When I began my first 100 day stitch book last year the plan was to be purely abstract. To commit to a “yes and” improvisational process, let go of outcome, be concerned only with making marks with stitches and responding to those marks. Create for the sake of creating.
On the first day there was a little pile of fabric scraps and a blank page. The scraps were odd and unintentional shapes – off cuts from other projects.
The vision of pure abstraction dissolved almost immediately, representation crept in, sometimes obviously (to me) and sometimes subtly. There were boats and trees and castles and mushrooms, vessels, and lots more. My first impulse was to work to banish those recognizable images. The problem was they snuck in on their own. I didn’t plan for them. And that really was the improvisational process I had committed to.
day 6 2022
So I let them come. Sometimes they took over and sometimes they shimmered in and out as I worked. The revelation was the images I ended up liking the best, the pages where I felt like I got out of my own way (the whole point of the exercise) shift between abstraction and figure.
Did I make the image or did it just appear?
It’s sort of like looking at clouds. Clouds don’t try to look like anything in particular but it happens all the time, we perceive an image. There is a word for it and everything – pareidolia
“ the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. “
That was the biggest revelation and lesson of last year’s 100 days. It pointed me towards a place that feels inspiring and creative and challenging, a good place to play. The ambiguity is freeing.
Let’s talk about another word- intuition
“the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”
The point of this 100 day exercise is to listen to yourself, to learn to feel for and trust your intuition. Really listening, connecting to your intuition and expressing yourself is difficult. Daily practice helps. What might 100 days of showing up and listening reveal about your own work, process, imagination?
The 100 day stitch book begins on January 20th and ends on April 29th. Find the details here.
I’ll close this post with your warm up assignments :
Checkout the stitch book I made last year- starting at the bottom of the post you can see each page over the five days and you can see the book assembled here.
Gather some materials and put them in a box. Label the box 100 day stitch book 2023. The hard part is over, you already started.
meet gustav! by Melanie
