Art meets Object

Art is my Way. And my object. I promised I'd show you some good out of all the hairballs of my life in a previous blog. Okay, meet the felted nouveau Edelweiss!

There is this distinction in the arts, the Fine versus the Applied. The High and, then, ahem, the Low. Art (the rarified ballet slipper) and Craft (shoes cobbled by hand). As a lifelong maker-doer the whole dichotomy is objectionable. What is the hierarchy of making objects, save some qualities of origin or what passion asserts their arrival: when exactly do instinct and practice conceive art? Abstractions are imposed after the fact. Invalidation also. I hit the wall in every sense this week. I could not sit to ease my ache to work in larger pieces as my heart broke with fear. Don't diss my Edelweiss, world, I warn you. I mean what am I actually going to do, run down debilitation and gesticulate at it? well if I could...but I couldn't get my hands on a walker.

There is the devotion to making and doing, and then those who cannot or will not show up in their own lives enough to grab on and wring out of being alive whatever satisfaction they can, facing up to the endless losses and changes with at least some curiousity. I refuse to be in-valid. So, sobbing, I stab into the furballs, to slice, carve, do surgery on them. Make of the food for a vaccuum something one would reach to touch instead. I am not ready to be thrown away. How do I feel about powerlessness? Inability to push ahead my own mending from this last operation to my head? I used razor blades and big shears on those soft, round orbs, the hairball skulls.

I cannot enjoy being this disabled. After years as a professional helper I cannot help myself or force myself out of this disease that steals my life in chunks. I danced classical ballet 4 times a week, 3 hours a day from ages 5 to 14, then ethnic dance my entire life. I feel humiliated as I struggle to stand and windmill like a broken stork until I end up a plank on the floor. I performed music when my mother, a coloratura, stopped singing. Now I can't hear the most precious sounds, or even necessary ones; the doorbell or locks, having no indicator but cats dashing that something comes around. Fear, this is the worst part. What happens, the falling, the silence, these I can learn from. Edelweiss object to crippling fear.

Art is how a curious mind gives courage to hands. I venture into what I don't understand and use my eyes and hands to recycle fear into something else. To make some use of reactions that would otherwise paralyze or overwhelm me. I make and I calm down. This I learned as a little girl from the screams and sounds, being unable to make large people stop brutalizing those who weren't as big. Like I said, she stopped singing. Completely. Unless I sang descant to her melody, then she was not alone. Audible screaming had to be muffled or transposed into something. She sang until she couldn't. I may be pinned and unable to escape, but I leave visible proof that someone was there. Someone you should wonder about and search for. It may be as slight as the torn napkin flowers I left at the counters of the gas stations or cafes before he'd force us back into the car, moving again, to the next neighborhood where no one would stop him or call the police.


Art was always my bigger voice and strongest signal. It gives me rights. I am able. I am valid. I can express anything, everything, honestly, deeply or as bluntly as I will. If my challenge has always been to make something out of nothing, why not Edelweiss from hairballs? But now you know their pedigree. These are the fleshy cousins of those lost napkin flowers. Delicate species but a sturdy genus. They are my objects, my objections, aren't they? Who would know seeing them on a shoulder bag, or hat, and read their actual message? Would you have guessed? Now this: what was my mother's favorite song?