.

I’ve been sitting on this draft since the wildfires were raging so in lieu of writing more, I’m just going to release it into the world as an apology for my absence. I’ll be starting a graduate program soon so I do believe we will soon be getting back into the thick of history again.

I hope you have a wonderful and care-filled week,