I’d like to start sharing more behind each piece I make, because the process and the truth revealed is really what it’s all about for me. I’ll start with this piece :) It is a double sided, two in one woven friend.
I wove this piece with the intention to display the yellow side, as it is the sister to a yellow-circled textile piece I made a few years ago. There’s a lot of stopping and starting in my art practice, always has been. I like to live with a piece and journey through the season I’m in with God and work out what’s going on inside me and what He’s teaching me through what I make. I never really know what I’m learning in the process, or what’s really truly going on inside of me and around me, even though sometimes I think I do. It’s only after time and space away from the season and the piece that I can see the truth. Art really is a way of knowing.
So! I wove this with the intention to display the yellow circle. I wove it during a season of massive transition and grief and also joy. I wove it in the early months after having my first child, after losing my dad suddenly to cancer. I wove it while living in a foreign country far from my family of origin and where I do not speak the local language (I still live here in Germany). I cannot stress how not graceful, but grace filled the season in which I made this was. Most days I felt so cracked wide open that it was impossible to hide from what I was carrying and where I needed healing. But, Jesus saw me in it and through it and he helped me.
While weaving the yellow circle, I didn’t trust myself on how I chose to construct it. I felt it was messy and that in it I exposed myself in some way that made me cringe. But, I stood by my initial decision and kept walking/weaving on towards the end of the piece. Mostly because I didn’t want to take the time to make it ‘perfect’. How funny that the woven underside, the messy side, the side I felt exposed something about myself I wanted to hide is now the side I most prefer. I find it’s more interesting, has more character, knows more so who it is and is more beautiful even.
My hope is that this piece helps you to also see that in all that’s come to the surface these past few months, that you’d be open and honest with yourself and with God about it. That you wouldn’t align with what Shame is telling you and instead that you’d be kind to the places you need healing and believe that you are loved especially when you feel unloveable.
I believe that in the process of it all you are becoming more interesting, your character more refined, that you’ll soon know more so who you are and that you are becoming even more beautiful— because at the end of the day it all starts with what’s inside.