Thursday, August 18, 2011

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.







11 comments:

  1. Aaah this is going to be a wonderful Magic Cloth.
    To be precise it already IS a wonderful Magic Cloth !!!
    Love the way your triangles not fit, and thus DO fit beautifully together

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  2. beautifully said, thank you for sharing!

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  4. great magic diaries cloth and love your thoughts about hybridity. i think there are some of us who have always put old things together to make new. it seems to have become the 'fashion' these days to do that, in the spirit of being green, and is now more acceptable.
    love your sun/star.

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  5. the cloth is so much YOU...your touch evident
    and loving...
    excellent words
    xoxo to you...

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  6. I just discovered your blog and i share with you the love for lived fabrics. This work of you remind me the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins which i love so much.
    I feel inspired and love this Magic Cloth!!

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  7. Thank you for your visit Grace.
    So we share the same struggle with our own creative work!!.
    I know why i like your work, for me it is not only beautiful but real, meaning: not pretentious.
    Please show more, show everything because this is the path i want to walk too and we need each other support!!.
    My mail: lolaruiz21@hotmail.com

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  8. I found you via Lola's blog and so glad I did! What gorgeous work you do. In answer to your question about context, I say context is everything - or at least provenance. I once made a quilt of fabrics from clothing I found on the street during Vancouver's garbage strike, and I made an accompanying book that had a page for each fabric and where I found it.
    Great question and you have given me lots to think about.

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  9. Gracie, this is all so colorful and exciting! You have the gift, I do believe. I didn't get the color genes but I love to see what others do with it...sigh.

    What is the name of your book on kantha stitching? I was just looking on Amazon and the one I found is selling (used) for over $190!

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