SPIRIT ALCHEMY | ART & INTUITION
There Was So Much I Needed to Be Free Of
Letting go of all I needed to release
Change was in the air in 1988. Both in my journey of becoming an artist and in my family life.
My husband’s father was in the hospital awaiting surgery when he got infected with Legionella bacteria in the water at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax.
So, death was on my mind.
I wanted to make something large. The biggest fabric picture possible.
My husband made me a wooden frame. I stretched the layers of fabric and quilt batting to it. Stab stitching the layers together. My arms outstretched to the tips of my fingers in the centre.
This piece was destined to hang in the gallery window to draw people in during my first solo show.
I spent 15 hours to draw and cut the paper pattern and fabric pieces. Another 60 hours to sew it all together.
The drawing reminded me of the stages of life. Losing physical youth. Aging. Fading away. Transforming.
Transforming like the butterfly.
A childhood nursery rhyme and image influenced this picture.
Years later, I would come to view my father as a crooked man. Dishonest. Deceiving. Not as I’d believed him to be.
I wrote this poem in 1978, when I was 19. My parents, 52 and 59.
Old Men and Butterflies
Butterfly wings flutter.
Summer sun dances,
like young fingers
through his greying hair.
Butterflies slip like butter
through his trembling hands.
Washed away in the tide
are the chances he might have had,
if only time was kinder
and butterflies weaker.
The trill to hold something.
Something young.
Something free
and pretty
The old man gazed at me.
He saw the butterfly
I thought I wrote a poem about a man I was with at eighteen. A man seventeen years older than me.
But old man could refer to my father.
This piece would have significance in 1994, when I came to suspect my father of sexual abuse.
The hands in my artwork also reminded me of my father’s hands. When drunk he’d grab my mother’s breasts, say, “Let me give them a little rub.” He then jiggled them up and down, laughing.
When I developed breasts at age ten my father no longer let me sit on his lap. He said, “You’re a big girl now.”
Instead of hugs and kisses, I received comments about my breasts.
He still held the younger girls in our family. He tickled them, laughed, and said, “Got to rub your little titties. They need hand-cultivating to grow.”
Then he’d look over me and say, “Barbara Ann’s doesn’t need any more cultivating. Hers have already grown enough.” Then he laughed.
And everyone but me laughed while I walked from the room hating his remarks, their laughter, and how my body was betraying me.
Sometimes my father’s hands were held out in front of him while acting a fool.
Other times when angry, these same hands went going for someone’s throat.
Once in my teens, my father came at me, his hands stretched in front of him like claws. Before I could fully grasp what was happening, he seized me by the shoulders and shook me, his hands going for my throat.
I managed to break free by slipping out of my winter jacket. I ran out of the house, with no time to stop and put on my winter boots. I raced through the snow in my stocking feet in the cold to escape him. I stayed with a friend and didn’t return home for days afterwards.
In my teens I was drawn to butterflies. Wore a ring with a butterfly on it. A symbol of change and metamorphosis. Of rebirth. Of freedom. A reminder I’d someday be free of my parents.
My art became the right path for me. Following my intuition. Letting my images guide me.
I was not sure how much change was coming my way.
But I knew I had to escape my cocoon.
I’m not one for regrets, but I regret I did not create the butterflies in colour. I had thought of it. But it had been too much of a leap for me at that time. Too big of a change.
Instead, I went to Valerie, a fabric artist friend, and we went through her scrap pieces of cloth, looking for suitable black, white, and grey printed fabrics for the butterflies.
My inability to change was a reflection of my black-and-white thinking. It reflected my rigidness in other areas of what I could or allowed myself to do.
I had so many fears and self-imposed rules preventing me from letting go and flying free
The piece was about more than physical death. It represented a symbolic death. One of inner transformation.
What might a new existence look like for me?
What was the old me dying to? Changing into?
This piece would also symbolize the end of working in only black, white, and grey.
As I held back and tried to fight change, the butterflies wanted to expand into colour.
Just before my show opened, small flashes of colour were in my visions. Not yet a full range of colour. But one significant colour… soon to be revealed.
It was a colour so fitting for this change. Yet, my unconscious hadn’t realized it yet.
Might you be able to guess that colour?
