press pause
hibernation is necessary
creating in the {cold}
Throughout the winter, my studio in the russell has probably had the heat on…once. So it’s safe to say i have been huddling in front of a space heater (or two), wearing gloves and winter boots while painting. Paint at your own risk: oil paint is flammable and you shouldn’t look to this as a safety guide. Thankfully i was pretty close to being done with most of my paintings by this point, although i did have a lot of work left to do for one of the pieces- i took a pause from creating work since the holidays at my retail job can be intense.
I try to keep a good balance of studio-work-social life-alone time but something is always askew and the balancing beam of life always has something to throw at us, doesn't it? To {attempt} to take care of myself during the colder months, i remind myself that if its too cold in the studio : i simply do not have to force myself to go. I often have to convince myself that my productivity during the winter (and in general) does not always have to be at 100 and i am not less worthy if i allow myself to rest. animals are wired to hibernate in the winter to survive the cold and don’t feel guilty about it, so why should i?
Are you there {god} ?
My plan for the winter was: less studio, more sewing at home if i had the energy, or just staying inside under a blanket at all times. I had started my quilt for the girlhood show in the spring, and had a few pieces sewn together here and there but no real concrete idea of where i was going with it. I knew i wanted to make the quilt be about {gender} and i decided on a color palette that explored man / woman / in between/both based on colors typically assigned to the genders – blue, pink –and the in between/combo being purple. I was scouring thrift stores for suitable fabrics and i found what would be one of the main “parts” for the quilt – a hilarious blue t-shirt with mario praying, with the text, “are you there god? its - a - me, mario!”
I had some leftover fabric cyanotype experiments from years ago that ended up being a murky pink purple that i used in the quilt, along with some actual imagery (computers with human elements, a man explaining DNA), other fabric elements in the piece depict angels, with two main angels praying near the “are you there god?” that i cut out from the mario t-shirt- as ways that the internet and outside influences (such as authority figures, religion, etc) can play a part in how one interprets and expresses their gender.
I challenged myself to try to think back to when i was a child and moments where i, maybe unknowingly, was expressing myself in {what i now know to be} my queerness and how that reflected how i viewed myself as a {woman}. I remember being “tomboy-ish”, i remember being awed that some people’s households were lead by their fathers, i remember meeting my dad’s side of the family and seeing how many traits i had of theirs, i remember loving video games and going to the park and polly pockets. Looking at myself as a {woman} now, i can appreciate my complex traits of femininity and masculinity that intermingle and how they reflect, so strongly, how i truly am my mother’s daughter and my father’s son, all wrapped up into one queer amalgamation of a woman, and how i felt ostracized for not fitting into the premade boxes my parents and their culture created for me.
I think the quilt ended up being a bit of a cluster-fuck to look at which is fitting for how i feel thinking about my childhood/gender/religion. I had an image in my mind what the quilt would end up looking like, and if you’ve ever made anything you know that sometimes having the finished product as an idealized version in your mind can be counterproductive. Do i love this quilt? Not necessarily. Do i think it was a learning experience, and not too shabby for someone who barely knows how to use their sewing machine? yes. And i think thats what matters more.
Cut and paste
Because i am a glutton for punishment and never feeling like i am working on enough projects (what can i say, i like having options!) i started working on an idea for a zine, based on a collage i had done, probably in 2020 or early 2021. I made a zine a while ago, i’ll link it here. Like most things, looking back at this zine i am little embarrassed. I was not in a great place when i made it and i think the rough nature of the printing and cut-outs shows my mental state - lol.
This time instead of a collection of writings i wanted to do somewhat of a story, so i am creating a story of jesus as a pig. I thrifted this pig book a long time ago and chopped it up, and then when i had this idea, i knew i needed to find this little pig book on the internet to grab another copy. Sidenote: my coworker gave me a good resource to find places to buy books that aren’t amazon - its called bookfinder.com! I also always recommend thriftbooks to find used copies of books.
Anyway, i had been thinking of making another zine for like two years i am simply indecisive and for some reason the {idea} of making a zine meant not being able to work on painting because it would take over my whole life. But thats not case. While taking a break from my cutting and pasting for my new zine, i spent an afternoon over at my friend saylems house where they had their functional RISO machine that they had been fixing up. I showed them my first few pages of the zine and they offered to help me print it–yippee! That afternoon we played around printing and i made these!
O spring, come quickly!
If you’re in michigan you know our weather has been fluctuating so much recently and i am just wanting those nice 60 degree days BACK! ASAP! But we’ll get there soon… for now i have to work on unpacking my new place! And figuring out what i want to make post-exhibition – its always very daunting to start a new body of work especially after working on art for a specific goal for like, a year straight. sometimes i feel like my brain is empty and i get worried that i have used up all of my creative energy but there will always be more to make and more to say and more to speak about. I’m just going to focus on that for now. And unpacking my house.
See you next time!
emilia