No new pictures today, I am afraid. Just words. Or maybe I will dig around and find something.
I decided to wean myself from Facebook. Like many, I love it and hate it. But clearly it is too seductive for me because I spend much too much time there. I didn't have the nerve to completely deactivate my account, but I am challenging myself to stay away unless I have something urgent to say or add. Too often I felt like I was repeating myself here and there. So I am choosing here rather than there. I like this format better - strangely more intimate yet, in actuality, more open. Who knows, maybe it will encourage more people to comment. I do so like getting comments, by the way.
Now free from Facebook, I want to take a moment to reflect more on the Knitting Sprawl exhibition in Peterborough. I must confess that I left Peterborough with an unsettled feeling. Unsettled because I knew in my heart of hearts that the work presented there isn't quite hitting the mark. It feels too unfinished and uncertain. The project is so large - the topic, the media, the scale - that I have been having a hard time distilling it down into something new. While knitting is at the center of it, it isn't necessarily the heart of it and I am thinking that perhaps me knitting in response isn't actually the answer. Or perhaps only me knitting isn't the answer. I aspire to have my work be 1 + 1 = 5. I think I have only hit 1 + 1 = 2 here.
Then again, I wonder if I am just uncomfortable about being back in the more traditional gallery/studio world where it is so much more crowded than, say, on a Manhattan rooftop with a water tower. If you remove the "wow" factor, is there anything left?
These are the thoughts that I have been walking around with lately, in between dyeing and spinning sessions. Perhaps they are coming forward because one of the successes of the Wave Hill project has been that, in creating a format for people to come together and focus on this rather simple topic, something new has been created. Something intangible but very real nonetheless. I know it when I feel it and it is definitely happening at Wave Hill.
I just haven't felt it yet with Knitting Sprawl.
I'm with you on Facebook. Twice I have "fired" people because it was getting too big for me, and I started questioning what I really wanted it for. In the end, I decided it would be a place for friends I may never see again (or seldom) and family I seldom see. I actually did close my account but guess what? They're just waiting for you to come back, so when you do, it's all still there. Kind of creepy.
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