Turning Away from the Sun

It doesn’t happen that often but sometimes the clouds part and the sky opens and you have a chance to expresss what is in you to express. Thanks to my friend Michelle Law, a talented artist and fellow girl of the farmy lands, I recently got to do just that in the Chequaquet Gallery at the Centerville Historical Museum here on Cape Cod.

“Go ahead,” Michelle said to me last January. “Do whatever you’d like.”

All I knew was that I loved layers of netty flounce; crows; rust; tears & tatters; words; moody images; handmade books; stained, coarse linen; and stories. But it wasn’t until later in the winter when I was having coffee with my friend David Ellis, another very talented and inspirational artist, that Miss Havisham came to mind. We were talking about the things nobody wants anymore, the neglected and the unseen, the weary and the worn, and the joy of seeing these things from a fresh perspective and perhaps putting them to use again.

And somehow Miss Havisham, star of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, came to mind and so did the recognition of poetry in the cast-offs and the left-overs. “Miz Havisham Revisited: The Poetics of Romantic Decay” took root that morning over strong coffee with a like-minded friend.

I learned a lot from doing this installation. I learned that if an idea silences your mind, thrums your heart, and wobbles your knees, you are definitely going to be okay if you give voice to it. It takes trust to believe that if you just notice and heed the clues, you will be shown how.

I found rusty tableware and hinges, oak frames with no glass, tin ceiling panels, battered shutters, tattered bed lamps in a haunted seaside mansion, starched underskirts, and a boudoir chair with a broken leg. I learned how to make stuffed crows on sticks and how to burn organdy into dark, brooding roses.

I learned how to stain linen and paper too and wrote and illustrated a story about sister crows on paper that smelled like instant coffee, then stretched the little accordion book for three feet on an old mantel hung on an eggplant-colored wall. I learned again and again to trust instinct, trust the vision that has hold of your psyche and your heart and shakes them and won’t let them go.

It wasn’t easy for me. I like control. I like knowing where I’m going. I’m not (try as I might) a big fan of surprises. But when I think about it, every time I put word to paper, I don’t know what’s coming next. I have learned to listen. I have learned to take note. But when it comes to trust, I have a way to go. One word at a time.