Last year painted a pair of silk hangings - a commission for a Thai restaurant in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I did several versions of Rama, painted with cyanotype liquid onto handwoven silk organza.
They resemble shadow-puppets, a traditional artform prthroughout SE Asia.
Ever the perfectionist, I was unsatisfied with the first Rama so then had it made into a dress instead.
Thursday morning I sat in the studio, snipping cotton fabric into squares for paper-making. My hands moved quickly, impatient with the work and ready to move on to making paper pulp. Those sharp Chinese scissors had other ideas, though.
Sudden resistance to a snip. No pain, only amazement at a hole cleanly cut through the skin. All of it - there was my knuckle under a hole in rubbery-looking flesh! Stood up shakily and grabbed the ultra-strong Elastoplasts I'd bought for smarting blisters that morning, quickly squished the skin together, slapped on the plasters, and headed to Lamma's clinic down the street. It was time for stitches. Three of them. Again.
The last "art-making stitches" I received were while cutting stencils at Glass Art in Minneapolis.
And a few months before the glass incident, I'd tried to get the top off a Liquin bottle - with an Xacto knife. You can guess what happened.
Art-making as a dangerous activity? I'm feeling mildly ridiculous, is more like it, with a finger sewed-up in black like a Frankenstein creation. And now even impatient to make paper once the stitches are out!
