Friday 21 September 2007

I did a Tarot reading to explore my creative block….

I deal the cards until I come to the a Major card.
In answer to the questions:
What drives me? - The Chariot was the first and only card.
What blocks me? - there were six cards before Le Pape appears.
Advice? - Temperance was the next card.


I’m driven by the will to achieve, but I’m failing to take the reins and have been left stranded by prevarication. I lack confidence in my abilities - not so much technical, more conceptual.
Its time to make something for, and about myself…. something that in years to come my great grandchild might come across and treasure.
To make this ’thing’ I need to break out of constrained thinking, and stop worrying about making a mess and wasting materials. I need to trust the process and allow this thing to evolve.

There’s more of course. I could spend hours exploring the cards, but already an idea is starting to form.


I first read Clarissa Pinkola Estes _Women Who Run With the Wolves_ in the early 1990s, and it remains close to hand. There’s a section entitled The Scapecoat…
… is a coat that details in painting, writing, and with all manner of things pinned and stitched to it all the name-calling a woman has endured in her life, all the insults, all the slurs, all the traumas, all the wounds, all the scars.



A few years ago I worked through an unhappy period by making ‘painful’ fragments - torn, burned, manipulated fragments of fabric, fibre and thread. I called them ‘A hundred tiny hurts and a few bloody big ones’. But as I worked them, I found myself adding more and more tiny areas of sparkle - the silver linings, the glimmers of hope, the pearls in the oyster.

I don’t want to make a Scapecoat. But I would like to make a Lifecoat…. something that charts the triumphs and tribulations, the achievements and the losses, the hopes and the dreams I have had and continue to have. I feel the cold more these days, and with the central heating set to the minimum to do my bit to save this amazing planet, I need a robe to keep me warm and comforted at home.

So today the plan is that I shall make myself a robe, using the softest fabrics and embroidered with metaphors of my life. Tomorrow I may regret stating this decision, but at least it’s a foothold out of the quagmire of indecision.

4 comments:

jude said...

great idea, i did one for myself at a low point and it worked wonders. nothing like wrapping yourself in yourself.

Sunny -- aka Matriarch said...

I love your idea of a "self robe". Your Tarot reading could have been for me. I was amazed to read exactly the answers to my own block. I wonder if for you, as is true for me, fear of cruel criticism creates obstacles to creativity. 'What if my creative efforts aren't as good as some one else's creative efforts?' This plays in my head. Perhaps it plays in yours. Turn it off. You are an artist. Your art should not look like that of any other person. Your art should be as true to you, as individual and unique, as your face.
Believe in you.
Sunny
http://chroniclife-today.blogspot.com/

Cathie said...

I love what Matriarch pointed out that your "art should be as true to you, as individual and unique as your face," and I will add to that it is and will continue to be, "a beautiful and enlightening reflection of who you are and will someday be." I think your idea of creating something deliciously soft and comforting made from the fibers of your "being" is brilliant. This is truly a moment when "you" become your art and your art "becomes" you. Rejoice in that special place.

shula said...

I like your method of reading cards.