I’m not even sure what to say about this piece. It has felt, through the entire process of making it, as if I really didn’t have much of a say in how it came together. I’m not even sure if I love it or hate it. Maybe both.

It started with an impulsive decision to wrap some rusty metal in some white silk, dunk it in tea, and see what happened after it sat overnight wrapped in plastic. I printed/dyed a few different pieces of fabric in a similar manner, and each piece came out so different from the others, I was surprised and delighted. And two thirds of this piece of silk went into the snowy stitched landscape I made a few weeks ago. But this end of the fabric was so wildly different from anything I’d ever created that I put it aside to think about later.

This week as I was pondering wild magic and the unpredictability of spiritual adventures, I couldn’t keep this bit of ecoprinted fabric out of my mind. I sat and stared at it a lot, seeing so many shapes in the random marks made by rust and tannins. It felt alive in my hands. So I took up thread in colors that harmonized with the fabric, and started picking out the shapes the patterns suggested to me. I kept showing it to my artist friends to get their input. None of them agreed on what the shapes in the fabric represented except for one thing: those three figures at the center were SOMEONE. Well. Three someones. None of us could agree on Who. But I just kept following the nudges and here it is, whatever it is. I still love the colors and the texture. I may never decide how I feel about the images I picked out with tiny stitches. But what a fantastic process, like excavating the image, and the story, living in the cloth. Wild magic indeed.

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