another swarm story

Today actually was a red-letter day!  A call from the post office first thing in the morning alerted me that the 2 packages of bees that Ben had ordered from Kelley Bees had arrived.  Ben has taken over the hives but -- as often happens -- he is out of town right now so he had arranged for me to collect the bees and get them into the hives.

So yes.  For those of us born in the suburbs or the city, you may not know that your live bees -- or live chicks -- arrive at post office and you are summoned to come and rescue them from their travel crates.

When I got out to the hives, turned out the bees in one of the older hives were busy swarming (re-locating to another home, which I have written about before).  So the new bees and I had to cool our heels for a while as I was not inclined to get in the middle of that, though it is a mesmerizing sound and sight.  Look closely and you will see the bees in the air all around the hive.

 

When they were clear of the hives, and safely parked in the tree above (where they await directions from their scout as to where they are relocating), I got busy and opened the little crates to pour the bees into their new homes.

 

The box at the top is the traveling box; below is the hive body with its removable frames where the comb is built.  You knock the frame against the hive, and the bees fall out with a whump.  Some stay in the travel box through repeated whumpings.  They will eventually migrate into the new hive by the end of the day -- they will find their way by smelling their queen's pheromones. 

The queen rides in her own little carriage, a small wooden box sealed with a sugar cube.  She will nibble her way out of the box, by which time her court will have settled in and can welcome her home.  The bright aluminum strip you see, middle right, is holding her small box in the midst of the frames.  The queen always begins in the center of the hive, and her court huddle around her in a protective buzzing ball.

 

After I finished, I gently slid the lids back into place, and put the travel boxes, with their lingering tenants, on the top of their respective hives so they could find their way home before nightfall.

Green

I once wove a tapestry, inspired by the names of small Wisconsin towns, called "Black Earth, Spring Green".  Now I write about the color of the small town where I live, as it is indeed Spring Green time right now and there is nothing so thrilling for me as driving through the country on a sunny day in the late afternoon and watching the color shift.
 

High contrast in late afternoon sunlight shatters a single color into brilliance and shadow.  Shades of green sharply divide between sunbright green-yellow and its cool deep forest green shadow.  In the American Midwest, the sweet viridian green fields of blue-green winter wheat are beginning to sprout the ears of wheat, turning pale celery toward golden at the tips.  Each day now the palette will shift, as it does, also, every hour in the sunlight.   At this time of day, everything assumes a bright golden cast, with the deepest of shadows etching all the details in high contrast.

Wild mustard takes over the fallow fields but as disking begins, it will fall and and the color of the field will turn abruptly to purplish grey.   Other fields are shifting out of their bracken-red-brown winter coats into indeterminate but imminent green.   

And some fields, already tilled and seeded, are momentarily a grey-mauve soil which will shortly begin to erupt in tiny yellow sprouts, growing day by day until the dull earth color is engulfed.

 

 

 

color in the sun

In the midst of a generally chilly and grey spring, the sun came out for  a few dazzling days this week, and I went around exploring bits of Winston Salem, NC neighborhoods.  In contrast, I was also viewing a highly charged, color saturated exhibition at SECCA (more on that shortly), and could not resist comparing the colors I marveled at in the museum with the funky resale shops nearby.  Here is Cookie's Shabby Tiques, on Reynolda Street near SECCA.  Saturated mustard and verdigris, with slashes of primary colors against an intensely blue sky.

And to follow the palette, a lush painting by Tomory Dodge, showing at SECCA.

meditating, or not

Well, I am still not weaving -- nor am I writing very much, despite best intentions and earnest promises to myself.  But as I fuss and bother and stay far away from the studio, meditation is creeping back into my life, and that, as we all know, is the path to mindfulness.

I have never been one to sit and chant a mantra, though I have sat and followed my breathing (thanks very much to yoga training) and I know full well the value of this: the clearing out of the pipes, the increased ability to concentrate, the intensification of focus and clarity which will result.

I have always, since I first understood what meditation meant and how it worked in our lives, thought that my weaving was my meditation.  At Cranbrook, where I studied in the 80's, Hamada's writings about the centering power of craft were much in discussion and a formative and empowering defense of hand weaving in the face of conceptualism.

But I had a significant conversation with a dear friend, who lives and breathes a meditative life, earlier in the week.  I told her how much I felt unbalanced because I was disconnected from my artmaking, in particular the meditative weaving process.  I asked her if weaving was, as I had frequently claimed, a true form of meditation, and to my chagrin, she replied that it certainly has great meditative qualities, but the attention required from time to time for the motion of the hands or the decisions one makes along the way remove it from the total detachment that is the goal.  Aaaaahhh.

No, I have not yet dug out my zafu and begun pure meditation in earnest.  But as I was weeding my gravel garden this morning (how Zen!), my mind roamed elegantly around and formed such beautiful, clear associations about art, life, gardening, spring.  What to do?  Interrupt it, run in and write it all down?  Or keep going and savor the experience, knowing that it will slip from my memory by day's end (now)?  I chose the latter, valuing the experience over the recording of it.  Kathleen assures me that when I start meditation in earnest I can, in effect, have both: the beautiful experience and the reclaimed memory to write about it later if I choose.

January Harvest

In this squirrelly, unpredictable new kind of winter, we get some 50 degree days in southern Indiana.  Last weekend on a warm day my friend Steve announced he was planting spinach and chard.  For my part, I have been overwhelmed in talking the talk - lots of talk -- but not necessarily finding the time to walk the walk.  I had not even taken down last summer's tomato vines, though I had planted some Chinese cabbage last fall which survived the big post-christmas snow storm.

I am a real advocate of growing your own food, buying local food, growing year round -- but often, I lack the time and the back strength to really carry on in my own garden. Excuses!  So when it was warm for a while this weekend I went out and pulled out all of the dead tomato plants, weeded the old (still living ) weeds, and turned over the soil.  In doing so I found some little surprises: a few tiny potatoes, a very few small beets, odds and ends of arugula plants, green onions, a teensy daikon radish, a small carrot.  Nothing better than buried treasure!  It made a sweet little supper.

What I want to do is actually grow food year round.  It is more than possible here in southern Indiana.  I have seen that it is possible in Maine (see Elliot Coleman's Winter Harvest Handbook), and an old classmate of mine is attempting the same (in unheated greenhouses) in Homer Alaska.  These things inspire me: as ideas, as visuals, as a new way to approach my life.

The Half-Life of Words

The internet sometimes spooks me.  Your words can literally come back to haunt you!  I subscribe to Google Alerts to find out what people say about me (call me vain or paranoid, it is useful!), and today and alert about an article mentioning me came up, so I went to it and found the abstract ot a talk I gave to the Textile Society of America in New York in 1998, when, if I remember rightly, I was asked to speak about making textile things.  I should note that I was practically schooled to understand that weaving was plenty old fashioned (or call me paranoid!).  Here is the abstract.  As for the talk, it was probably ad-libbed, used slides, and if I stored it on the computer at all that was a few crashes ago.

Making It the "Old-Fashioned Way"

"It is tempting to consider the process I am about to describe as the result of a point of view which is subjective and maybe even romantic. Although the adjective "old fashioned" as used in the title carries a certain amount of ironic wit, in fact my method of weaving is ancient and timeless. I chose it because it is the only way I can adequately convey the majority of my ideas about the textile world. I also work this way because I love the process itself I have tailored my ideas, and risked hobbling them, in order to continue to indulge in a way of working that suits me eminently.
I weave objects which I call tapestries, although technically they are compound twill fabrics with images composed of discontinuous inlaid wefts. The structure is a three harness twill; the ground is warp-faced and the inlaid areas are weft-faced. I selected the structure after studying the three-harness twill tapestry of Kashmiri shawls. The structure confers the ability to express acutely refined detail while yielding the drape necessary for a shawl's function. I adapted the weave to an inlay structure in order to economize on the time spent in weaving. In fact, I weave quite rapidly as a result, often more than 12" a day. I am also able to exploit both warp and weft as design elements. The sett of my warp is relatively fine, 30 epi, which gives the work good detail and yet is a large enough scale to be able to see easily the interaction of colors between individual threads."

And here is a detail of something I was weaving around that time.

detail, "Pear Tree", 1996 hand woven textile

contemplating weaving again

It has been a really long time since I have done any weaving -- I cut the last tapestry off in September last year, shipped them all out to Patina Gallery, and heaved a sigh of relief at the close of a cycle of work.

Most times when I do cycles of work, they are focused on something external: a historic garden, perhaps, or the contents of my kitchen.  When the sequence makes sense,when the story has been told, it is over.  The last body of work was different in that it recorded an internal state of personal transformation.  What marks the end?  It was not a deliberated logical sequence, so much as an intuitive one.  When I finished Beatrice, my muse, the work was complete.

So the remnants of specific warps -- with enough left to weave more! -- have hung limply from my looms' reeds, chiding me that it is wasteful not to weave them off, while I have busied myself with projects of an entirely different nature: reading about climate change, working toward bringing local food to our tiny rural town, learning to screen print and using that to make direct statements about these issues in terms of household items.  All the while wondering, Will I ever weave again?

Bee Nice hand printed Linen towels, 2012

Weaving to me is a centering process essential to my well being.  I don't make useful things, witty things, toys on my looms (all of which I love to make in other craft media): I reserve it for my alpha state work, when my hands and heart and head are connected in a way that still the chatter of thought and manifests deeper realities.  I now that sounds hyperbolic, but that is how I define the art-making state, and it deserves the highest respect in my own chain of work: the weaving studio is uncluttered with any of the other things that crowd my work day: no sewing, no paperwork, no computer, nothing but yarn, space, and my looms.  When I set foot in there it is like entering the yoga studio: no shoes, mind stilling.

I haven't been there much lately so the mind is clamoring.

I have been distilling thoughts, though, about how the art end of my work can begin to confront the same ideas I have been so absorbed with in the rest of my activities.  I have the idea, but not the visual yet.  Often a body of work begins when I see something out there which might as well have a halo around it: I see it and it marks me and demands I do something with it.  The last cycle was without the exterior stimulus, but most other things are clearly about a place.  Genius loci, is that the phrase?

"Cold Frames & Fruit Trees" from the English Garden Series, 1989

Now I have been thinking about gardening as not just a metaphor for life, but as central to a new sustainability, and I am re-discovering old thought (such as my English Kitchen Garden series) and combining them with exciting new ideas being tested in the world, such as the zero-waste urban farm I saw in Chicago a few weeks ago.  I have the ideas spilling out, but have found no centering visual focus yet.  Nearly there!  Watch this space.

all images copyright Laura Foster Nicholson