Symphony Hanna
Textured
We are the only three people in these woods.
When I process wool from something spinnable, to spun, I see a
measurement of time, and I am brought to the ideas of the Fates spinning our
collective lives. Wool is warm, scratchy, soft, and fibrous. It is complex and
always smells of dusty comfort. I’m going to the hearth, a place where comfort seems natural.
I look at things I'm making with great maniacal laughter, they are
creations of intuition and a bit of obsession. I am trying to create a space
I’ve never been to. I place my rooted realities and memories into the physical
things I'm making and then into my longing to live in a fantasy world, more
specifically, a past that doesn't exist. An idealized version of a farm, a
simplistic life, living with the land.
I work with wheels, water, warmth, and weave.
I’d like to say I deal in memories, and that my work is supposed to make
you think of the past. While it’s true, the past I'm trying to create is from a
land of magic, elves, and grog. It is not my past, nor my future. It is where I
want to live, and it is in my mind and of my memories; part of my world, my reality.
When my grandfather would come to visit he’d hide fairy wands in trees
for me to find. They were toothpicks with the plastic fuzzy tops. This is my
work, an intersection of memory, and an imaginary indoor-outdoor space based in the fuzzing of reality.
The yarn umbrella spins. Single ply is rinsed or dyed. The yarn umbrella spins, again
While the ball winder organizes and keeps time
With the passing of thread
From umbrella to ball
My hands mark the moments of everything done
Comfort to me is a lack of manufacture; rather something loved and warm
and rustic, a place of domesticity. Somewhere that only exists for me in tiny
bursts of time outside, or books, or imaginary hearths, with imaginary cats,
and imaginary clothes, a beautiful dream.
I collect the rain
My hair shifts back and forth from short to long
My features flicker back and forth from human to elf.
My eyes are as they are,
and all the colors of my hair and skin remain the same.
Always barefoot, always in touch, always alone yet surrounded.
The creek babbles not far beyond yet out of sight.
And trees are always full of apples,
which I don’t eat.
The air remains warm with a gentle breeze.
My eyes are drawn to the sturdy wooden basin, my kettle,
the spare dress in the corner
and my reflection in the mirror.
I flicker back and forth, my image never holding still.
My desire to remain is what fixes me here.
The single room is full of everything I need
and some lovely things I don’t.
Honey cakes, and lavender soap.
As my feet pad across the floor,
I notice a door I’ve never seen before.
I sneak close,
and when it's open,
new ideas
glow and glimmer and dance and prance
and create too many thoughts.
I am forced to pick some up,
fluffy puffy things
I brush it out till it’s all facing the same direction,
A task that takes some time by hand,
then I sit at my wheel
and I spin.
I do this 6 times
And then I spin 2 ideas together and they become one.
I do this 3 times.
And I am left with three ideas:
Time and thyme and space are important things.
It doesn’t have to make sense to you,
and
It doesn’t have to make sense to me.
Form is Fiction
