MARIE ALI
quilts
February 5 - March 4, 2011
DREAMTIME AND CREATIVE NOW
I was having dinner with my four year old niece Emaline and told her a fairy tale about the girl who had to knit seven sweaters for her bewitched brothers to break an evil spell, how a prince falls in love with her, and her brothers freed, ending with "…and they lived happily…" and Emaline added "they lived happily ever after right now." That is the true moral of the story. Creation always happens in the now. As I was thinking about my artist's statement I wanted to go to the basics not a pedigree. The joy of life and of expression happen freshly and with a certain attitude of respect for whatever arises and wants to be expressed. Art is not meant to be decorative or pretty, but significant and touching.
So I would like to give an example of the impetus of the Dreamtime quilt. This quilt came from a dream I had that felt very powerful to me so that I felt compelled to bring it into form. In this dream I am standing in a line of aborigines from Australia who were showing me their Dreamtime-an eternal time, sometimes called mythic time, even the timeless perennial. As if we were in a movie, a searing desert appeared with the heat causing the view to wave-a mirage of heat waves as we zoom in, crossing a body of water, with a cave on the far side. We are not in the scene at all but the scene is moving in front of us until we have entered the cave. My eyes adjust slowly from the blinding light to the subtle skylights from the holes above the cave, and in the dark walls I can perceive shining seams of fire opals. Some of the opalescent colors are reflected on the water yet in the shallows I can see small gems of opals that have fallen from the wall. I realize in the dream that the people I'm with don't collect or sell the gems for themselves, but make this sacred place more beautiful by taking the clay and adding the jewels in patterns on the walls.
This is the end of the dream, but not of the tale. As I often do several times a year, I took time to do a retreat with several other people and started this dream in fabric. I had gathered batiks and hand dyed fabrics and began to cut out the quilt and lay it out. I collapsed the movement of the dream into one scene so that the seam of fire opals is apparent as well as the water, the cave, and the desert sands. There is no need to elaborate on the process of quilting here, but in time the quilt was assembled and the hand appliqués and hand quilting was in progress when a friend who had moved to Australia came to quilt with me. She brought with her the answer to a question of mine: what is the connection between the Aborigines and fire opals? It turns out that she hadn't seen her aboriginal friends but instead Googled it. Try aborigines/fire opals.
I'll try to summarize the creation myth that came up first. There was first man with his two wives Wisdom and Fertility -he is fishing and they are walking and talking beside the river when suddenly a huge crocodile sees the women and eats them. The hero chases the crocodile up the river and they have a huge fight-the thrashing of the croc's tail carves out a lake but he slips away and the hero continues the chase up the river. Then they fight again and carve another lake, but this time the hero slays the monster and slits the belly and takes out the women. However, even though they are whole, they are dead. As he mourns a little black ant comes along and bites the women bringing them back to life. (The power of the small.) There are two lakes in western Australia and Fire opal mines are next to one. Legend has it that the croc's scales became the fire opals.
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Later I also read in Mutant Message Down Under that there is such a sacred cave. So, in a way, it's not exactly my creation, my role here is to deliver a message also. This is what art IS actually: a message without an owner-if it communicates you are the next one to pass on the message. We are all connected, united really into one fabric, just as all these pieces make a quilt. We all are important, we all create all the time, this is our nature.
The tree in the Dreamtime quilt wasn't in the dream itself, nor was the swirl of a whirlpool, yet they were needed. After I added these I saw something happening that also wasn't in the dream: out of the whirlpool or current there came the night sky though the dream was in a searing hot daytime sky. I only then saw that night sky as Dreamtime birthing the universe with all the galaxies made of a google of stars.
This leads to the rest of the quilts-the ashes of first stars are the nebulas The nebula is birthed when a star goes nova as in the quilt I made as a friend was dying called Ashes From the First Stars. She slept under it through a long year. Like an ouroborus or a phoenix, a supernova not only leaves these beautiful gaseous displays which the Hubble telescope reveals for us, it also is the cradle of new star births which you can see in the Veil Nebula quilt and the Orion Nebula. The Red quilt is part of an abstract series and is made for a dear friend who is dealing with Parkinson's-quilts are for comfort, healing, and for good dreams.
A few lines from Rumi via John Moyne and Coleman Barks translating:
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?...
But don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation,
So everyone will understand the passage,
WE HAVE OPENED YOU. |
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