Red Cedar

I’m sure I had something to say today, but then we discovered the outdoor chest freezer had failed last night and I had to run to rescue the thawing meat and the extra grains and flour stored in paper bags, quickly becoming wet from the dripping. I was successful at getting it organized, though I’m left with 6 pounds of bones that didn’t fit in the other freezer. I’ll be roasting and turning them into bone broth over the next two days despite the heat. Serves me right for procrastinating on that task.

All of that ate up the work break in which I would have written this post, so I am left with no time to reflect today. There has been bedlam in my house for other reasons these last few weeks (a 2 and 4 year old have been temporarily here with their mum) and there has been a lot of distraction. I am looking forward to the family moving on next week, and the return of my quiet house. I am also looking forward to the delivery of a new freezer which I ordered as soon as I cleaned up the mess from the old one.

So instead of something brilliant, I am sharing a picture of one of my favourite places to swim. It is right across from my house and down the beach about fifty feet, the only patch of sand in our little bay with a big shady maple to sit under on a hot day. When the tide is high, I love to swim to the reef and climb on top to watch the seals. I hope to get there this afternoon, but it’s not looking likely at the moment. Fortunately, early evening high tides and warm weather are predicted through the week so there will be other opportunities.

Working Fridays in the summertime should be optional really. It’s so hard to care about spreadsheets and data analysis when I’m looking out the window at the sun glinting off the ocean. My peek-a-boo view is enough to make me want to retire early and get on with a swim (though it’s a little windy at the moment).

Today marks the very end of the hiring process I started last September, with the final person from the process starting their job today (start was delayed due to a lapsed security clearance that needed redoing). Ten months is light speed where these things are concerned – but even so, I’m glad that it’s all wrapped up now. I’m onto other projects, which are pretty nerdy (user feedback, surveys, user data, interaction modeling) and focused on creating a continuous improvement cycle for our website. It’s pretty important work, but I’m having a hard time getting excited about it because I’ve been down this road before and disappointed by a lack of digital maturity in my organization time and time again.

As I noted yesterday, things have been pretty quiet around here most of the week with Brian in the city and the small family away. It gave me a chance to relax into my studio work and catch up on my sleep. I even took a couple of days off weight workouts to give my body some deep rest which felt necessary. I did get back to the weights yesterday though because the longer I stay away, the more arthritis creeps in. The only thing keeping aches and pains away is a regular workout routine, so as much as I would love to skip it many days, it’s really not in my best interest to do so at this stage of my life.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve managed to visit family for the first time in months. Everyone in our lives is at least one vaccination in (some have had both shots now), which has relaxed interactions all round. After such a quiet winter and spring, it’s more than a little welcome. Last Sunday we saw Brian’s family (and meet the newest addition who is only 7 weeks old), the weekend before it was mine. I’m looking forward to more regular visits with our families over the next little while.

We’re hosting our first house concert at Birdsong next weekend – which is now allowed under the provincial guidelines of 50 people outdoors. We won’t have had our second shot by then, but with good practices and distancing, I’m not too worried about covid exposure. Our second shot is coming up at the end of the month, which I’ve allowed some recovery time from before we host our next concert in July (I’ve heard the second shot can be a real doozy).

As of yesterday’s post, I have finished tying up the 20+ system on my loom and now it is ready to have a warp put on. At the moment I am warping one of the other looms, so I won’t be getting to this right away, but I am confident I have the cords on and in the right order. That’s 160 cords threaded and pegged – with the promise that I will never have to tie up my treadles again (just adjust them from the back). Sometimes it seems like half of weaving is equipment maintenance!

But that is a big job done, and a lot of dyeing prep is also done – which means more weaving and actual fibre dyeing are on their way soon, as are my additional days off which start on July 2nd. I’m looking forward to having more time in the summer for textile exploration as well as just unwinding after weekends of hosting concerts. It might not be Fridays off work all summer, but Mondays are better because I’ll actually use them in the studio (as opposed to in the house, preparing for weekend hosting).

So let the summer begin! Textiles and swimming and visits and dinners and friends and a cabin on another island – it’s all just around the corner 🙂

A few years ago, not long after I moved to Gabriola, a friend of mine stood in my weaving studio and said, “You should just be glad you are not an artist.” He was reflecting on his own struggles as a painter and installation artist, somewhat bitter about his lack of recent art practice and a career that had taken off and then faltered mid-air when his ability to produce new work waned in the face of family responsibilities many years ago. As far as he could tell, making “things” was a fine hobby, but it wasn’t nearly as important or torturous as making art. Or at least that’s what came across to me. He wasn’t in a great frame of mind at the time, and so I didn’t let him know that his words landed with me as an insult. Not because I consider the work I do “art”, but because the delineation between art and craft is something I have struggled with ever since I first started putting fabrics and yarns together to make clothing and household goods, but especially since learning to weave a few years ago.

Last night, in my twice-monthly creative process group, the art versus craft distinction came up in conversation. Although I have wrestled with these terms on and off over the years, I haven’t thought about it for awhile. I make things, useful and beautiful things, and I don’t worry too much about how it gets categorized. While there was once a time when I was insecure about my “right” to make art (write, play music, experiment with textiles), I now realize that just the act of doing is what matters to me and how others regard it isn’t as important as it used to be.

Even so, I surprised myself in the conversation when I said, “It’s up to me to identify where I fall in the lineage of creation – artist, craftsperson, maker. I define that. No one else does.” Because it wasn’t just that I said it. For the first time in considering this question I felt it right down to the bottom of myself and I think that’s because of where my own process of inquiry has gone in the last few years. Which is, from making things as replicas (using a known pattern to make a piece of clothing as an example) to designing my own textiles to weave and learning more about structure, form, and colour in order to do so. Although I am taking an online course which requires the weaving of prescribed samples right now, I’ve come to realize that I’m happiest when I’m weaving something of my own design process. Weaving samples is a means to an end in terms of learning about structure, and it’s good for my learning – but I’m only interested in it as a way to expand my understanding and repertoire for projects I will go on to design later.

Some might say – well that there – is the definition of art versus craft. To go from replicating to innovating is the core of what art is. But what if I’m innovating to make fabric for a tea towel? Well, then we’re back in craft land because art, by some definitions has no end use whereas craft does and so on. Some people suggest that art evokes emotion whereas craft doesn’t – but I hardly see that as true when I think of the range of emotional responses I’ve had to so-called artisinal goods in my lifetime (I once cried over a dessert of spruce-tip ice cream, so evocative of the forest of my childhood it was).

When art versus craft comes up casually as it did in my studio a few years ago, it seems to be code for “your work isn’t good enough to be considered.” To which I ask – considered by who? Perhaps my work will never hang in a gallery, but that’s true of many people who engage in classical art such as painting or sculpture. Perhaps my work has an end-use, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t start with open inquiry or from a place of emotional resonance.

Even so, I prefer the term craftsperson because it is less loaded, less snobbish and exclusively held. It denotes exactly what I value: the honing of one’s tools and skills against the resources of the world around us. An artist does this as well, of course – and again, we collapse the separation between the two. It’s not really something I’m caught up in these days though, mostly because I’m so content in the work I’ve set out for myself lately that there is no time or energy for fretting about what people say or think outside of my studio.