Or so the word came down from the mountain last night, as I finished up my blog post. I’m guessing Julie Powell (of Julie and Julia fame) would probably disagree, look where her blog got her, and of course TLo, with thousands of followers, probably the best source for who is wearing what in the fashion world, a fashion icon in and of itself, I’m going to guess they would probably disagree that blogging is not publishing. It all doesn’t matter really, as long as the answer is, for the purposes of HGA and entries into their Convergence exhibits, “Blogging is NOT considered published by anyone’s standards.”
So there you have it. Thanks to those who emailed me about this subject, and thanks Cally for starting the conversation. I have so loved following the whole design process, especially in bloggers like Tien, from the initial idea, “I’m going to weave my wedding gown…” to the final days of hems and appliqued lace, and beaded trim. It would be so great to see a garment you’ve been following like that in a Convergence exhibit, so I’m glad to hear that blogging doesn’t count as publishing as far as the HGA is concerned.
That said, I woke up this morning, and rethought how I finished the piece I pulled off the loom yesterday. First, the piece is titled, Rest in Peace. It is a diptych, for those who haven’t studied a lot of medieval art (like my poor husband who said last night in the pizza restaurant, “What’s a diptych?”) here is the definition courtesy of Answers.com.
diptych n. A work consisting of two painted or carved panels that are hinged together. An ancient writing tablet having two leaves hinged together.
Having looked at my share of ancient art, diptychs and triptychs have always fascinated me, two or more images that tell a story of sorts, where the images together tell a more powerful tale than each alone. With that said, I had two images that I thought, needed to be “hinged” together, and so I wove them side by side in my inlay technique I’ve used for much of my two dimensional artwork over the last two years.
Here is the shot I showed yesterday of the two images before I cut them off the loom and separated them into two. The image on the right, is of my two children on top of the World Trade Center, in August of 2001, two weeks before 9/11. We decided on the spur of the moment, to take a couple of days at the end of the summer, 2001, to take the kids into Manhattan, we live so close we never think of it as a vacation destination. The view from the Top of the World was breathtaking. And I noticed that all around the perimeter of the tower, behind the fence they were leaning on, was barbed wire, coiled high, to prevent the ultimate suicide I guess. Little did they figure two weeks later…
The photo on the left was a shot either my husband or I took of the towers, graphic, like monuments rising to the sky, like tombstones in a graveyard. (We both shot lots of images that day, and are both claiming rights to this one…)
I created little postcard packets from each of the images, like I’ve done with others in my Personal Post Series. And then I went in search of a way to hinge the two together, like a book, like a diptych. My first attempt didn’t work at all, I took apart a small notebook, but the spine wasn’t a continuous spiral, and it was too big and cumbersome.
My second attempt, shown here, was to hand sew jump rings between the two halves of the diptych. The rings were small, and problematic, without soldering them together, they kept slipping out of the thread connections that held them in place. I didn’t want to have to take a trip to a store to look for round rings that weren’t split. So this is where I left off last night.
This morning I woke up with a brain storm, I keep a stash of office supplies in the guest room cabinet, and I rooted through to see what notebook spines I could find that could work here, like a spiral tube. I found the perfect spine in an old notebook of my son’s. (He would start a notebook, three pages into it, he’d lose it, so I have a lot of almost knew notebooks from his school days, with only two or three pages written on…) How poetic. So I cut off all the jump rings and replaced them with this continuous black ringed spiral which so much more resembles barbed wire. Or a kid’s copybook…
I called the piece “Rest In Peace”, it tells the story of two buildings that were brought down in a horrific way, and I paired it with an image of my children standing on top of those buildings, the day the towers fell is the day my children’s childhood ended. Life would never be what it was for them before 9/11.
They now live in a world where people are willing to die to make a point, where orange alerts, and bag searches just to 
go visit an art museum are all very ordinary. They now live in a world where we are at war, in places they had yet to study on a map in elementary school.
My son is in boot camp, as I write, training to fire an M-16, to become a soldier. (On a brighter note, I got another letter from him today! Woo Hoo!) So this piece is pretty powerful to me. I don’t expect a juror looking through hundreds of images on a computer screen to get all that from my drab little piece, but I’m really happy with it. Here are the final shots, with the barbed wire/copybook hinge.
