A week ago today (meaning Thursday, May 26), I awoke with the strongest feeling of wanting to bring some silk with me to Iceland. Silk? Really? Silk and not wool? Silk in addition to wool? I had had the question of which materials to bring on my mind for weeks, but had been too busy with other matters to get to the studio or art supply store and start assembling them. With my flight on Saturday, I basically now had to gather and go. Warned by the Icelandic Textile Centre that options local to Blönduós were virtually nil, I expected to bring with me the materials I planned to work with.
This was a little tricky, since I was not at all sure of the work that I would do. There were obvious compromises: bring drawing materials, since drawing can be preliminary to any project. Perhaps I would just draw and work up pieces in textiles when I got home in July. But that seemed wrong, a missed opportunity. Even so, the drawing materials went into the bag and I am glad of them now as I think through dimensions, scale, superimpositions. The next obvious choice: bring wool. Everyone thinks of wool in connection with Iceland. And I loved wool: I had been using woollen and wool/cashmere cloth as the ground for my maps for the past six years. But even fine-milled Italian broadcloth is heavy and bulky – and of course expensive. It made no sense to buy and carry lengths of wool when I wasn’t yet sure what I’d do with it.
Plus, since I tend to choose my background colour and the work’s size very much in relation the the specifics of the project at hand, I didn’t want to pre-emptively select. I had no feel in my body as yet for Iceland, so I couldn’t find a way to feel into the materials I would want to represent it.
Even so, waking up last Thursday morning, what was calling to me was the idea of multiple yards of a heavy silk charmeuse, ivory or off-white. I awoke longing for its multiple yards’ worth of its drape, density and lustre. Really? Such a luxurious sophisticated fibre to take to so ourdoorsy, naturalized a scape, but I have learned over the years to trust my strong and inexplicable desires – at least in the matter of artmaking. That said, time was short. I was not going to get to a draper in the next two days. But rummaging in my existing stash of supplies did turn up some lengths of raw silk in cool white and an ivory: it would do.
In fact, now that I am thinking more materially about it, this raw silk is more robust than charmeuse and will stand up to the multiple layers of cloth and stitching that this Icelandic map – still in the imagining – seems to be wanting. And of course, now that I’m here, responding with body, eyes and breath to the land, sea and air, I find the shimmering silk a perfect versioning of the light on Iceland’s omni-present water. Too simple a reason for the choice, perhaps, but enough to be going on with.
The colours of Iceland seemed obvious after two days in Reykjavik: greys, blues, greens, ivories, and glimpses of golds and golden browns. Here was where the wool belonged, I realized. I would stitch into the silk cloth with wool, silk, mohair and other blends of animal fibres. The warmth and insulation these fibres provide seemed appropriate to context. Plus I felt the softness of their textures, the fuzz of some, would be a good way to render my walks, so different than the cotton floss I’d been used to using. At a local yarn store, I let my eyes and hands shop a spectrum for me. I spent far too much on yarn but came away deliriously happy, itching to get going. I was confident enough that the colours of the southern city would still pertain to the northwestern lands where I was headed: this is a small island, after all. Blönduós is about 237 km from Reyjavik, less than the distance from Montreal to Kingston. And they do.
In Reykjavik, I also found a beautiful map of Ísland to version, imagining a textile work that superimposes a version of the country and this small town, within the greater arc of walking during these long, long, luxuriously long light days. So I have created a pattern from this map, a shape to cut from one piece of silk and stitch onto the other, and I am aching to begin.
Can it really be as simple as this? Feeling this great drive to make, make, MAKE, I wonder: can I let go and just see what happens, despite being so soon arrived and so new to the place? Isn’t there more research to do? More understanding to develop? Can I trust my desire and see it as not at odds with my ethical imperatives? After all, I strive to honour and reflect something of every place in the walking maps I make. Do I know enough? Am I being too rash?
I will find out!
I have chosen to proceed, believing that whatever I make in this new context may be different from what I’m used to making in my familiar locales. My Icelandic textile map will likely be less a portrait of either of here or of me individually than a testament to my growing connection to this land. My map is my means of connection, perhaps, a gesture of process rather than an artifact of completed experience.
Hmmm.
Okay then, let’s go!