Mending and Hybridity

I've settled on the focus for my Magic Diaries cloth, and it is 'hybridity', an overly academic term for the notion that things whirled together in an overly accelerated and border-less world sometimes affix to each other.

Hybrid ideas and images appear in the mundane moments of day-to-day life, when ideas and images and things themselves are slowed down long enough to enter into some kind of relationship. I need a kind of creativity that responds to the possibility in those relationships. For me that creativity is 'mending'-putting together from fragments that have otherwise lost their moorings, or that have been released from those moorings.


Sometimes fragments that have otherwise lost their meaning and value.



I wonder. Is any mended cloth a hybrid? Is any cloth made from fragments with multiple and complex origins a hybrid?


And, here's the big question: is a hybrid cloth made today any different from a hybrid cloth we would all recognize as a 'traditional patchwork quilt' (for example). Does context- where we work from in the flow of time and ideas- matter? This part of the question matters for me- we live in a time when 'things' have such short lifespans, when their transition from 'new' to 'waste' is accelerated.

Is mending a way to deliberately stall the speeding up of that transition, the acceleration so characteristic of today? Can the creation of the hybrid mended cloth be a way to create new moorings, even in the face of processes that make that creation seem impossible?


So my Magic diaries cloth is, I guess, about the magic of mending things together. Not 'back together', just together. This is why found cloth and gifted cloth and second hand cloth and stuff that would be waste is so important to me I realize.