Small Objects of My Affection

Sitting on my desk, where I can see them just beyond my computer, are these four small objects. I can't quite explain why, but they comfort me with their familiarity, their shapes, their stories, their unique character. Two of them are reproductions of ancient objects: the bowl with human feet is a favorite piece in the Met's Egyptian collection; the stag is copied from an early bronze age sculpture from Anatolia, which I bought on a marvelous visit to Turkey 20 years ago. The two birds are paperweights, a chicken acquired from an antique shop ages ago, and a dainty Lalique which was in my beloved mother's collection. I see the chicken pecking away and the little glass bird about to take flight. Embedded in them are memories and silent affection. All four of of my desk companions elicit a sense of life, in their still and quiet way.

I began to think about my relationship to the inanimate objects around my house after reading this beautiful and touching prose poem, "Fetish" by Pierre Reverdy, in the book published by Black Square Editions. 

A little doll, a good luck marionette, she struggles at my window, at the mercy of the wind. The rain has soaked her dress, her face, and her hands, which are fading. She's even lost a leg. But her ring remains, and with it her power. In winter she knocks at the windowpane with her little foot in its blue shoe, and she dances, dances from joy, from the cold, to warm her heart again, her good luck wooden heart. At night she raises her suppliant arms toward the stars. 

Yes, these objects are fetishes, in the sense of embodying magic. Even though the marionette is well-worn she still has her power, and she dances with joy. 

A little stuffed alligator, with his wide smile and waving arms, looks out at me over my bedside clock with humor and charm. His silly attitude reminds me not to take myself too seriously, to remember to relax and smile, so he's an excellent bedtime friend. I'm especially fond of this little creature because I found him in my mother's collection of tiny toys for her great-grandchildren. 

This salt and pepper set and the pieces to follow are antique shop and yard sale finds that I've had for many years. The shakers have the shape of the birds they are named after––kookaburras––with large beaks and squat shapes, but their bright colors are a vivid invention. When I look at them I think of the raucous laugh of these birds, which I was lucky enough to hear in the Australian outback many years ago; it's a startling sound.  

A delicate herd of tiny animals, not more than 2 inches high, sits on my mantle. I love their shapes, simple yet speaking of each individual animal. They have a poignant vulnerability, with straight pins inserted into their bodies where thin legs have broken off. 

With elegant curved form topped with a black beret, a perky fellow sits on a pull toy. The large red wheels give him motion, which he addresses with his upright stance. 

Being a person who likes machines––machines inspire my artwork––I had to include a little wooden toy truck in this post. I imagine it being given to a child or grandchild, who would love pulling or pushing it about. Ah, the shapes! Blue cylinder atop red cylinder, alongside yellow rectangle, all on a black rectangle studded with red circles; so beautifully abstract. 

Each of these objects, and many more around my house, are imbued with a spirit of their own. Like Reverdy's marionette, they have heart and joy, good luck and power; they are magical.

The Shapes of Things

 

Sometimes it happens that an ordinary object lying about the house will nudge me to open my eyes and notice things I hadn't seen before. "Seen" is the wrong word: I saw them, but they failed to impress on my conscious mind as something especially beautiful. As Henry Miller put it: 

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

This old lap table was leaning against a wall, waiting to be put away, when I saw that lovely curve against the straight line of the outer wall, and the simple elegance of the rounded legs; and the circle, on a piece of wood that looks like it dropped from its original position, giving a sense of time passed. 

I then photographed some legs on old pieces of furniture, as on this dresser. The front legs are complex and inventive in form, curving in and out, in gentle and sharp lines. You can see a glimpse of the rear leg, which is much simpler in design. 

The repetitive pattern of the legs of my bedside table remind me of nothing more than of Brancusi's Endless Column, in miniature: 

An old fan with rubber blades has grace and elegance in its design.

Lest you think that it's only old objects that attract my interest, here are two functional forms attached to the outside of my house that I find quite beautiful in their shapes and lines:

This metal box has an appearance of a torso, with heavy rounded legs.

A fluid line of copper tubing enhances a circular form whose copper screws echo the color of the curved pipe. 

And of course, there are the contemporary machines that provide subject matter for my paintings, drawings, and relief sculpture. In agricultural equipment I find a wealth of unusual shapes, with surprising relationships of color, line, volume, and light. When I go out to look for motifs, it is like a treasure hunt, full of unforseen results. I would like to share John Cage's quote about the woods, because it resonates for me in my trips to farms:

One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

Morning Light

In winter, the sun hangs low in the sky; it streams into the house, reaching corners that the high sun of summer never touches. It is compensation for the freezing temperatures and the short days. Shadows become as dense as objects, as though a clear illustration of Plato's Cave.

Here is the original of that shadow: some lilacs from last spring, their dried heads arced downwards.

The morning sun picks out tiny details of goldenrod seed heads.

A hanging bunch of marjoram is echoed in its shadow.

The objects on my shelves glow in the brief illumination of morning.

And a cup emerges from the dark.

A gilded pear in a brass bowl becomes a mystery.

Shadows create geometries, of windows....

....of a ladder back chair.

Out of doors, the morning shadows are bright blue under a blue sky, the mountains of snow repeating the dark mountains in the distance. The brilliant sunlight is a gift in a winter of endless gray.

"Found Memories": Still Lives

An old woman appears, walking slowly down a dark hallway, the only light the kerosene lantern she is holding. She places the lantern on a work table and the camera lingers quietly, lovingly, on the old cracked bowl with its painted flowers. When I saw the bowl, emerging from dark, an ordinary object that was treated with reverence, I knew I'd love this Brazilian film, Found Memories, the first feature by Julia Murat.

We see the old woman make bread before dawn, by lantern light. She then walks down the railroad tracks and turns into a street in the village, while singing gently. The tracks are unused, the street empty.

She arrives at a building that is beautiful in color and form and balance, even in its disrepair. Each camera shot is carefully composed, and each lasts long enough to allow us to appreciate what we are seeing. The woman, Madalena, takes her bread into the shop, where she and Antonio have a gentle argument about its display. Then they sit outdoors together having a coffee. The slow, deliberate pace makes us realize that these actions have settled into a routine; each day Antonio says "There's some rain on the way"; each day they argue about the quality of the coffee. 

At midday the town's ten inhabitants go to mass; here we see that all who remain are elderly. We are not told anything about the town, but it is clear that it is isolated and has fallen on hard times. From the NY Times review, I learned that it is a fictional town in northern Brazil.

Everyone has a meal together at the church, praying quietly before eating.

In the evening, Madalena writes a brief, poetic letter to her dead husband. They are more beautiful than you would expect from a rural woman. One reads:

My love, I'd like to keep our memory forever alive, so our love, in the future, doesn't suffer from the passing of time. We have to go beyond death, this cruel enemy, that didn't choose day or time. I kiss you tenderly, yours, Madalena. 

She then folds the letter carefully and places it in an envelope, which she addresses to her husband. She puts the envelope, along with many others, in a circular box.

The director shows us this round of events over two or three days, so that we see that they never differ. But then youth arrives in the person of a young woman, Rita, traveling in those parts; she asks Madalena to put her up for two or three days.

The two regard each other: the old woman with doubt, mistrust, uncertainty; the young woman with the confidence of youth.

As she opens long closed rooms in her house for Rita, Madalena discovers her husband's shirt draped over a chair; she smells it with love and memory. Here already is a small change caused by the visitor.

Rita is a photographer; she works with both modern digital equipment and with pinhole cameras made from large tin cans. When she walks around the village, we begin to see through her eyes; she notices the objects in Antonio's shop; the film presents them to us with their beauty, charm, and aging dignity. Rita likes the little town; she feels she was born at the wrong time. The photographs she takes with her pinhole cameras are romantic visions of ruins, and touching portraits of the village inhabitants, with whom she's begun to develop bonds of affection.

We see the two wary women become very fond of each other. Rita photographs Madalena's kitchen; Madalena asks Rita to touch the bread, because "you need to feel the timing of the dough with your hands".

Finally, Madalena allows Rita to take her portrait, and she appears as a beautiful ghost floating before a worn wall. Love and loss hover between life and death.

The light in this film is often so beautiful, whether sunlight cast on objects and wall, or the flickering light of kerosene lanterns. Toward the end of the film we see Rita in a bath; the room is bathed in light, her head in shadow. Is this a metaphor of baptism or of death? This quiet, slow, meditative film leaves us with love and beauty, but with no answers.

At Hancock Shaker Village: Women's Work

Angelica, a medicinal herb

In Shaker communities, men and women lived and worked separately: their retiring rooms were on opposite sides of the Dwelling house, they worshipped on east and west sides of the Meetinghouse. There was separation, but no hierarchy: a woman, Mother Ann Lee, was the founder of the sect; women and men shared equally in the governance of the communities. As pointed out in one of the explanatory texts at the Hancock Shaker Village:

The Shakers believed in dividing labor into "women's work" and "men's work", particularly because they wanted to keep men and women separate. Women and men had their own workshops. However, the duties of Shaker men and women were more similar than men and women in "the world" because Shaker women ran businesses for communal family income and Shaker men shared equally in child care by raising the boys.

An important Shaker business was the selling of medicinal herbs and remedies. I assume that men did the gardening, since they did the farming, but women may have helped in the gathering and packaging. In an interesting article on Shaker herbs at Mother Earth Living, which quotes Elisha Myrick, a Shaker brother at Harvard, MA, who wrote in his journal of 1850: "Seven sisters and 4 brethren go out beyond the depot to pick wintergreen, get a small quantity."

In addition to small herb gardens at the Hancock Shaker Village, there was a garden with dye plants such as Madder and Woad and Coreopsis tinctoria.

These natural dyes were used to color spun wool that the Sisters then wove into cloth, an important aspect of the Sister's work. On the left is wool dyed with Madder, on the right with Queen Anne's Lace.

Flax was grown for linen. The spiky implements you see above are hatchels which are used to comb the flax fibers before they are spun. Here is a link to a video with shows the process of breaking down the flax stems and preparing the fiber for weaving.

This is a photo of one part of the weave loft, with a small loom for weaving tape for chair seats and a large loom made in 1934 by Brother Henry DeWitt of the Mount Lebanon community. From the museum's description:

The Shakers were adamant about manufacturing their own cloth from the moment their communities were gathered into order. Additionally, they sold textiles and associated goods to the outside World. Members of the New Lebanon, NY, community were in business as clothiers serving both their community and non-Shakers. Over time the Shakers came to rely on outsiders for their cloth. Brother Isaac Newton Youngs, writing in 1856, stated that "in early times of the Chh....there was very little cloth purchased from the world. The making of our own cloth has greatly diminished, owing greatly to the increase of factories, in the world, which enables us to purchase cloth cheaper than we can make it among ourselves, tho' the cloth generally is not so durable as home made."

Although they were self sufficient, as shown in the above quote, the Shakers did not shy from modern conveniences, installing electricity when it became available, buying an automobile and building a garage for it. 

The making and sale of woolen cloaks was a business of the Sisters at Hancock from the 1880s until the 1940s. They were very popular out in the World: President Grover Cleveland's wife wore a Shaker cloak to his inauguration in 1892.

Then there was the mundane task of the laundry, which was the job of women. The laundry was housed in the same building as the men's machine shop, and both were powered with water turbines, the water coming from a reservoir. The Sisters rotated through the various chores each month, so no one was permanently assigned to one job.

This is the ironing room, with stoves for heating the irons, and long tables for the work.

The dairy was another important aspect of Sister's work. They made butter and cheese and their products were known for quality throughout the Berkshire region.

Then there was the cooking: women prepared food for the community of one hundred people. The stone floors and oven designs were up to date and efficient.

Enormous kettles could prepare large amounts of food. When I was visiting the museum, a volunteer was baking a cake from a Shaker recipe. I noticed that none of the ovens were heated for baking, so I asked her where the cake would be cooked: "oh, we have a modern oven" she replied. When the community became smaller and moved into the 20th century, the Sisters had more modern appliances. We don't see them at the museum because it is set up as life in the community would have been in the mid 19th century. I suppose that this is one of the questions in historic preservation: which era of an ongoing, living community do you choose to represent?

The food cooked in the cellar of the Dwelling house was carried up to the dining room by the use of dumb waiters, or "sliding cupboards", as an Elder described them in 1832.

Lastly, I feel right at home looking at the canning jars and the shelves laden with preserved food. This is a technique that hasn't changed: place hot food in jars, seal, boil in a water bath, then cool. The only change is that paraffin wax was used to seal the jars and now we have self-sealing lids as a modern convenience. As with dyeing wool, where I now work with simple acid dyes instead of the more complex natural ones, the process is similar, creating a link to time gone by; the lives lived by Shaker women were so different from ours, but there are places where our understanding can bridge the years and the differences.



Other posts on the Shaker Village:
The Shakers: A Community of Faith and Work
At Hancock Shaker Village: Men's Work