cliodhna’s wave

I started this about eight months ago, got caught up in other stuff and have been working on it steadily for the last month. I am making the patches and embroidering them and then will put them together. The picture here is the first third laid out so i can see how it looked.

This is my workshop, small I know, a table in the corner but the view out the window is wonderful. I left my oil paints in chihuahua and so I don’t need a big table right now.

I am liking Guatemala. It rained today and the thunder rumbled and there is always a breeze which is nice in comparison to Chihuahua, where it was either really cold or intensly hot. I went shopping in the central crafts market and bought some bags and textiles. Have to send them home now to the folks. I promised my sister a wall hanging for her new apartment.

I am getting ready to drive. A scary prospect because they are even worse drivers here than in Chihuahua. On a par with Mexico city I would say. I kinda know the layout now though and how to find my way to places. It looks simple, laid out in a grid system of Zones, avenues and streets, but in actuality the one way streets and the diagonals twist everything and an address that looks simple on paper becomes a maze of puzzles when confronted with reality. A house is numbered for its distance from the edge of the street or the avenue its on. I still don’t quite get it….

People here routinely work 24hr  shifts and the security guards at the hotel we were staying at work 48 hour shifts. I don’t understand this, how can you expect anyone to do a job properly if you work them 48 hours? and what is wrong with even a twelve hour shift, send them home for sleep and rest and get them back in the next day. Makes me appreciate coming from a country where the wealth is more balanced and even the minimum wage, small though it is, is actually enough to live on. Like in Mexico, you can survive on the minimum wage here, just about, but anything else to better yourself or buy books, electronics, cars, forget about it. Books here are twice the price of Ireland or the states. I suppose its a good technique to preserve the status quo, if you only make enough to survive and feed your family you won’t have enough time off to think about the injustice of it or do something stupid like form a union or demand better wages.

I am getting ready for a craft fair coming up in Nov. Its in Marlay Park Dublin. I am busy busy making things for it and trying to balance the art part with the craft part.

Now, both are both, if you catch my drift, my art is a craft I am constantly honing and changing and tweaking and seeking new ways to get from the image/feeling in my head to the finished piece hanging in the wall. But in the context of this post let us say that ‘art’ is what I do purely because I love doing it and ‘craft’ are the cutesy small things I am doing to sell.

I find myself getting worried about the money end and plan heart patches and bird iron on patches and more hanging birds and although I do like making these, they are not my lifes dream. I get off balance into time based linear thinking sometimes of having to do more more more…. exhausting

Back to balance, heart based, eternity, we are here on earth to learn how to love and ahhhhhh, ok, I will make something special today, something from the doodles that are hanging on my wall stuck up with masking tape waiting for their time.

But first I will make a few bird patches, cause I haven’t made any yet and I want to see how they turn out. That is the other part of the balance, small versus large, silly versus profound…..

The pictures in this post are all part of a series of small embroideries I did. I wanted to make small jewel like squares of rich decoration. I layered cotton between gauzes and used metallic threads. They are all 4 inches by 4 inches and very cute! I changed the usual edging I do from lace to rough stiching round the edge of the fabric.

x cliodhna

Hi! to enter the giveaway please comment on either this post or my facebook page GreenBirdDreaming…

I have decided its time for another giveaway.

Now to the theme of the giveaway. The Small Achievement Award.

I was thinking the other day about how I run myself down and always try to work harder and push myself further and think ‘oh, i am not working fast enough’ or ‘I am not being good enough’. I work with a Toltec teacher and part of this work is seeing myself and finding out who I really am, finding where I stop myself from shining but also just be happy where I am right now and accept myself. I, as explained above, push myself in this also and he tells me ‘but Cliodhna, you are great! you are an artist living in Chihuahua and you travel here and travel there and you paint beautiful things’ and I think, ‘you know he’s right, I have done a lot and i don’t give myself credit for what I have done, I just run myself aground on my thoughts of what I didn’t do or how I did it wrong’.

Thats where this post comes from, not the big achievements that are in papers or make news on the television but the little achievements we don’t give ourselves credit for, being a mother raising wonderful children, painting, making a cake, being nice to the neighbour, listening to someone, learning to drive, traveling, just being me, whatever you have done or do that you don’t recognise as an achievement.

I am going to officialy give myself a pat on the back for living in another country, learning another language, and on an even smaller level changing a lock in a door which took me a while to figure out but all finished and I had a perfectly working chub lock without calling a locksmith to do it! I was quite proud of that

Comment below to enter the giveaway and if you like, share something small you have achieved you would like to congratulate yourself for. Can be anything!

x cliodhna

Fishes swim in the pool of our minds. Wolf watches the pool and listens to the fish. The Bird takes the messages form Wolf and carries them to the sky.

Does anyone else have this problem?

I want to do big stuff, then I want to do small pieces,

I want to do huge quilts that cover a wall and then I want to do tiny stuffed birds with beads hanging off them.

I want to make skirts, underwear, felted hats,

I want to dye my own fabrics with the plants in my surroundings and I want to save time by buying the already wonderful luscious fabrics that exist out there

I want to do commercial pieces that will sell and make me money and i want to do one off exclusive squares of beauty that take days and days and you can’t possibly sell them for enough to recoup time, materials and emotional input

I wish there were four of me….

Balance Clio, balance, and of course the word I am still improving on…. patience

I realized something yesterday. I will find the downside of everything I do. I make something or achieve something and then I will judge it against others or not being good enough and I will make it a failure.

Take threadless for example. I make t shirt designs for threadless and at the back of my mind I know I won’t win, I say I am not cool enough or I am too ‘girly’ for the mainly hip younger male crowd that seems to get designs printed. But the thing is I have good ideas I just don’t have the Photoshop skills to really make them shine and I find they improve slowly as I go. A part of me takes it personally when I get a low score and feel like I am failing again whereas really I am pitching to the wrong audience and there are lots of people out there who like my art and show support and I don’t count those but I count the people who don’t like my stuff. Failure.

Doesn’t mean I am going to stop making designs for threadless, it’s actually been an education to do them. I stretch my skills at graphic art and sometimes the best way to really see a design objectively and see how I could push it further or bring it closer to what I had in mind is to put it out there in front of people. And threadless has some really wonderful artists and designers submitting designs and I learn from them too as to what is possible. I just need to stop judging myself a failure.

I suppose that’s the balance. Knowing my capabilities and skills and how best I use them and where I can improve them and then the other side of believing in what I do right now and not belittling it because it doesn’t measure up to where I think I should be or what others are doing. And also to do things for my own pleasure and practice and not to be secretly looking for approval from the audience I am showing it to.

I remember when I was younger and my mum would always make sure we knew how good we were in relation to the others we were going in against in competition. She had them all pegged and pinned into the level of their skill and value as musicians. I was never going to win, I wasn’t good enough, but sure I could try anyway if I wanted. I did want, and I wanted to prove her wrong, but you know, I always ended up proving her right. There were always lots of kids ‘better’ than me. It became a measure of my worth and still is really but now I don’t want it anymore. To see something is to own it and to own it is to be able to leave it behind. I don’t know what I would have done in her place, if a child of mine was going in for a competition that I knew she wasn’t going to win. I think I would probably say nothing at all and just wish her luck and do her best and maybe I wouldn’t put them in competitions in the first place. Its not her fault, she was just following the track she was taught and it was fun also. We did loads of choir competitions and they were fun to head off to with the class.

Maybe that’s it, I am still in competition and wanting to win and never getting the prize because the prize doesn’t really exist anymore. I am in competition with myself for elusive perfection and self approval that I never give myself because no matter what I do there is always the part I failed to do. I don’t congratulate myself for having learnt the piece and practiced and got up and played in front of everyone I judge the fact I wasn’t the best in the eyes of everyone else out there. I don’t say wow well done I have had a few exhibitions and sold work and make art that makes me happy and fulfills me I judge myself that I don’t sell more or don’t have a big gallery behind me or am not ‘well known’ in the academic art circles which in reality I don’t want to belong to anyway. I wait for the world to recognize me when I am not seeing myself.

wow, just had a thought…. maybe thats why I paint faces all the time… I need someone to see me!

Standing on Sandymount strand one early evening with my bike propped against my hip I gaze out into the sands and pools of shimmering water left by the outgoing tide that stretch for easily a mile out of shore. The sky is that wonderful almost transparent blue/purple that has a promise of mystery and a hint of things hidden about to be revealed. The sun has just dropped below the horizon of houses behind me, the moon is just peeking over the horizon in front of me and just up to the right Venus shines in her first star glory.

I begin to do a mental exercise. I imagine it all in 3d. I put the sun behind me and the earth a ball on which I stand spinning on its axis on its orbit around the sun. I put the moon on its smaller orbit around the earth and Venus on her orbit, a smaller one closer to the sun and moving faster then we are. I put aside all notions of up or down or flat orbits and I place us all in space, where these considerations do not apply

I play with this idea for a minute, and then suddenly it hits me with full force. It becomes real. I look up/down/sideways and grip my bike tightly as if to give me weight. There is nothing above me. Nothing, really nothing holding me onto this spinning ball we call home. There is no such thing as ‘sky’; that is a word made to give us a safe concept of having a roof over our heads. Only reason its blue during the day is because of reflecting light. I have incredible vertigo for a few seconds and then slowly it passes and I am once more feet on solid ground again.

Thank you gravity, whatever you are!

wonderful!

nap done and I am feeling a lot more mentally together. Teaching is exhuasting. I am out of practise of how to appear like the stern teacher and I used to hate that bit anyway and also with a strange class it takes a while to get to know them. Its funny, with the discipline bit, I am not sure what my mother has in place as to what is acceptable and what is not but when someone does something thats really out of line then the rest of them freeze for a second. Then they realise I am not going to do anything and they go back to normal.. Trouble is in a classroom messing and noise escalates rather than them keeping themselves calm. They just get giddier and giddier.

Plus I am unknown territory so they have to try everything to see if they can get away with it. They started with the fake coughing round little break today until I offered to send anyone who wanted to go up to the principal to ring their mothers and tell them they were sick. That stopped that in a hurry. I think whats so tiring about it is that you can’t switch off for a second.

Schools have changed. When I was in primary it was all about sewing and art and drama and singing and projects with history and geography and maths fitted in round the sides of those. Now its all curriculum and there seems to be no time for what I would consider the important things. I ask myself why teach a young child endless facts about geography that he or she won’t remember when we should be teaching them creativity at a time when their minds are still forming and are open to new ways of thinking. Teach them the facts later when they will learn them faster. If I had a child I would definitely send them to a steiner or a waldorf school or teach them at home if I could.

Their pictures turned out great. I would take photos but the camera isn’t at home so…

I had a dream years and years ago and I was sitting beside a canyon looking at an old leatherbound book which had the words “Where dragons be and how to find them” written on the front cover. I was looking at the index page because of course I wanted to know how to find them when up the canyon a huge bird came soaring. It dissolved into a thousand pixelly parts and then reformed facing towards me and took off past me with such power. I was left sitting there with my mouth open but no-one else saw it in the dream. I never did find out how to find dragons, guess I wasn’t supposed to know that information at that time.

I have changed a lot since that time. I lived in my dreams back then, It was quite cool for a while, I could dream on order and I had all sorts of mad strange lessons and journeys and I think looking back I was learning a lot on a level I didn’t know about. Time came though when I realized I wasn’t capable of holding down a proper job or manifesting all these dreams I had into reality. I was so afraid of failing (or succeeding) or making mistakes or not being able to live up to my own dreams and my knowledge about myself that I was stuck in this world and so I made the decision to come out, to quit obsessing about my inner world and start manifesting in my outer one.

The thing I know about myself is that I always get what I ask for.. always.. and this is not from an ego point of view, it amazes me sometimes when I look back and remember ‘Oh yeah, I asked for this, cool, thanks universe’. Of course this cuts both ways, I remember being frustrated with myself that I wasn’t in touch with my negative emotions, I was living on the surface all the time. Boy oh boy did I have a doozer of a year and a half after that wish but I came out the other side wiser and more in touch with myself and more accepting of my negativity and smarting from a few painful lessons.

So to come to place I think of as the Jonathon Livingston Seagull place. To learn how to ‘not ask’ but to stand so still you can traverse time and space. To learn how to be in that precious space of peace where creativity flows without hindrance, without judgement or comparison or fear or dissaproval. To leave ‘trying’ behind and just be. To let myself do that with my art and my pictures but also my life. Let it flow to where it needs to go so always I am in the right place , and the right place is always here.

I feel right now I am on the beginning of a cycle, cool feeling, I am planning work, wanting to get down to it. more oil pictures, these pictures I’m doing for threadless will get turned into embroideries. Patience, plant some seeds and see what sprouts. I said to someone recently my lesson is slow development and patience with myself is something I have had to learn. Let things develop slowly, don’t rush, don’t push, I will get to where I want to go to eventually with my stuff well learnt and well prepared, with calmness and in heart.

I am settling with Paul also, wonderful feeling of deepness that I always just accepted I would probably never find and of course scared the shit out of me when it arrived . Just to make ya’ll jealous here is a picture of the swimming hole we were in recently and I was swimming in a looking around at where I had found myself in my life saying “Cool! thanks universe”

so I have been thinking. I think we women need to reclaim our space. The feminists were right! I have been thinking about art and galleries and history and what is accepted by the establishment.

I am talking about our silence, our willingness to accept outer conditions of beauty and artfullness that come from an intellectual level. The mind (our own mind). The mind puts conditions and wants meaning and thought and wants to control. I remember being in art collage looking through the history books and the vast majority were men. Now I know this is old news and I was angry then but I recently had a realisation that women let them do this. The men set up establishments that they considered very important and set up rules of painting and how to’s and what not to’s and said that anything that wasn’t accepted by them was not good art. (i know I am sweeping the whole of history with a very big brush here) and the thing is we believed them! we women started to try to be like them to get into the establishments they set up. Think about an alternative history where women respected their own womenhood and supported each other. Look at native american tribes or aboriginal tribes where the men and the women each have rich separate connections and rituals that honour and value the validity of being male and being female as well as connecting as a whole tribe.

If european history had had that how different would it be now? It also took men to break out of the rules at the end of the 19th century with Van Gogh and Gaughain and Monet and Picasso and all the groundbreakers from that time and yes there were women then too but where are they now? why are they not household names known by everyone?

I know whoever is reading this might be thinking this is a bit of a rant but this was a big revelation to me. As Paul asked me last night, (after he was contemplating ants and they didn’t even know he was there) what is so big I can’t even see it. So on a personal level how have I been trying to fit with a male view of art and self expression, without even realising it.

There are women out there following their own path and I wish them all the good luck and energy in the world because it is hard. Looking at Ireland right now and there seems to be a fashion for intellectual art that ‘means’ something. When it is good they are meaningful and insightful and I love seeing them and pondering them but there is the other side too that we must honour and maybe it is time to create it ourselves. People have the buying power, women have the buying power!

I love the women artists I am finding on the web, and all the quilting and stitching shows, especially in the states are totally inspiring. They have gone past the functionality of the humble quilt to a piece of art work that shines with power. I love when I find beauty and true self expression whether it be male or female. because that what it comes down to, if we deny the female it doesn’t matter what sex we are, we are only living half a life. Its so important for us women to speak out and be vocal and make our lives how we want it, for ourselves first but also if the women are silent then the whole community is only living half a life.

The female is fluid and limitless, creating new life, bringing forth, breaking boundries and overflowing the old. She is death because to create something new you have to say goodbye to the old. She is darkness because the seed needs darkness to germanate before bursting forth in new life. She is light because light flows everywhere. She nutures and guides and holds and encourages with no reservations, no rules apply, nothing is to little to be passed over.

The male is structure and buildings and solidity, the male brings forth the dreams and the creativity of the female and gives it form. Shapes it with tools and thinks up new ways of forming and controlling substances to hold the creation of the female. Builds buildings, creates laws, sees limits, names things, puts order on chaos,

The male is lost in the pure fluidity and surging of life of the female and the female cannot function in the pure laws and structure of the male. We are all male and female, it is our job to balance the two.

ok, hope any of this makes sense. I know its a bit of a ramble. It makes sense in me but sort of in a round soft shape that is hard to put words on. It is a feeling of freedom for me, a sense of a whole other place that is there to be explored that I really didn’t value before. A place that is very open and welcoming and warm. Women have to find this place first because we are closer to it and then when we honour it and honour ourselves and each other then it doesn’t matter what the ‘establishment’ wants, we have our own place of power.

x clio