About the Tapestries

Questing Among the Tapestries

Here’s an invitation to explore what feelings come up for you as you view each tapestry. Maybe they inspire a story or a trip down memory lane.  

If your body feels inspired from some of the gestures in these tapestries,try feeling into the poses or making the movements they inspire for a multi-sensory experience. 

“Emerging Dragon” 4’x 6′ 2015

“The Couple” 4’1″ x 6’8″ 2020

Making the Family Tree with its Gifts and Burdens

My process in tapestry making has a lot to do with gathering.  I lie in bed in the morning thinking of my next tapestry.  Sometimes the inspiration comes from something we’ve done in InterPlay, or found in an Internal Family session, or shamanic journeying, or in living life. 

This tapestry, The Family Tree, started when I found two parts of me, an older part mired down in the weeds from ancestral burdens, and an eager young part who looks at the world with wonder and curiosity and an in inborn interest or line of focus. 

Once I have a direction, I look in my studio for materials to create the idea which will become better formed and defined as I work. I hang a 5ft x 8ft piece of hooked rug backing on a rod and suspend it from picture molding in my studio.

For this tapestry I start a blue denim background and add a material with clouds on it for the sky.   I make a tree out of cloth with lines of black triangles of varying sizes on a white background.  It gets mixed up with the clouds. 

Time to rethink.  I replace the clouds with a red  orange background.   Much better.

I expect to add a few ancestors at the ends of my tree’s branches, but I don’t see how to do that. Instead I see how to  put an adventurer in the tree to indicate that we have some choice about which branches of the tree we’re willing to explore.  I try a head looking out of the tree.  It looks awkward and doesn’t stay.
Not inspired by the “weeds” I have for under the tree I hunt for other weeds in an allowing frame of mind.  Things light up, come to hand, appear on the floor, and make suggestions.  I find my weeds in a part of a skirt from India that has applique red stalks with flowers with embroidered outlines on a black background.  They are not the wimpy low growing weeds I’d imagined, but giant stalks high as mountains. I’ve already cut a section out of the cloth for another project, and this makes a gully for the Family tree to grow out of. 

Looking through my felt collection, I find a round pale pink head with a fish for the eye that looks like my young curious part.  Placing the head coming out of the weeds, I add more fish going away from this little person thinking about how we’re attracted to certain objects or patterns from a very young age and how these give our lives their direction.   For example, at the age of 4, when our younger son saw a fish being caught. He became a vegetarian right then. Later he became a vegan.

My collection of felt also yields a goat, which I put on a mountain top opposite to the young head.  In my childhood, my Uncle Dave loved to tell about Tuckenburg goats.  They live on steep Swiss mountains and had developed shorter legs on one side to go around the mountain more easily.   Of course, this means they could only circle the mountain in one direction.   Imagine the complications of that.

I find another head I’d made and discarded from some other project.  With its wide eyes she looks like she would like to hide in the weeds.   All these came incrementally at a gentle, thrilling, absorbing co-creative pace.

I couldn’t see how to make individual ancestors, on my Family tree, but some big dark blue drops came to hand. They could drip from the tree and land as burdens, even take different shapes depending on how the person they landed on looked at them.   And while I’m making burdens, I also add gifts, gold circles, abundance and perseverance that also comes from the ancestors and grow on the branches of the Family Tree. 

The steep mountains with weeds have gaps in them and the face from the weeds just fits into this gap. Once there I give her a body, she begins to reach out to embrace the mountains.  I give her big hands to hold it all together.  This feels like one big roll of the women in our family.  Holding it all together is a great accomplishment, full of gifts and full of burdens.

I put a cluster of lace circles in the sky, like the stars in the Pleiades. 
The stars suggest foliage for the tree. Of course, that’s what Family trees do in Spring – they blossom.

I make another large head, expecting it to also be female, since my ancestors I personally know were all female.  But just as I begin to pin on the head I see the perfect piece of fabric for a beard. I add it, a torso and some springs, so he looks like a Jack in the box or genie coming out of a mountain.   He has an enormous hand which feels like a dynamic force in the family.  Again, this has its gifts and burdens.

I make another large head, expecting it to also be female, since my ancestors I personally know were all female.  But just as I begin to pin on the head I see the perfect piece of fabric for a beard. I add it, a torso and some springs, so he looks like a Jack in the box or genie coming out of a mountain.   He has an enormous hand which feels like a dynamic force in the family.  Again, this has its gifts and burdens.
 
Adding gold trim in the sky and on the sides, helps finish this tapestry of the Family Tree.

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