play 'art history' as you browse
7 February, 2021
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I have been researching, exploring and designing what has become the Illegible collection for the last month. In early January, I collected old bedsheets and other such materials to sew clothes from, beginning with a blouse that I improvised a bit around a pattern I saw on Micarah Tewer's Tik Tok. When Andrew Yu asked if I would make him a version of the blouse, with collar, to wear for his Christmas party next year (a year out), it occurred to me that I could produce a greater quantity of these and build around its aesthetic a collection that I could delicately and gently form by hand, from grandma's old painting studio, which has since become my sewing/hot gluing/metalworking studio. I long for my own studio at the Lemp Brewery spaces. I spent hours earlier this week looking into it. This week I've been distracted, however, by a boy from work. Work has begun to drain me more than expected. Last week, when the weather was decent, I would sit in the back yard with Bear and read her chapters from The Mushroom at the End of the World. I am also simultaneously reading Butterfly People and Beloved. I began really researching moss two weeks ago, and later lichen, only to see Jaron Cook of all people sharing his research on Wisconsin lichen on instagram. He said that Braiding Sweetgrass is the one book he begs people to read, so I got a copy from Left Bank Books. I have been too tired to really read this week. The cold has totally and utterly drained me. Today the temperature is in the single-digits, Fahrenheit. Early last week I took the following photos in-studio to capture the garments I have thus far:
8 February, 2021
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Today I mended two of Lucy's skirts, and turned a dress of hers into a skirt, and tried to salvage the rest as a top. Results unclear. Spent the afternoon at grandma's which was pleasant enough until it wasn't, as always. The CJC protests for better prison conditions came on the news and she called the prisoners "animals". Pushing back was useless, again. I find it so sad to see her have absolutely zero capacity for compassion. I can't think of anyone she really makes space for herself to be compassionate towards except Bear -- who is literally an animal, non-human, although we humans are animal as well of course. That's not what grandma meant, though.
Last night at work I brought Braiding Sweetgrass and blew through the first few chapters, many times on the verge of tears. I was not expecting it to be an emotional read. Of course, she's a poet as well as a biologist. I am just astounded by all that I do not know about this land and these geographies that my family "owns." I'm thinking about the land that Tony and his crew are digging up in our backyard in Shrewsbury for this cedar fence, pink and new and raw. I'm thinking about grandma's two (three?) lots in Webster Groves. Then of course there are the places we "own" that I really think of as land--Marble Creek, Pinehurst, Papa's lakeside property wherever that is. Today Uncle Kirk told me at Grandma's that Jake is buying out the other half of Marble Creek that was owned by a friend of Pawpaw's. Which is good news, I hope.
Been investigating the paw paw tree and its uses in textiles long before settler colonialism in these parts. I am in the midst of confronting a lot of what I lack, all at once, it seems right now.It is heavy and I know mostly that I have to keep reading. And reading. I stayed up a few hours after getting home from Lucy's last night to continue Braiding Sweetgrass, made more awake by reading which is so rarely the case for me, particularly after 11pm. Now I am in bed, wrapped in all of my softest on what is frankly an unbearably cold day, with hail on the way to Grandma's, and snow all the time I was there.
Lately I have been drawn to a playlist I've titled "Numpty" made of the kind of music I always wish I knew more about, the kind of classic, romantic without the crap, feel good music music. In the bath this morning I thought about how Alistair Chew and I recently agreed we live in a gold age of music production. However, lyrics are at their probable all-time worst and continue to degenerate. Funny how those seem to feel a need to balance themselves out. Except with FKA Twigs. I'll give her both, every time. This brings me to the idea I scribbled in the margins of The Mushroom at the End of the World about encounters and contamination: what if we could shape clothing with sound? I have to start literally here, and imagine an extremely delicate, sensitive fabric blown into shape by an enormous speaker--this hypothetical is indeed my first and only way of imagining this thus far. Contamination also made me wish to stain my clothing with the algaes of Marble Creek, rubbings from its nearby leaves, using pine needles. The issue consitently comes down to washing, in the end. People, myself included, are absolutely overwashing our garments and only something as synthetic as today's majority could withstand so much washing. Like how we over-shampoo our hair. I want to make clothes that would be obliterated by a washing machine, which in and of itself is unsustainable in a different way. Our clothes must last so that we reduce consumption, but it requires a simultaneous shift in the way we clean them, why and how.
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11 February, 2021
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Salvage botany. Aster & Goldenrod chapter. Time with Bear. Coffee ritual in the morning. Need to go on a lichen exploration, perhaps at Marble Creek. Ask Papa about Wisconsin land on the lake. Why do I struggle so much with putting away clean laundry?
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Closing tabs on these hyper-futuristic tech interventions that I feel I'm not living up to. I shouldn't be living up to them. I don't know that they are the way. Nor is my role in rediscovering lost practices of clothing creation that is reciprocal with the Earth. Keep thinking, re-reading Kimmerer. Chapter on language last night was so gorgeous, heartbreaking.
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Going to grandma's today. She's getting spam calls about purchases charged to her apple account, which she doesn't understand since it used to be amazon....apple, amazon, she's lost. But she woke mom up last night to tell her she realized there are apples on either end of her ipad box. We laugh, but it's special, too.
17 March, 2021
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I wish the stars could tell me how to stick to routine. All they seem to tell me is that it's difficult for me, which I know. Here we are, St. Patrick's day, over a month since I last even remembered to come in here. So much and so little has transpired in my thinking, in my living. Hardly able to read. Hardly able to write. Just been so tired.
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Booked my trip to LA with Val this morning. My stomach was in knots so I took a long bath/steam in K Hall's moss bath elixir. Fitting. Spent the morning on the phone with Papa for two hours and have been so utterly and totally drained all day. Got my first dose of Pfizer vaccine yesterday, so blaming the fatigue on that though I'm sure that's not it. Largely, it must be this shit weather that's come back. I absolutely need the sun to come back or I *will* collapse into myself.
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Don't have it in me to work in studio this week. I did begin upgrading the heel of the canvas boots with black lizard leather from the scrap pack from Springfield Leather.
Fragmented!!!
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"Valerie Hammond maintains a fluid artistic practice, distinguishable for her organic approach and deft interaction with different mediums. In all of her work, there is play between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the spiritual: the dichotomy between what is seen and the sensation it provokes. The works inhabit a space she is constantly searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. Her artwork becomes emblematic not only of the people whose hands she has traced or the subjects she is drawing but of her own evolving artist process-testimony to the passing of time and the quiet dissolution of memory."
15 April, 2021
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Nearly a month since my last post. Don't know how to come remotely close to covering everything the last month has brought--especially in my relationships to others and self. I almost said mostly others but it is equally self through that very act, so here we are. I went to the boat house today, and found some closure and also a new window to climb through when needed.
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Re-reading these notes to myself is so refreshing. I'm so grateful to have been thinking out loud in this space. Sometimes it dawns on me that I really do have some good ideas. The full-bodied exhaustion I've experienced since probably Tuesday of last week, my second vaccine dose, a return from Marble Creek that I will eventually process in writing, and a foundation shifting that has honestly had me spiralling non-stop for days, plus the bullshit of work and safety and quitting and flying to LA on Monday thank *god* - whew. So much life I can't even pick up the books that help ground me so. I can't wait to be on a plane again. I read so much and so well and productively on some planes. Hope I manage to bring the important books with me. Would love to jump back into the real work with the garment projects here.
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18 May, 2021
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I wish I was writing more than in one-month intervals. It's a pitty to be so removed from writing to myself. Returning to this space always makes me feel...better is too simple - it's more than content, more fulfilled, I'm not sure. It's raining in Saint Louis today, I'm listening to the Staves, Bear is curled up by my side. I spent last week in Denver with Kaia. We hiked, I rolled my ankle two minutes in, and kept hiking for three days -- Maxwell Falls, Downtown, and Red Rocks. I flew back Sunday, and yesterday, Monday, I got in a three-car accident. I woke up this morning with my neck aching from the whiplash of getting rear-ended by a Ford truck, whose driver was not insured. I'm so fucking frustrated. I had spent the day at home with the plumber who was seeing to our leaking, broken basement, shower and washing machine. Mom feels cursed, as do I. Leaving the plumber, I had loaded up the trunk with duffels of clothing to take to Goodwill, to buy some old curtains or bedding or tablecloths as lining for the topography coat, to see Jordan at Gelateria and take a call for the new documentary project with Chiara on Isabel, but none of that happened. I do think the Goodwill duffels cushioned the blow of the truck. Which I can appreciate.
I've been spending time in grandma's front garden lately, weeding out wildflowers she tells me to throw away, but I've put them in old kombucha bottles on the breakfast table where I now sit in mom's living room. It's really nice to have them floating behind my laptop screen, where I now spend so much of my time. I craved this - feeling like a work-from-home freelancer just skating by in this pandemic like so many others rather than aimlessly floating and taking advantage of the free time. I don't know, I feel better and worse having this variety of things, but it means I can stay home and be paid. I'll be staying home much more now, of course, without a car for the time being. I need to call the auto shop.
I am now on Hold with Caliber Collision. This is the worst accident I've ever been in. I wish I didn't have a car, or a need to drive at all.
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I'll include images from red rocks
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