Introduction
Happy November! This month, we have updates from all three of our artists and a new piece by Leo that can be found on his page (linked here). Our next newsletter will come out on January 31st to allow us to spend time with our families during the holidays. Thanks for reading!
Updates From Leo
When I graduated and moved away from Kansas City, where I had lived for the past three years, I spent the summer alone and angry. During that time, I decided to take a queer writing class, hoping to reconnect with something I had lost years ago. Every Tuesday we met on Zoom and for half the class, we wrote. It was terrifying. The first few classes, I couldn’t write anything. I stared at my notebook and tried to piece sentences together. The words that came out were jagged and disjointed, sometimes so strange and far from what I was trying to say that it was disturbing. I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to do it. I would call my partner after every class and cry for an hour. I was so lost in my own head, so overwhelmed by the difficulty of something I used to find so comforting and freeing, I felt like I was trying to fight a way back into myself and I was losing.
But every week, I went back. I kept pushing out sentences no matter how much I hated them, I worked to never let my pencil leave the paper during our allotted time. I listened to other people in the class, reconnecting to my communities, seeing myself in the words they wrote and the discussions they had. I started to really write again.
I still find it challenging and I don’t do it nearly as often as I would like to or should. But I am taking small steps to work myself back into it without the pressure of deadlines or anybody else seeing it. This month however, I decided to finish, polish, and publish to the collective a piece that I had started during that class, and slowly I began to find my voice again.
Updates From Warwick
The end of semester busyness, sun setting at 4pm, and cold weather have all been getting to me. This month has felt infinitely slow and heavy. My sewing machine and I still aren’t seeing eye to eye, so there has been a major pause for me on that front. The lack of time sewing and a never ending creative itch does mean I have spent more time in the ceramics studio. I finished a butter
dish as a wedding gift for a friend, and have been revisiting the “fairy house” forms I’ve been making on and off for the last couple of years. These forms are based on the birdhouses my mother and I used to make out of dried gourds, stained with bright oil paints. The pieces really could just be birdhouses, but the evolution of their creation and the bricks I use on their surface are also rooted in memories of making fairy houses out of cob and sticks from before I turned ten. So I use the two names interchangeably, without the specific dedication to function needed for me to advertise them as birdhouses.
Ceramics has been hard recently. Although maybe it's always been hard. I remember in the early spring of 2020 sitting in the office of a school nurse explaining that I can’t articulate what's wrong but that nothing quite works right. That my hands aren’t my own, and I was so exhausted I didn’t know how to be anything but sad. I remember having the same conversation with my ceramics professor the next day while trying to explain why I had suddenly lost the ability to throw, a skill I used to be confident in. My confidence would fluctuate over the next three years as I continued to choose clay, over and over again. I love clay. I love feeling physically connected and in tune with my work, I love feeling connected to the earth, I love how it connects so many other art forms I’ve dabbled in. But I spend most of my days feeling sore and wishing my hands would stay steady. I’ll find the balance, and I’m happy with the progress I’ve made the past couple of weeks. Still, for next month, I’m excited to rest.
Updates from Sophiko
This month I’ve been working on an oil
painting. I wanted to practice realistic figure painting since I’ve only painted objects in oil before and a body presents entirely different (and as I’ve learned, much more difficult) challenges. Progress on the painting has been slow and steady. I’ve restarted at least three times and I think I’ve finally learned to not skimp on the sketch and under-painting portion… something I am always, always guilty of. I want to learn to have more patience in that stage. I’ve also been playing around with pens and pastels for fun.
No project I’ve started has seen its end just yet. It’s been a long and cold November. And I’m thankful for Leo and Warwick for cheering me on and being so loving and encouraging. Having friends like them keeps the cold at bay better than any warm coat or hot chocolate.
Thanks for Reading, See you Janurary 31st!
Love,
The Birdhouse Collective