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About Longing Season
To feel longing is to be in time. You cannot long for something without having had a past to inform this longing, or the promise of a future to be hopeful for. This collection is a reflection of the distinct and unforgiving experiences of longing that come with new parenthood. Nine long months of waiting, wishing, wondering. Anticipating and enduring the painful promise of labor. Longing for the first smile, giggle, roll, word, step. Longing for the before. For sleep. A raw animal-like longing for the sniff of your baby’s head, his eyelashes on your cheek. Longing while your hips rock back and forth like tall pines in the wind, composing a naptime lullaby. Longing to be alone. To be present. To feel like yourself. For time to pass, to stay still, for there to be more of it. Knowing you’ll look back on it all wishing you could do it again.
These works are about what it has meant to be in time differently during this season. Slow steady weavings that can be picked up and put down on a dime, each weft a marker of time spent working in the studio, or at the kitchen table. Cyanotypes made by seconds spent steeped in the sun. Drawings made in brief, wanting pockets of time, cut up and reconfigured, much like what it is to remake my identity during this season. Work made in fits and starts. My practice evolving to align with the unpredictable, tender, messy, soft nature of motherhood. To be more accepting of what is possible. Woven works as I attempt to weave together what it means to be in time as both an artist and a parent.
I think back to a journal entry from last summer when much of this work was coming together.
“I was moving forward steadily on a few weavings, hoping to put them in a dye bath by tomorrow. But Frankie woke quite early from her nap. She’s having her first real rough bout of teething and is all out of sorts. Had to put the work aside and lay in bed with her until she fell back asleep. Hate to see her hurting but it’s also so rare to cuddle her for extended periods, she’s always on the move these days. Now reading alongside, lulled by her little breaths. Learning that this is a part of the work too, these pauses, these in-between moments. Love the idea of these being woven into my practice and each individual piece. Looking back and remembering these sweet and very fleeting pieces of our life together.”
May this collection be a record, a way of documenting the tedious, unrelenting, inevitable joy that is the time spent making a life together.