Workshop Notes 11/29/23

Morning, afternoon, evening to you wherever you are in the world. I am thankful you are here. This is my soul work that keeps my soul alight in dark times. I devote myself to this practice and come back from the fringes to report to you what I have found with my fiber art, my magic, and my death work practices. This is a reader-supported publication. If you want access to all the workshop notes and my Sunday essay series, please consider subscribing for a paid tier today. Right now, I am offering subscriptions for $4 dollars a month, 20% off the normal subscription price of 5 dollars a month. For the price of the latte art of your dreams, you will recieve 6-8 essays a month to your email inbox that touch on all these topics I hold near and dear to our hearts. I hope you and yours are well, dear reader.

One of the downsides to putting so much effort into my writing practice is that I have not paid as close of attention to writing about my handcrafting or doing my hand crafts. In fact, its a source of real annoyance that my handcraft practice has had to take a backseat to completing forms to start my business and prepare to pay business taxes for my essay series. “I am paying to write now,” I said to Lily in a quippy manner after completing all the steps to conduct the subscription business within the confines of the law. While that’s me just blowing off steam to my wife, it does reflect the real lived reality of how bureaucratic processes can really suck the joy out of all this work. Consequently, I want to start a Workshop Notes photo/video/essay series that will drop periodically during the week to keep my joy in handcrafting and archiving my process.

To be honest, I am exhausted being a “content creator” on a social media platform. As Devany Amber Wolfe of Serpent Fire aptly noted last year,

“I am not a content creator. Though sometimes I create content…. I am not someone who loves to perform in front of a camera, though sometimes I will play the game. I can’t vomit brilliance at the pace of a voracious feed. But I have tried for the sake of building my business.” Link

I have tried all these things and been willing to shift my archiving process to fit within a set of algorithmic rules I have heard boost my visibility. But, I don’t want to do that anymore, so I am going to stop. I just want to be a writer and handcrafter and maintain my own little pocket of the internet for those that are interested. I am just going to post all my work on Substack from now on. This will mean a pretty distinct shift in how I interact with instagram and substack. I will still be posting on IG, but it will only be to note that I have posted an essay or a workshop note. All the meat and potatoes of this project, the real heft of it, will be here.

I want to invest in my own archiving of my process, not fight for attention on a platform where people primarily repost content from other social media platforms. My struggle with these issues are nothing new. I wrote about it at length in Reflections on Art in the Age of Social Media. I want to be engaged with the process of peering into my own work and other art as a viewer, not as a marketing professional trying to get more visibility. Yes, with finite time and energy, I want to protect myself from the vampiric IG platform whose explicit purpose is to hook me into spending as much of my time on the platform as possible. I want to take the time and use it to tell human stories about the struggles of making handmade objects in a world that wants you to live in your mind. That is the core of an archival approach where I write the story of persevering despite the odds being stacked against me as a parent and full time worker in an age of plague. (Yes, the pandemic is still a real lived existential threat for our immuno-compromised and chronically ill kin.) Given that most millenials and gen x folx use IG to watch the “best of Tik Tok” or twitter reposts, I am not going to bare my soul over there and compete with Stupid Pet Tricks, vol 134,000 and nibbles, the nimble gerbil.

Consequently, I want to start a workshop notes series that will accomplish the following:

• Show all the pictures of the work that is in progress that I would typically share on IG;

• Talk about the designs that I am working on which I wouldn’t share on IG because they would “perform” so poorly;

• Develop different videos of making that don’t have to be confined to IG reel standards (think sweetgrass of fiber art);

• Set a date with my page to reflect on barriers and successes in handmaking over the last week; and

• Build a devotional space dedicated to my joy in what my hands can produce.

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This is the sum total of my current handspun work from the last few months. This picture displays skeins stretching on niddy noddies, skeins in progress on drop spindles, skeins of yarn waiting to be used in weavings, and my balls of shetland roving from various Colorado flocks. Like anyone in late stage capitalism, I often question if I am “productive” enough. It helps sometimes for me to play along with that unwanted inner voice and just put everyone out on display. After standing back and surveying the results, I can always see the hours and hours I have poured into this work of spinning my own favorite gauge of single ply tapestry yarn. I also see all the work that has to be finished still to move onto larger projects.

One of the true benefits of being a luddite fiber artist who chooses to work at a slow pace at each stage of the spinning, dyeing, and weaving process is that I can move in glacial time. That is helpful for me as I traverse this culture that demands I work at lightspeed on most things that I do. As I stated above, there is a demand that we no longer be artists but content creators or entertainers. No, please glob no. I just want to make little things with my hands for the hour or so a day I have to myself before I read 20 pages of a book and fall asleep. I am not here for your amusement. I am just here to share with you in the feeling of doing my best to create something with my grubby little paws that makes my soul sing. I am here, because there is something inside me that needs to be expressed. I need to move at glacial time, sometimes taking years to complete a project, because it helps me settle into a more deliberate rhythm. A rhythm that is completely at odds with the dominant culture that surrounds me. I certainly feel more comfortable in that rhythm than I do the one that most of the institutions around me have forced me into.

I think fiber art in this way is similar to the temporal-bending gift that the Heptapods gifted humanity in the 2016 science fiction film Arrival. Last night, as LiIy and I were watching Arrival, there was one scene that flew off the screen to me. Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist tasked with learning the Heptapods language and communicating with the visitors to learn their purpose on either, remarks to a military commander upon learning their language:

“The weapon is their language. They gave it all to us…If you learn it, when you really learn it, you begin to perceive time the way that they do. So you can see what's to come. But time, it isn't the same for them. It's non-linear.”

I have often remarked that I feel outside time when doing fiber art. Sometimes, I am curious if I am speaking a totally alien language in regards to my own different experience of time as a fiber artist. Is it possible that even while using words that are understood, that we are operating across such a chasm of experience that my discussion of time is totally unconceivable? It may be that one has to share substantially in the same material culture to have the same understanding of time.

I mean, this all certainly seems possible, given that many of my core influences are from centuries ago. I am more inspired by 19th century spinners and weavers who would rather break machines than subject themselves to the yoke of some rich white guy who introduced the spinning jenny and weaving machines to take away worker autonomy and discipline workers into routinized labor schedules than I am our age of techno-robber baron capitalists. I am more inspired by the utopian socialists of the Victorian era in the Arts and Crafts Movement (e.g., William Morris) than I am the techno-libertarian’s of our current age. I am in awe of the druids of centuries ago, not any of the charismatic leaders of our mainstream religions.

Consequently, my own experience of time, sitting with druids of old, in my personal ritual circle gives me that same experience of being unmoored from linear time. I certainly feel like I can bring forward folkways from the past into the now and into the future just by my own ardent need to be in solidarity with the people from centuries ago who approached craft and spirituality the same way I do. Is that a form of time travel? I surely think it is, as I have moved against the head waters of my own culture to bring practices and ways of being back to life that I have identified as missing. This is more of a mytho-poetic time bending, rather than the sort of hard materialist time travel you hear discussed in science fiction films. Yet, its effects are the same. I live, to some degree, separate from the institutions that speed us all up and dictate what our concerns should be. This is the benefit of any form of time bending in my estimation. It gives us that separation that allow us a degree of freedom to move like a glacier in our own work, think in deeper and longer cycles, and be proactive in building the world we want to see.

All my best dear reader,

James

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