Color

There is something in the colors from the plants that keep you so attracted to them. It gives you comfort. It stimulates your senses that sometimes you just want to soak in that color. It might be a little scrap piece of silk, but you look at it and can’t stop – it’s like something that is encoded in that color from a plant speaks to your subconsciousness while your consciousness subsides. And you don’t have to understand anything at all, you just have to feel it.

It never happens with artificial colors. Even when you look at the color you adore, it’s different. You love it, but it’s just not the same… It lacks that feeling…

I believe it’s my third Summer when I do a lot of dyeing with plants. I can’t call myself a professional dyer who does a lot of studies and makes detailed records (if I would go that deep into dyeing, I would have to stop felting. One man can not live the lifetimes of many, no matter how you want it…) But just when I did my first samples with plants, I felt THAT. There is something that won’t let you go back too. You even don’t notice, but all artificially dyed materials little by little start to step back of your creative life and you find yourself surrounded just with what you call natural and true.

 

 

It’s my first Summer though when I collect quite a lot of dye stuff from my own land myself or use vegetable waste and medicinal herbs that have expired (I always had lots of these as this is almost the only medicine I take for more than 15 years).

 

 

St. John’s wort, sage, tansy – all growing in our fields, around us. I really love the sources that are available here… And I’ve been using them as medicinal herbs for so many years already. Strange that I didn’t think about colors before. Dyeing opens your eyes to the world. It teaches you to notice things, to cherish the world we are living in, to connect and to feel. It heals you.

 

 

And then the color meets the fiber to make a perfect duo. And makes you want to soak in it, to touch it, wander with your eyes in it, get lost and feel safe at the same time.

 

 

Comfort…

The Net. Connections

Meeting people, getting into mysterious situations of coincidences, especially during my recent travels with my workshop program, always deepened that feeling of the NET, the connections in our lives. There have been so many situations when I meet people who are somehow related to the people I already knew, no matter where on Earth they lived, or me myself, when I meet people I never knew in this life but got a feeling we just parted yesterday and met again, that I really stopped to wonder. I can even say I am really looking forward to every single meeting of “my people” that is yet to come. I don’t ask why I do meet those people, I am not really trying to remember what could have connected us in lives before this one, I just accept and respect every meeting. No matter what it brings – is it me or someone else paying the debts from the past lifetimes, it’s that feeling of connections in humanity, in life, the net around us and in us – it’s like closing your eyes and putting your finger on your wrist to feel the pulse of one LIFE for all that doesn’t start and doesn’t end with birth and death.

This net, the connections have been my theme lately in life, and my focus in my new felt pieces – fragile, yet strong, flowing without a start and the end – every fiber entangled with one another, embracing each other in knots that never get undone, building connections, the net…

Music by  Joe Hisaishi

 

 

 

 

“Meetings are not flowers. They do not fade and die without any traces, stepping into shadows.  … you have to open your mind and heart and to understand people not only as personally closely related, but as the companions to the truth. And then all meetings will be blessed.”   (C.Antarova “Two Lives”)

Photography

Whatever is your art or craft media, you will always turn to photography as the means to reflect your work to the world or even create a continuation of the thought of your work. That’s why I always considered it to be a very important aspect in one’s artistic life.

Not all of us of course have a professional photographer, professional equipment and studio, not to mention a few super models at hand to always present one’s work in the best manner. At least I don’t – just an improvised environment in an apartment, a tripod and remote control in my own hands and the same face all the time of which I really get bored and wished I had a couple of best friends – models nearby from time to time.  Anyway, on the other hand it’s sometimes the easiest option when you do everything by yourself. It’s just the maker who can really express what he meant with his work (or a real soul mate photographer who feels and sees the world the way you do and knows every corner of your soul, thus – your work too… But tell me how often do you meet such?  But… I am still dreaming of the photo shoots with some photographers I feel close to my soul and to have women I adore as my models… It’s nice to imagine).

I always regret when I don’t have enough time to picture all the work I do as I consider it to be a final act of my creation that materializes the image living in my mind. Or I’d better say – a final act that requires my own input as the very final act is the reaction of observers that the piece stimulates…

 

 

wedding dress (wool & silk)

 

   wool, silk & flax, eco dyed with vegetable plant dyes