Beach Day & Art

I woke up angry and confused after a long night of troubling dreams. Even after breakfast and some homework, I still couldn't shake those feelings, so I decided to get out of the house and make some art. 

A swan! In January! 

I grabbed a ball of string, some scissors, a camera, and set off for the lake shore. There was a gentle breeze from the north, not a cloud in the sky, and it was warm enough to go without gloves.

Practically tropical.

An orange sandstone pebble.

I decided to make rock piles. They started off large: big, perfect waterworn rocks I carried from the treeline to the water's edge. Every 100 feet or so I made a new pile. 5, 6, 7, 8 rocks high. While I made these piles I thought of the weird dream-emotions I woke with and how they had morphed into grief and anger towards my family's lost culture, the blandness of this town, and also towards a great friendship that fell apart when I moved here. 

Each pile marked a little death or loss. I gave my anger many funerals today, from the start of the north shore sand beach all the way to the Hamilton bridge. 

As I moved down the beach the rocks became smaller and scarce. The towers of stone became stacks of pebbles. Eventually there was no more rock and I had to build these cairns from chips of driftwood. My emotions became smaller, lighter, harder to find and difficult to see from a distance. 

I found small treasures along the way. Orange sandstone pebbles, a plastic doll's arm, waterworn bones. 

I found dead fish too. 

People watched me as I stacked rocks and walked. I didn't really mind. They didn't intrude or ask questions. I made it to the end of the beach and, turning away from the last tiny stack of driftwood, I left the beach for the walking trail that skirts the water. 


My grief and anger didn't feel gone, but I felt instead a curious quietening of it within me. I walked home on that trail and once in a while the trees would part at the right place and I'd see the small silhouette of a pile of rock against the water. It made me happy to see them from a distance, happy I could see others taking time to examine them. 


This small gesture of art/healing ended up meaning more to me that what I had intended earlier in the day when I set out with the string and the scissors and the camera. I spent three hours today walking and piling rocks! Who's to say if I could have spent the same amount of time and energy on a similar project if I hadn't woken up on the wrong side of the bed, or if I lived in a different town, or if that friend had kept in touch, or if history had treated my ancestors with kindness instead of hatred. I'm grateful for the beach today, and I know there's be more art experiments soon. 

The red line indicates where I placed rock/wood piles along a stretch of beach almost 6km long. That's a really long stretch of beach. 

Reflections

I certainly can't claim to speak for all weavers, but I do believe that some of us find meditation in weaving and a perhaps even a type of spirituality in the repetitious processes. 


During my first two years, maybe three, of college, the deep concentration and stillness of weaving came close to the awe of looking up at a night sky free from light pollution, or the brilliant life in the vast spruce forests of my childhood. Weaving, spinning, felting, sewing and dyeing became my mental anchors when other aspects of my life were in chaos. Over these few years my hands have learned new skills and I've stretched into the territory of fine art, but my practice always returns to the deceptively simple manipulation of fibre. 


There is balance in weaving. A balance between physical effort and acute focus, a constant rechecking of position and pattern and tension and beat. It is outrageously complex and completely mesmerizing. There are epiphanies. There are heartbreaks. All the while you are allowing the thread to speak to you, and you, in a quiet trance, listen and respond with your whole body. You are a part of the loom and your essence is in the cloth.