Lost and Found

This will be an uncharacteristically short post as I am frantically packing for Complex Weavers Seminar, but I can’t let this very special  day pass without a mention.

It is September 11th.

Yesterday I took a bus into NYC down into Chelsea, on one of the most beautiful days so far this year, the weather here in the northeast has been spectacular.  I agreed to volunteer to intake artworks for the Textile Study Group of New York’s exhibit  9x9x3 Salon des Refusés.  I will be exhibiting a piece in the show which opens Thursday night.  Details are here.

The piece I’m exhibiting is constructed from sliced, wet felted hand dyed corriedale wool, and then reassembled.  There is a netted fence covering the opening.  It is a fitting piece for today.  Yesterday as I was signing in works, one of the other artists looked up at me as she was filling out her form and said, “The weather was just the same as today”.  And she burst into tears.

See, I knew exactly what she meant.  It was also a Tuesday, September 11, 2001 and the weather was uncharacteristically spectacular, and that small detail is seared into all New Yorkers, we will never forget.

And so, eleven years later, uncharacteristically gorgeous weather can still bring tears…

Rest in Peace

This diptych on the right was from two photographs taken in August of 2001, when my children were on top of the two towers, two weeks before they fell.  The images were printed on silk, cut apart and rewoven back together.

We will remember…

There was a gift actually, from such a gorgeous day.  I went through the house this morning and opened every window I could possibly open, giving the house a last airing before shutting it all up tight for the winter.  I even went into the unused bedrooms from my vacated children.  I raised up blinds, and threw open the sash as it were…

And there, hanging from one of the double hung windows in the guest room, was my missing snowflake I made in bobbin lace from fine copper wire.  I have been missing this piece for more than a year, I’ve been searching everywhere I could think of because I always loved this piece, this small lovely graceful bit of lace made from glistening wire.  And it had disappeared.  I had given up looking for it, thinking that someone had actually entered my studio and stolen it.  I knew right where it always hung.  And when I reached for it one day, packing to give a lace making demonstration, it wasn’t there.  I have no recollection of hanging it in the window of the guest room.  The blinds haven’t been raised in there for a couple of years.

And there is was.  Shining light back into the room on this glorious day.  A gift.  We will remember…