Silver Lining

There was a buzz from across the room, attention-grabbing. It worked, my phone, just as designed; it grabbed my attention. On its screen, a photograph from above a trash canister with an antique royal velvet skirt atop the rest of the contents. ‘I put this here but maybe you want it.’ Slightly moth-eaten, otherwise discarded, of course I wanted it. I walked a quarter mile down to the corner where the dust meets the pavement, the perch for the refuse before it gets loaded into the truck and taken to a pile, faced with its forever fate. The bear lock came open and the velvet was folded nicely. My arms made a cradle around it and it journeyed back to the top of the hill with me, inside the walls of the makeshift studio; walls which must have the essences and oils and air of all the artists who have occupied it before, and which I willfully imagine to emanate and bestow my own work with fine particle dust of enigmatic energy as I toil away on these time-consuming tasks.

Only days before, I’d wandered into the saddle shop for the farm-fresh eggs they sell and saw in their display shelf an analogous swatch of royal purple velvet. It acted as the stage for some silver adornments I couldn’t afford, flashy saddle embellishments and collar tips and cufflinks for those whose life paths have taken them into the ring of competitive Western show horsemanship. This wasn’t a life path my family could afford, so my relationship with it remained observational, fantastic.

I made peace with what wasn’t afforded. My mother still took us to the fairs, the county and the state, so we could watch the glittering bits of metal and leather catch the sun, learn the gait patterns of the horses as they danced in the arenas, and imagine ourselves there as mounted competitors, striving for a ribbon or belt buckle. It remained a dream.

For much of my summers during this time, I was left at my rural home alone, to my own devices. Hours needed to be filled, and I was at liberty to see to it that they were.

I wasn’t taught to use a sewing machine, but I knew where the box of needles and thread lived, and I knew where to find scraps of fabric left over from my mom’s hobbies - most of which revolved in some way around pleasing my sister and me. She’d make us costumes, make us free to pretend we were things we weren’t but wanted to be. A dragon, a lion, a nurse, a horse, a cat, an athlete, a cowgirl. And being a child myself and thus not having children of my own, I could only mirror this generosity by taking the leftover scraps and cutting them to fit my stuffed animals, hand-stitching outfits for them so that they, too, could free themselves in fantasy, since that was the world I thrived in.

I swept the chipped-paint hardwood floor and I laid the skirt down onto it. Meticulously, tenderly, I took out the seams which made it cylindrical until it laid flat, satin on one side and velvet on the other. What seams remained gave the appearance of emanating light rays; I worked a triangle of tailor’s chalk into a rectangular border to best highlight this incidental feature. I realized, then, that something was missing. I needed pinking shears.

I traveled to the nearest city as soon as my schedule would allow, and went to a crafts store chain I’d only been to once or twice before, on account of it being so far away in a city. The shears were a pretty penny, in a relative way, but I bought them because there really was no other tool for the job. The only alternative to keeping the fragile edges of this beautiful decaying relic intact was a serger, and that was a pretty penny I simply couldn’t justify. And besides, if that lovely zig-zag contour was good enough for the original manufacturers, it was more than good enough for me.

Since before 2015, when I finally learned to use a sewing machine, my interest in the junctures of morality between human sociology and animal husbandry would drive the queries in my art practices. Domestication, colonialism, practicality, spectacle, idealism, technocracy, conquest. One is tempted to make hasty leaps and links, but even Jacque Lacan suggests that people and animals alike experience both the imaginary and the real. With our eventual graduation as adults into the symbolic realm and revealing our sinthome, we are compulsively drawn to figuration and representation to be at peace with these other two parts of this Borromean knot, which is not so visually unlike the decorative Alamar knot of the Californian Vaqueros. How, then, do we use our long and complex history of relating to animals, making homage to them through art and ritual, to take salient allegories away from this experience to relate to our own condition? It seems that one way is through the montaging and colligating images and materials that suggest the potency of this relationship while grazing along its implications.

The purple velvet, I knew, had to be the backdrop for the next iteration of this investigation. The synchronicity of its appearance in the saddle shop was too uncanny to be ignored. There was a spool of maroon thread I’d also rescued from someone else’s discard pile with which I’d hand-embroider my images. I expected they would appear, on this purple, to vibrate with visual tension. This visual tension, I knew, would reify the conceptual tension I was intent to illustrate -- the tension of human control over their most co-dependent post-industrial counterparts: horses and livestock.

When we see an image of wranglers wrestling a horse to the ground, holding it by its tail and a rope attached to its muzzle, we might find ourselves come alive with a pang of sympathy. If this image is abstracted to tap on the shoulder of a cultural nostalgia for pastoral craft, we might become personally implicated. But do we know all the stories of these images? Do we know why horses are hobbled, for instance? And whatever the response to these questions, can we use art as an opportunity to educate or become educated, to launch discussions that help find common ground and humanity between artist, observer, and the world we all live in? Is this how we can affect change? Are these opportunities for commune the glittering bits of silver around the complex leather knots?

I don’t know the answer to any of this, but I do know I now have a sturdy set of pinking shears that, hopefully, will last at least as long as I continue to try. And maybe, through these discussions, I can offer my story of acceptance: even if one’s life path has bypassed something which seemed important, there may still be a chance to rescue it from the bin, reconfigure it, and create something totally new and even more illuminating.