Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Mondays just insist on being Mondays. At least I got a chance to work on redesigning the American Tapestry Alliance website, so that the project heads into a test phase. I also did get to physical therapy (actually, I really like the whole process of p.t. where I get to focus on something non-intellectual). However, I didn't get to the loom. My impatience always grows if I don't have time at the loom.

News from Monday: it turns out I don't have a purchaser for "Cloth of Construction (Tarps)". The deal fell through. Maybe that's not a bad thing. Travis and I started talking about designing a house to hang the piece. He found it a delightfully humorous idea: to make a construction (a house) for a construction (a tapestry) about construction (a building). As usual, I missed the point and he had to explain it to me. ;) The circularity did, indeed, delight me. Now I can't drop the thought and it keeps popping up in my brain. (Brains are singularly difficult and taciturn when it comes to control.)

Getting back to the "Tapestry Today" exhibition at Soundscape Gallery in Santa Rosa.... and the idea of art and intimacy. Perhaps the "small scale = intimate" formula was my own invention. I can't recall exactly how the relationship emerged. No doubt I discovered it when small tapestries began showing up, roughly around 1988. Most small objects draw us in close in order to see them. The viewer's proximity and inspection can induce intimacy only in the broadest of terms, based on physically being close. As I think about it more, a sense of intimacy more likely comes into play with closeness to other human beings and, by extension, animals. I'm less sure that I could say the same would apply to an inanimate object, such as a rock or a twig. To put it another way, the chance of triggering the intimate response with closeness drops as the distance from humanness of the object increases. A featureless stone will probably not trigger a sense of intimacy but it is likely that a stone carved as a figure will.

I want to contrast two pieces from this show but I need more time to think about how to do that.