Plant Studies

Recent Costume Sketches

Recent Dance Costume Sketches for Moxie Costumes.

Fishing for Something New

I wasn't looking for a change 6 months ago. I was content just "fishing" on my side of the pier. Nevermind the splinters that filled my fingertips. Nevermind the grumpy fishermen surrounding me. Nevermind my meager catch. I had my gear, not too fancy but better than most. I had a few days of sunshine every month and some nibbles of success that kept me going. 

Going, but not growing. 

Not too long ago, I was keeping things together at work and home, dutifully satisfying as many of the needs of others as I could. What I didn't know was that the seed of change had taken root inside me growing more frustrated and unfulfilled by the day. 

For the last few years I have been working to balance my life by making sure to take time to be creative. To fill my bucket with things that feel good to me. I have painted, sewed, written and worked to find my creative flow. 

But, instead of balancing my life, these creative moments have served to shine a brighter light on the things in my life that aren't fulfilling me anymore. 

I think it's time to change fishing spots and to find work more in line with who I am. It won't be easy though. I'm pretty comfortable in my old fishing chair next to these grumpy "one that got away" tale tellers. But good things rarely come to those not seeking. And every success I've ever had has started out just like this, determined but unsure, excited but terrified, confident but under-prepared. Good thing I love to fish.

Still, No Closer

 I Wonder…

These are photos from my paternal grandparents wedding day. I love these snapshots for so many reasons...  my love of vintage anything, the glimpse of middle class mid century wedding fashion, the way I can see my dad in my grandfather's face and my aunts in my grandmother's. I especially love the way she is looking at him. She didn't know at the time, of course, that she would go on to have 7 children with this man, not counting the pregnancies that didn't succeed. 

 

Lola was a caring mother to those 7 children and later a doting grandmother to her 9 grandchildren. I was their eldest.

If she were still here today, I would want to ask her how she felt about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I'm sure she would be happy about it and I love her for that. 

However, I wonder, if we had a conversation and I told her about my ectopic pregnancy, and later my miscarriage that required surgical removal, and how technically those potentially life saving operations could now be delayed because of the overturn, would she reconsider? I've read that operations like those are now being delayed in some states pending approval from legal. 

I am very much a pro-lifer. I believe in God and his hand in creating life. I believe abortion for convenience is wrong. But I also believe a woman who was raped should have every right to an abortion. And I believe a woman who is pregnant with a fetus missing vital organs, but still with a detectable heart beat, should have the right to an abortion. 

I believe child birth is extremely complicated and it occurs within a human being who also has rights. Therefor, I wonder if I could make my grandmother see, that not everyone who wants an abortion is a baby hating monster. I would venture to guess that most aren't. Most are probably scared girls/women who don't have the ability or support to make any other decision.

Abortion by choice, for the convenience of the mother, is a moral problem. And you can't legislate solutions to moral problems. If we are to make any impact on this problem, we must make human connections, educate about all the reasons an abortion might be chosen, and be compassionate to those who are pregnant not by choice. 

I don't believe overturning Roe will bring us any closer to the solution. It definitely doesn't bring us any closer as human beings. I believe it further divides, which I suspect was the real goal.

Idle Routes of Me

Idle Routes

Idle Routes, Wendy Fuselier, 2021

    I've spent some time recently thinking about the paths not taken in my life. Not in a regretful way, just out of curiosity about who else I could have become. 

    The person I did become loves juxtaposition, both in life and in design. She is a creature of hand-work who finds comfort in fibers. This piece is a reflection of the layers, torn bits, unexpected outcomes in my life and how I've managed to stitch them all together into something greater than the sum of their parts.

    The fabrics are new, vintage and reclaimed cotton, silk, linen, and rayon. Hand pieced and stitched using pearl cotton.

Detail of Idle Routes, Wendy Fuselier, 2021

Detail of Idle Routes, Wendy Fuselier, 2021

 

Digging a Little Deeper

With our current worldwide situation, I have been doing my best to ignore the outside world, or to limit my consumption of it to only positive, creative and educational information. So I'm taken this time to focus on trying to narrow the focus of my voice as an artist. 

I have been watching videos and listening to podcasts of other artists to help me better figure out who I am on the inside in an attempt to bring that out. My current favorites are the Art Juice Podcast with Louise Fletcher and Alice Sheridan, and the Art2Life youtube channel with Nicholas Wilton. I like their content because, in my opinion, the information they share can be applied to any medium. I particularly like Louise's advice to follow what makes you feel good when making art. That what you enjoy will ultimately guide you to what you are meant to create.

All of these artists happen to be painters, and so I eventually was inspired to pick up a paintbrush and start working. This painting started as a seascape at sunset but somewhere along the way my sun became a moon. I'm happy with the way it turned out and plan to continue painting in addition to my stitching, hoping that one will make the other better I guess. 

So long for now. 

"I Just Can't" a poem

 

I Just Can’t

 

I love sitting in the sun,

My chair so hot, scorching,

 

Just shaved legs cool and buttery,

Me, drowsy, in the toasty heat,

Trying not to think about the day's end, 

I wish someone was here to talk to,

 

My mother and her cutting ways,

Oh, to leave her life and live,

 

No roots, no ties, just freedom,

Decaying family gone,

 

I wish I could share what it’s like,

But I can’t.

I just can't

Finished: Not Scared to Be Seen

The name of this quilt is from a line in the song This is Me from the movie The Greatest Showman. The lyrics of this song speak to me very deeply and I highly recommend watching the youtube video of Keala Settle singing the song before the production of the movie. It brings me to tears everytime I watch it. 

Patchwork Landscape

I love hexies and have a bunch made with no real purpose. I just like making them. After calculating how many would be necessary to make an entire quilt top, I decided that I probably don't have the time to make that happen, so I was inspired to make this art quilt and use some of my hexies.

I also used some of my favorite fabrics at the time for the sun and its rays and a buffalo plaid for the ground.

This piece hangs in my living room. I really enjoy how colorful it is.

What I'm currently working on...

I've always loved mosaics and wanted to play around with a mosaic quilt concept, so I decided to do a scrap mosaic. I'm using double stick fusible web which I apply to the back of the fabrics before cutting them up into small pieces and pressing them on the base. My plan is to put a sheer fabric over the top before either hand or machine quilting.

The Shady Tree, playing with weaving

I truly love working with fabric. I love how versital it can be. It can be cut and stitched, of course, but it can also be drawn or painted on, glued, shredded, torn, woven, etc.

This piece sat half finished for years. I started it because I found a weaving loom in a local thrift store and, as I often do, I immediately became inspired to try a different medium. I took the loom home and started researching the craft. After falling down a rabbit hole of google searching, youtube video watching and library book reading, I started this small weaving with yarn. About midway however, I lost interest or got distracted (no doubt by another project, craft or artistic style), so I put my little tree weaving aside and forgot about it. 

Then, one day I was going through my scrap basket and decided to tear the larger peices into strips and join them together to add to my little weaving and I love how it turned out. The fabric gives the piece more texture and volume. Every time I look at it my mind goes in several different ways thinking about how I could push it further. Maybe dip dye the ends of the fringe or stitch it into a quilt or maybe make it the center back of an art coat. I know I will be playing more with weaving in the future.

Better Together: An Art Quilt Inspired by Japanese Boro

This piece was inspired by the Japanese art of boro. "Boro (Japanese: ぼろ) are a class of Japanese textiles that have been mended or patched together. The term is derived from Japanese boroboro, meaning something tattered or repaired" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boro_(textile)).

I started with a cotton sheet and layered fabric pieces to cover the entire surface having them overlap in different ways. I basted them first with safety pins and, after rearranging until I was happy, I then basted by hand with long running stitches. The boro stitches were the last step. As the quilt came together I decided to add the red stripes giving it the feel of an abstract flag of the USA. The fabrics are denims, cottons, linens, and silk blends, primarily from up-cycled clothing and other textiles. Stitching was done by hand with 100% cotton yarn.

I found the up and down hand stitching, while slow, to be very rewarding. As I worked on this piece I often thought of the origins of the technique. I imagined a woman sewing a fabric patch onto her husband's heavy fishing coat in order to repair a worn area. It may have been passed down through generations and so had many repairs done by many hands.

Works in Progress

These are a couple of items I'm currently working on. Both are fabric with beads/other elements and measure approximately 10 1/2 inches square.