Keirartworks's Blog

10:20am, Sunday April 8; home & tucked into the couch under my fish blanket, with coffee number two.

The paper chaos is less overwhelming; I’m now two thirds of my way through a financial study of what happened last year.

What a time it was.  Full of equal parts rage and abundance, despair and deep, welcomed joy.  It has changed me beyond reckoning; the woman I was a year ago seems dim and small, from here.

In the interim, I spent a great deal of money on food nourishment.  I spent a much larger amount on building a solid foundation for my own autonomy – a cabin, on property I am sole owner of since July, on tools for its maintenance and development, on a chainsaw, both symbolic and practical, since there’s a woodstove.

I bought many many books and read lots of them (still a mountain to go).  Because of what Hooks, Solnit, Beard, Maracle, Hess, Hustveldt, Veblen, and so very many authors had to say about the world, I became a feminist.

Change the term if you like; it’s not a religion.  Call it ecological theory, and add Abrams, Kumar, Bateson, and more.  It’s all. right. there. If you choose to look.

I ate my own rage – not voraciously, but steadily, until I began to understand its’ sources.  This cost me a certain extra quantity in beer and wine, though I think mostly as a soft off-switch, and thank the universe this questionable strategy didn’t take me into addiction. This ongoing diet of rage strained my psychological capacities well beyond their old limits.  Worth it.  I can’t bring to mind an intention better set than this one.

I stopped trying to prove my value as a musician.  Also stopped bending to a belief that I must continue to focus my creative energies into the small town I’ve lived and worked in for 25 years. It has been a complex pleasure to do so – both the serving and the release. 

Here, I’ve been enriched by excellent music, fine fine friends, the the enduring comfort of interconnectedness with just about everyone.  It is a place of truly great beauty and ongoing creative challenge that has shaped me, and will always call me home.

Here I’ve also encountered deep poverty, systemic mysogyny (which is everywhere),  an oft-embedded distrust of single, strong women artists (many folk just downright bewildered by this), and men who felt entitled to claim Centre in intimate relationship, thereby marginalizing my own yearnings and directional urges.

I absolutely aided and abetted in the latter, also it’s hard to live with an artist, no matter what. 

In the slow process of eating and digesting all my stored up anger, I’ve sorted out that a large part of my chronic relationship pain was the result of direct resistance to old, old patriarchic assumptions.  It was less about the men I loved, several who are still good friends of mine – (hello and love if you’re reading this) – than these old, cultural assumptions.

This is a relief to know.

I spent another large chunk on higher education – investment in my own expansion into the world beyond this physical community.

This has given me respectful insight into my own thinking mind, and uncovered a hunger to study still more.  I now actively seek a tribe of thinker-artists who are at work to help solve the complex puzzles of right now.  Wherever they may be.

I will finish this masters I’m in and find a way go to Glasgow to do another, in visual art.  My dad’s parents were born there.  I want to touch that place, for them and for me.

After years of real poverty (it’s not just me and my friends – most artists live this way – here’s an excellent CBC article), the abundance of last year made my internal poverties clearer to me, by contrast.

Poverty is limitation.  It is the word ‘No.’ , and the word ‘Can’t.’ 

It begins with the experience of one’s perceived value in the context of family, and the family’s perceived value in society.  This perception is rooted in early experience and largely defines how each of us present ourselves in the world. If we do not own who we are as separate from what these early experiences taught us, then more often than not, we present ourselves as having limited value (as our experience has taught), and we get that same response mirrored back to us.  It manifests in physical, emotional, psychological  – and financial …poverty.  There’s so much to be said about this process.

My recently re-read journals are a chronicle from all my teenage and adult years.  In some, every third page is a budget, a financial strategy, an income projection; a detailed examination of which debt gets paid first after monthly expenses and before food.  Every page is threaded with anxiety, even through joys and exuberances.  

No matter how much personal power you may have, poverty can and will eat it all, over time.  Add race, gender and class to this, and getting out is nigh impossible without the kind of life-sustaining help that doesn’t end up owning you.

Here’s what MLK has to say about it (a facebook post – write to me if you’re [understandably] not on fb-I’m digging for the original).

I am humbled and grateful to be white, Scots-Canadian and further privileged by a family inheritance which would make a massive difference in the lives of many of my friends.  Determined, also, to use what financial, creative, and intellectual power I have in support of a cultural system that includes and empowers rather than sustaining what we know is destructive and abusive.

Full-time artists know what the underside of the poverty line looks like.  It gives us, among other things, a kind of street cred.  We are a tribe who has learned what day jobs are best for paying rent but not draining creative energy so that studio work can continue.  Day jobs are for some a last resort, since jobs like that are hard to find.  So we teach, we build projects and programs, we collaborate, we apply for grants, we community fund our cds, exhibitions and tours, we make it so, so that the art work can happen.

We generate far more than just paintings, or songs, or books, or films, or plays.

Last fall, my body stopped me in my tracks, as a bad bow-arm injury resulted in the resurgence of a rotator cuff injury sustained in the building of what is now my ex-husband’s house, the paltry settlement for which also happened last year. Complex, yes?

I’m pretty tough so I let this go on far too long, until the pain was constant and debilitating. Then I surrendered, and stopped generating.  At all, for a while.

And I spent some money on time.  Time – to savour the moment, to learn the song of my cabin, to dig deeply into school, to write, to think.

More than any of that, to simply Be, for a while.

Of course, this has led me back into the studio.

conte pastel, in progress, from yesterday.  I love Paul Klee, and his colour.  Some day his colour theory book in english translation will be affordable and I will find a way to buy it.

What the tax people will get is a page of numbers that all add up.

This is the real story.

A sideways start to the day so my antennae have been awry.

I’ve been picking up on things I wasn’t expecting to see or consider, so experiencing the odd sensation of living out two narratives at once:  the planned, artistic inquiry into functional art and the role of repetitive action in studio work, and the unplanned trundle through jumbled pieces of family story interaction/reaction have overlapped themselves.

I’m experiencing a kind of synesthesia in which my mother’s story about her conversation about social media, conspiracy theory, the deep south, Alberta and guns is intermingling –  with an image of a cotton plant’s blossom and fibre spun into threads then woven together make fabric.

I can see long long bolt of wet, hand-scrunched white cotton, and a handful of skilled Indonesian workers adding three sets of strong dye.  I can see them, precise and efficient, building the wax print.  Then more dye, more scrunching, more dye again, add sunlight, sprinkle setting compound from a bucket.  Remove the wax resist, then wash. Package and send from Indonesia to Canada, where I then buy two yards each of several bolts to make functional art with.

Thinking about how our notions of guns as a necessary protection is printed into us, just as racism and misogyny is. How for those of white, European descent, colonial privilege is dyed into our very nature.  How a wax print resist can protect part of an these old ideas from being erased by bleach.  How after the shock of change the small part not erased still holds, but differently – transformed into a beautiful repeated pattern, altered by the new colours around it.

Two complexities inform each other in my sideways day, and that’s just fine.

The videos below describe how old and incredible this process is in Indonesia;  it’s time for me to get back into the studio.

Chickens in the background in this modern batik making video from Java. Note:  this is not traditional Javanese batik – for a video description of this with beautiful gamelan soundtrack go here

A strategy emerges…

Frustrated, once again, by an intolerable situation I find myself yearning, once again, to be in a position of greater power.  A very wise, intensely intelligent friend gently reminds me that there is already enormous power is in what I do, what I make, and the way I offer this to the world.  I’m grateful for the reminder. It’s all too easy to forget my own resources when I’m staring at closed doors.

She is right about it.  I do feel this power each time I gather the time, the focus and the funding to weave thought together with art and music, dig into the deeper meanings of experience to produce and present a show, a book, a well-turned blog or a song.  In those moments I live at the epicentre of my own authorship, which is the most powerful place anyone can speak from.

When I am there, especially when collaborating with others who work from a place of integrity, I can embrace diversity and rise above petty manipulations with ease. I can use my strength (and the humility that goes with it) to connect, include, direct attention to, propose solution for, mentor, encourage and inspire others to find this place for and in themselves.

This is real power- the kind that empowers others, who then empower more others, and others so that positive empowerment extends throughout the entire complex ecosystem of this planet. It includes, connects, relates, nourishes, and directly addresses disparity.

I can’t always be in that place. When I’m out gathering experience, sharpening insight, building resources and connections for production, I often bump into my own triggers, stumble upon long-smoldering fires that light up when poked. It is a place of questioning I go to, and many times those questions lead to more closed doors.  No matter how fiercely I glare, I cannot burn a hole in them; they will not open to let the healthy air through.

Behind most of these doors is the place where our five-thousand-year-old patriarchy still thrives in self-perpetuating, ever spiralling madness.

But things are changing.  Doors are becoming less opaque, so we can begin to discern the goings-on behind them.  No matter how benignly they’ve learned to present themselves, the active players appear in increasing contrast to the determined inclusivity of the marginalized voices we hear and join, in global women’s marches, Time’s Up, Black Lives Matter, March for our Lives, and so many more.  I’m relieved by this, even in the midst of my abhorrence of the willful damage that continues to be done.  It’s better to have names and faces to represent patriarchic culture than rail against the blank wall of systemic misogyny and racism.

It was in this context of frustration that I watched the footage and photographs, read the written responses to the March for our Lives movement two mornings ago.  As I did, I cried.  Tears of gratitude.

The Rise Above is important because it fosters clarity and wastes no energy on diversionary tactics.  I saw real rage, real grief transformed through integrity into the clear, directed action of millions upon millions of people – led by youth.  They will not stop, and nor will I.

There’s a reason that Tolkien’s work endures.  The ring of power melts in the very fires that forged it – our own European industrial revolution, run terribly, horribly amok.

Things are changing. We’ve all had far more than enough.

I find myself looking back through eight years.

This is a lot like my recent experience of standing inside Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrors.  There is no floor, no boundary, no anchor point, nothing concrete, just a feeling of wonder, rising into awe.

As I scan and assess these eight years passed through the lens of now, it is like that. Everything I had thought to be firmly rooted in permanence is changed. This includes me. It includes how and what I remember.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009

I think of Stephen Hawking, who died on the same day I visited Kusama’s rooms.  Who spent his life exploring the phenomenon of time, and published a book in 1988 which translated mathematical code for us.  In it he wrote, “You cannot predict the future.”.

He also wrote this: “The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.”. This I have more trouble wrapping my head around.  Perhaps Kusama offers clues in those infinity rooms. Maybe all that I no longer recognize after eight years of life is a form of living proof?

Also Kusama. (please forgive my finger upper left)

In this house, where I have lived these past four years is a collection of things from two family ‘anchor’ homes which were dismantled and dispersed, in 2013 and 2015.  Also here is one lamp, two plants, books, a piano, a chair and a bed which come from another house I built (with my now-ex husband) from 2006 until 2013.  In the room above me are art supplies and equipment from my factory building studio which I opened in 2009 and closed in 2017 – another home dismantled and dispersed.

studio, January 2017, with my friend Knuckles the wise polydactyl cat

On the walls here are paintings I’ve made from five solo art shows dating from 1998 through to 2014.  Three of them are directional paintings, West, East and North, that describe summers I spent in a ‘hut’ studio at the farm my parents gifted to my estranged sister and I in 2004 as Tennants-in-common.  After a prolonged and emotional struggle, my sister and I agreed to dissolve the joint arrangement in 2017.  As a result I no longer own any interest in the farm. Some of the trees I planted there are now twenty-five feet tall – they live their own complex story now, and will far outlive our little manouverings.

The final room of Kusama’s exhibition  – these stickers have been/ are being placed by us, the visitors.  Over time, the physical things in the room appear to lose their form.  Another kind of dismantle/dispersal, where increase in entropy moves in the direction of time.

The paintings on my walls resonate differently than they did when I made them, as I gaze from this place of me, now.  My sense of ownership is radically different than it was when things seemed more concrete, more permanent.

Who was that woman who painted these things, I wonder?  The way I might wonder about a woman reading a book on the subway.

I find this liberating.

Here’s what Oxford English Dictionary has to say about entropy:

Not sure I can articulate this, yet.

Harness has become a listening blanket.

Rage has become discernment,

patient, like a well-fed shark

constantly in motion.

Pain has become beauty,

complex, like music.

like sky and lake.

There is time.

I am grateful for this, since it will take some time to make a new story.

I can feel the new story coming

from across the lake.