Wednesday 14 August 2024

What’s In A Mess


My studio has overtaken my home. It’s a mess. I usually hate the messiness, but something shifted in these last few weeks. Making me realise it was actually useful.



It looked messy on the outside, but I felt really comfortable within it - sitting on the sofa, with all my threads around me in clear plastic bags, allowing me to see them. The threads did entangle and at times, around me too. Catching in my toes, around my ankles and legs. Trying to get up in a hurry to answer the doorbell or go to the loo was often a rather strangulating process. Sometimes a sneaky ball of yarn would roll under the sofa and once I realised that, I’d pull and pull the thread until I caught sight of the ball, pick it up and place it somewhere it couldn’t create more of a mess. But yarns when unravelled and snuggled together in close confines, will tangle and twist when handled and it does become problematic. 



I had crochet hooks and knitting needles close at hand so I could decide to do either, depending upon the threads I had in my hand - based on the number of strands that made up, or came close to the colour I needed to make into my 5” square pattern. 


Laid out open, even though they were carefully placed in holders, the knitting and crochet needles took up considerable space and the crochet hooks would often disappear under a cushion or into a thread bag. I had similar issues with the thread cutter and scissors. Many times, I’d be sitting on them. Always a mystery how they got there! 


It was a mess. But, it was a functional mess. Having everything at hand, despite the periodic disappearing acts, served expediency and efficiency. And as I worked with my hands, enacting various mudras to create the fabricated patterns, order was emerging from the chaos. The squares piled up. I blocked them each night and felt satisfied that so was making progress. Each day, I just slipped into that messy space, almost comforted by it, to continue making the squares - adding to the pattern melange. 



These mudras may or may not or have the  beneficial effects of yogic or dance mudras. But, something happens to the mind and heart, when the hand works in repetitive patterns. Stitching slows the mind down, it allows one to think. Rather, hear oneself think. It also helps me feel what’s going on. Sometimes feelings are intense, they’re hard to fathom and slowing down helps unravel them. The fact that we make something, aids the contemplation. I don’t feel quite so useless, just connecting with myself for most of the day. 



In our overly connected world, where there’s just too much out there to assimilate and make sense of, stitching for hours at a stretch helps one feel more grounded in your being. And, I tend to do it for most of the day in silence. No music, no Netflix or Apple TV. It’s when the mind starts going around in circles and I can’t continue to confuse myself, that I switch channels and create some noise in the background. Ostensibly I’m  watching TV and do grasp some of what’s going on, but mostly I’m concentrating on what I’m making. And having slept it off, as I journal the next morning having, I begin to make sense of whatever I was ruminating on or feeling. And it goes on and on like so. 



It’s rained so hard for the past two months. It was beginning to seem as if the sun had forsaken us altogether. I’ve also been unwell for the last three weeks. It’s been hard. But, I found comfort in my messy studio, where I could work once the fever wore off. Yes, it’s drained me. Yes, the paracetamols have caused havoc with acidity, but I’m recovering. 


The pattern melange is also coming along. I’ve crossed the half-way mark, but there’s still a long way to go. However,  I have to pack this stuff up to prepare for a multitude of things, a trip to Delhi for care-giving included. 




Before I cleared up this mess, I wanted to share how it suddenly dawned on me, that this mess, isn’t unlike the mess I see myself as. The shame and disdain I feel for what I’ve done or not done, for the ignorance, the arrogance and more that fuelled the trajectory of my life this far. Those so-called dysfunctional patterns that subconsciously emerged and determined the course of action I took. But, I’m beginning to realise that they may well be ‘functional’ after all. Like my messy studio creates efficiency and expediency in making the over-sized pattern mélange. There may well be some function to the psychological mess that discomfits my sense of self. 


It’s really making me re-think the idea of messiness. It’s helping me feel less of a need to tidy up, to clean up around me or cringe at all the fallen leaves that carpet the lawn, totally eclipsing the grass. And Im also trying not feel so bad about the bamboo trees they thoughtlessly pruned last year because they’re growing back in clumsy clumps. The balletic fronds fluttering  elegantly in my window frame, just isn’t the same these days. Their dance is gawky and amateurish and I have been cussing the guys who ordered them cut, ruining my vista of graceful green


The tall coconut palm that stands a stoic witness to life within and without my window, advises that one must flutter whichever way the wind blows. 


Even if it means diving right into the messiness of it all. As Carl Gustav Jung observed “design emerges from amidst the chaos of form” so, there’s hope yet! 




Monday 15 July 2024

Inspired

Some pieces need to be set aside and picked up after some time. I am waiting for a fresh palette of yarn from Mumbai, so went back to this piece after a couple of months. I think this one is done, but there are a few more in the series still a WIP. 


Inspired by the sand bubbler crabs, and many wise words from Brodsky, Brene Brown, Natalie Ledwell and Martha Nussbaum, I’ve persuaded this piece into being. 


Their thoughts are precious and I’ve included them with different angles and details of the piece





 






 






























Sunday 7 July 2024

Stitch Meditations , 7th July 2024



Music has been an integral part of my life, be it playing the piano or singing. I gave up the piano when the instrument I had was too old to be tuned and the piano tuner also died.  At this point I was past 50. 


And returned to singing (after some 30 years) which I had given up to pursue the piano. While I’m doing crochet - working on the ‘Patterns in Being’ project, I try and do some riyaaz. With the tanpura to keep sur now an app, I can do this quite easily, though not as often as my teacher would like me to. This is a ghazal she suggested I learn. I recorded it to share with her as my last class was missed. It’s far from perfect. I start off, off-key and the high notes are still a challenge, but it’s a WIP, just like my crochet project. 

https://youtu.be/Lvq6Ii6a6iA?si=ot_ibSpoHtwWJuck



As I sang, pondered on the lyrics and popularity of this ghazal, a 6mm aluminium crochet hook weaving the fabric - of a pattern I used to make a lovely silk scarf from my younger sister’s recent birthday. Having constructed a 7ft long one the pattern should have been second nature, but using two threads instead of one didn’t permit the usual flow. This too added to my reflections on stitch and the song.





The lyrics of which were written by Fayaz Hashmi, a 20th century Pakistani poet and songwriter who also worked in the Indian film industry.  The music was composed by Sohail Rana and the song was popularized by classical vocalist, Habib Wali Mohmmad who also sang it as playback singer for a Pakistani film ‘Badal aur Bijli, in 1973. 





The profoundly romantic and soul piercing lyrics expressing the pain of unrequited love and longing for a beloved, combined with a heart stirring melody creates an emotional listening experience, and has inspired many artistes to add it to their repertoire. My favourite rendition is by Farida  Khanum  (1993) whose vocals evoke the intensity of yearning that’s real and palpable.  I remember hearing it for the first time and feeling a familiar tug of the longing the poetics evoke. 


And don’t we all? I mean isn’t that why the lyrics appeal to so many?


Making me wonder if somewhere our idea of love and romance has become associated with longing, that which we cannot have. The unattainable, the challenge which brings us to a state of pathos. Pushing us into the depths of being, rising up like the phoenix from the ashes of disappointment. Like moth to flame, unrequited love can become an addictive pattern that challenges the being, its growth. 


Often, when I think of the verses that Swami Parmahansa wrote and sang during satsangs and which have become part of the Sadhna of his devotees, I find this same sense of longing for the idea of God, for what is attainable but ever so briefly or through rigour and intense discipline. Or always just beyond one’s reach. Saint poets like Lala, Andal and Mahadeviakka also spoke of pain, rigour and strife, as the ways into the soul of our being.





Yet, the world judges those that seek but do not find. That strive but fail. Often shaming each other. Even as our most romantics hero’s are Heer and Ranjha, Romeo and Juliet and even Rumi’s profound poetry comes from his separation from Shams. A pattern of social acceptance seems to be to reject the idea of longing even as it’s what’s embedded in our psyche. 


The old Hindi film songs, which I so love. That era of poetry in film that made the songs so memorable and singable, are also more about longing, more than love itself. The bitter-sweetness of parting, waiting to be re-united and that ilk. It’s almost as if we are programmed to fail to achieve the desired, because the journey is probably more exciting, hopeful, poignant than the destination. Which in the context of human love is inevitably a huge disappointment. 


And we cope with heartbreak to realise we were never really broken, but being opened up to explore horizons of being, beyond our imagination. And, these songs remind us of that journey, that longing, the hope - that romance of being which is never quite fulfilled through another, if at all. 






With these words 

“Waqt ke qaid mein, zindagi hai magar 

Chand ghadiyaan yehi hai jo aazad hai 

Inko khokar mere jaan-e-jaana, umr bhar 

na taraste raho. Aaj jaane ki zid na karo” the poet almost suggests that the beloved leave, for otherwise who would yearn so sweetly for him/or her…..




This post is in continuum of the previous one 

http://gopikanathstitchjournal.blogspot.com/2024/05/stitch-meditations-on-being-patterns.html

Monday 10 June 2024

Stitch Meditations on Being - The Patterns and Hues



“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf…….
                                                                                                                                                    - Philip Larkin



These words say it all, without revealing the gory details or gruesomeness of the wounds we all carry within us. Largely disguised in various ways but played out subconsciously. Most of the time we are unaware of why we do what we do and of the influences of the “soppy-stern…….at one another’s throats” that created who we are, beyond just the physical mating, but the why and how of our psychological make up.

When Larkin says “Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf” he evokes the patterns we form and re-create (subconsciously for the most part). Habits make it easier for us to negotiate life - such as driving a car or bike and even drawing, crochet, knitting and that ilk. But, it’s the emotional and psychological patterns that create the problems, where human misery “deepens like a coastal shelf”






Yet, as Larkin put it, it’s inevitable that we inherit dysfunctional ways/patterns and also play them out, passing them on generation to generation. Unravelling these patterns may or may not create the potential for change, but it’s interesting to do so for the purposes of understanding your own psyche/self. Beyond that, what can we do?

 

This was a dilemma that I faced and struggled with until I started studying the patterns on the molluscs along the Goan coastline. These patterns were unique, as inimitable as our finger prints. It was virtually impossible to find two clams with identical colours and patterns.






What was even more interesting was to learn that these patterns are created by virtue of genetic and environmental conditions. A neurological response for camouflage and survival. Even so, the radula of other species did manage to drill through and suck the animal out, and if not, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Wherein the holes they drilled, became another level of embellishment to the strokes of colour that decorated the exoskeletons.

I studied these patterns in various ways: through the camera, by drawing and eventually by zooming into the photos I took of each. This was fascinating because in pixelating the images, I found the patterns were a configuration of colours.




Colour, as we have seen through the ages, carries symbolic meaning that varies from culture to culture. Lisa Feldman Barrett, social scientist and author of the book ‘How Emotions are made’ asserts that our emotions also vary from culture to culture. Colour and emotions, have long been linked:  green with envy, yellow for happiness and joy, red for love and anger and more in that vein.

But, Feldman Barrett says there is no singular way to describe any of the human emotions. Each culture and person within it, experiences a variety of sensations within anger, joy, love and despair. The subtle gradations and differences between fury, rage, anger, frustration, being irked etc are just that - subtle variations.

In this zoomed in and pixelated photo of a clam shell, that’s what I see, subtle gradations of colour - so subtle that it’s driving me insane trying to reproduce them in thread.





I have two versions of the thread adaptations. The first was a cross-stitched replica where I mixed the threads - two to three different colours from over 400, colours of cotton floss, collected from various thread makers including Anchor and DMC. It took me a long time to complete one piece and the second is in progress. A slow process which I often abandon to tackle something else and return to until it is done. The first one took me a year.




However, the piece that I’m currently working on, isn’t just about getting the colour right, it’s also about patterns and how the same hue can alter with the pattern. The idea is to make a large crocheted and knitted piece instead of embroidery. The reason the colours are taxing both mind and pocket is that unlike embroidery threads, the colour range is extremely limited for knitting and crochet. At least in any one count of yarn to enable some symmetry in scale to join the 5  inch squares.

I had started the pattern blanket (for want of another term)with some vague idea, with regard to how I wanted to put theknitted and crochet squares together. It evolved over two to three years and I made the squares from all the colours I could muster but I just couldn’t figure out how to really work them together to create any visual that appealed to me. This resulted in my abandoning the project and the 300 odd squares I’d already made, not to forget the hours of painstaking knitting and crochet – often at the end of the day. It didn’t make me happy but I didn’t know how to move forward. I thought it was a failed project and hadn’t looked at it for over a year.




Then a couple of weeksdiscovered wood borers had inhabited my rather extensive book shelf which stretches across about half my apartment. I had to empty all the shelves and cabinets below that housed stationery, fabric and my stash of embroidery threads as also hundreds of books amassed over the last four decades and some inherited from my parents’ collection. Art magazines, old issues of Selvedge, Piecework, Surface Design, Embroidery and the now extinct Fiber Arts, Marg Magazines, India magazines (also extinct),BBC music magazine, piano scores and about 100 art magazines - a series I collected in my student days about artists - one issue on each artist (sadly none about Indian artists but focussed on western art history). And of course a collection of books - fiction, non-fiction, poetry, textiles, art, spirituality and more. Basically it was a lot to place around the apartment and at the end of it all, the only free space was my bed.

My knitting and crochet stash is housed in my bedroom, in various draws  usually by colour. This was not disturbed by the pest control requirement. So I decided to revisit the abandoned pattern blanket and changed tack by using the template I had already embroidered in cross-stitch. The 1/4 inch embroidered squares took me about ten minutes each to execute, with seven of those minutes to get the colours to match. In the knitted and crochet version, I am facing similar issues with the subtle gradations of hue, but more so because I’m not working with just cotton floss, but yarns ranging from wool, acrylic, rayon, nylon, cotton, wool and cotton blends, and also the counts are all different from very fine crochet yarn at a 40’s count to chunky 4-6 ply. Often, I have to work  differing counts together to try and approximate the colours.





It was a challenging week both with the rather smelly pest control, putting things back into place and this creative project. But I now have a template that gives me the direction I need. What I’m grappling with, in addition to the technical issues, is what I hope to achieve by engaging in this rather esoteric idea of replicating the colour boxes in both hue and pattern.

While working on the cross-stitch version, I marvelled at the numerous shades there were and recreating them helped me understand that there are so many hues to each emotion. It’s impossible to understand what another person is feeling because what they feel is unique to them - culturally, socially, experientially, genetically, environmentally and more. That was a great insight because one does tend to think we know how others are experiencing emotion or what they may be feeling, but Feldman Barrett also suggests that it’s not possible - at best we can imagine within the range of our experience, based on our own emotional shade card. Our emotions and the hue gradation of the occurrence is uniquely personal.




Most of our thinking comes from conditioning. And is the result of social constructs geared to create a sense of order with the existence of so many of us who inhabit this planet. However, through centuries of the existence of mankind, the ideas have evolved in a rather unthinking and dysfunctional way. In many ways much of our thinking could be deemed be distorted by ideas that most likely germinated through limited knowing and were handed down with incompleteunderstanding by those before us, who didn’t know better.  Quite like Larkin says in his poem. They fuck you up, …..They may not mean to, but they do.”

 

Patterns are prevalent throughout nature and also in our emotions and thinking. My professional training has been in textile design and patterns are nofirmly etched in my DNA. We were taught to create designs for fabric by dissecting vegetables like okra – a cross section with the seeds visible; drawing this and repeating the form in differing ways of  formal repeat patterns for printing motifs on cloth. The challenge was to ensure that the repeat wasn’t visible and also contributed to the visual outcome; trying to disguise the vegetable form through repeating the motif in creative ways. The repetition made almost everything pleasing to the eye because familiarity  is what enables a sense of well-being and makes something agreeable to the senses.

 




As I evolved into  a fibre artist, examining my own persona – a journey of self-actualization through my art, I started exploring the idea of mind-stains or ideas that cause us to feel less than good, feeling shame and doubt and self-cynosure. Initially I explored this through notions of tea stains on my saucer as I spilled the tea I was drinking. It was a long exploration of seven years, wherein I realised that one could still flower – fulfil the human potential despite these feelings that seem to hold one back. 

 




When I moved to Goa, I didn’t give up the idea of stains for they were very much a part of my inner explorations relating to  experiences that created these inhibitors. But, living along the coastline of the Arabian Sea, I went beyond human nature to study nature in her full glory and life by the seaside has been fascinating in this sense. Wherein colliding ripples of water, washing over mud adhesion ripples at the River Chapora estuary and further down the beaches of Morjhimand Aswem, with wind adding to the rippling effects and the diffused rays of sunshine at dusk – complimenting and complicating the patterns, I began seeing these patterns of colliding energies as incredibly beautiful. 

 




It was the complexity that appealed for it related to the intricacy of configurations that become our patterns of behaviour. Of energies inherent in the psyche formulated through generations of conditioning, one’s own experiences – of colliding with other energies, bringing out these patterns. Where we recreate them because energy draws us to others when we recognising something familiar. In re-creating we feel grief and anguish, become aware and the tendency is generally to view ourselves in a negative light. Something that needs to be changed. But the wisdom of the ocean suggests that there is incredible beauty in these engagements and that the tendencies may change through the collisions of energetic fields as we negotiate our lives, but the overlaying effects of these fields are intriguing, dynamic and awe-inspiring. If only one could look at the self as we see the natural world.

 




Through the study of  clams shells, the sand bubbler crabs and their feeding residue and also the ripples of sand and water, I started seeing that patterns are formed by colour and the collision of energies in the elements. By extension I made the correlation that emotions seen as colour, in the human psyche, form patterns and vice-versa. Therefore adding pattern to the art work, going beyond mere colour became imperative.




However, this further complicated the process of trying to create the sublet hues uneven thread counts and a variety of ornamental thread configurations through crochet and knitting. At this point, can only envisage a blanket that’s an uncomfortable evocation of how we exist together with our unique experience and understanding of emotion, alongside others who feel and perceive these differently.

But, I’m a long way yet from being able to see this. I have under 100 squares when I need close to 640. I often rip out the squares because they’re either too big or I need to add a row or two if it’s smaller than I need it to be. Some are tight and sit awkward, others are delicately delightful. It’s going to be another task to whip them all together, possibly like one struggles to negotiate this world with the billions of others beside us….