Textile Tuesday::Mill Village Mandala’s

I’ve been pretty inconsistent about blogging lately and I’m not sure if I should be blogging about my art, my organizing, organizing tips, project’s I’ve been working on, the direction I’m headed (Organizing for artists!) or what??? So many questions and I’ve been super busy so I’ve just fallen silent. I will figure this out, it will emerge and hopefully my customers and readers can help me figure it out! Tell me what you want to see and hear.

In the meantime I’ll share something I’ve been really excited to be working on. I was selected to be an Installation Artist for Enough Pie Awakening III:Solstice event in Charleston this coming Saturday.  Here’s a little about the pieces I’ll be installing on site for the event, how they came to be and why I gave them the name Mill Village Mandala (s) (Detailed views below).

In my current work I spend a great deal of time helping clients find order where there has been chaos. I look around their personal universe for patterns and clues, noticing areas of chaos and order. I use the information that I gather in their universe to help them re-define a new sense of order in their space and life.

In essence I help transform chaos to order with them and for them.

Helping clients through the cathartic proc

ess of releasing things is essential to the work we do together. These wire hangers symbolize the release of excess “stuff”, the waste and neglect of our valuable resources in our lives. As the idea to use them emerged, they began to quite literally represent a tangled past and what beauty can emerge when we begin to re-vision our future with more order.

The mandala is a beautiful and sacred example of how form and pattern can emerge from all the microcosms of the universe. My vision for sharing this mandala installation is to create a metaphorical gateway for our community to come together through place making and creative expression. Tapping my “eye” for creating patterns, I used recycled materials – cast off from the bi-products of the textile industry like hangers, recycled tee shirts and natural indigo dye – to realize this artistic vision.

The Mill Village is a reference to the history of the textiles industry which migrated from New England to South Carolina after the industrial revolution. In these Villages the ‘Patterns of life’ were dictated by the mill owners including the currency used, religious practice and places of residence and business.

I hope to ‘let the sun shine in’ on our wasteful appetite for textiles and share the beautiful patterns these cast off materials can create as a metaphor for how we can re-envision just about anything to transform it from overlooked to beautiful and useful.