an invitation and shifu help

an invitation to all of my shifu students:

i've begun work on an article for Hand Papermaking journal about shifu and healing. i would like to invite you to contribute any thoughts you might have had about just that; if the shifu-making process has in any way facilitated healing in/for you. mina takahashi, the editor of HandPapermaking asked me to write about this after my observation that spinning paper and weaving a textile, especially when the paper has color or words that are deeply rich for the maker, allows an opening for a sort of healing. i made a shifu covered handmade paper book for wendy golden levitt who works with textiles and healing (especially with children) which has become the grief book. i'm curious about why that book and why shifu making has deeply affected and helped people move into healing.

if any of this resonates with your experience of shifu making, i invite you to send me a few sentences about your thoughts, and even a photo of work you’ve made. i would like to incorporate some of these into the article. please email me at vdbolyard at gmail dot com with any words/pictures, and i thank you, now twice over, for being my student and for thinking about this.

IV, III, II, I

 thursday there was so much good news:

my sister claudia macdonald, 

got her masters in school administration degree.
she did it just days before she turns 71! 
my hero.
~~~

and my friend wendy

wrote about textiles and healing

in the on-line hand eye

with lots of captioned photos 
crediting the textile makers, too,

of her healing work with and children.

my first botanical paper and shifu book is there.
~~~

there was other book news in north russell:

this:

collection 

housed in this birch box

is a letterpress book set

published by the minnesota center for book arts

and the words

are excerpts from

braiding sweetgrass

genevieve nordmark

who just graduated from esf

(another masters degree!)

was interning at the center and helped with

making the cover papers...

she sent me this.

THIS!

she took it to dr kimmerer's office 

also at esf,

and had her sign it for me.

such a treasure,

words, well, they fail me...

the illustrations:

one in each booklet,

are lovely, too.

~~~

here:

fiber raining down

pink maple seeds, too.

circlet of sweetgrass.

healing

 this is how

my body has felt

 for a couple of days

 a strange cold aching

seems like it's time to move on

 in the mail came a surprise

aimee feels like this as she sorts through hedi's magic.

 i've felt this way long enough!

(and there was a great phone talk, grin)

riches of friendship

thanks for the get wells.

hands/love

celebrating love is a strange concept to me, especially if your practice is love. and yet we set aside tomorrow as a day to remember love. the ones we love. to remember. i celebrate my tiny family of three. all the time. we are non traditional, non conventional in many ways. i am grateful for that.

ian at work at bullseye glass

(wonky pixels when enlarged)

hannah at work on knitting

the silent (ian and hannah will chuckle) one

this week hand/eye online came out with a new edition, including a new piece by wendy golden levitt. her work encompasses love on many levels, love and healing. that is her very strong gift. many fiber artists' works are assists in the work these children do.

 these hands working on wendy's book. 

you can see some other signs of love there, a heart, a moon.

gathered from the earth and pulped

 and sheetformed

 and stitched

 and knotted 

and spun 

and woven into a book.

shifu and healing

i went to visit wendy in toronto last week. also to attend a talk given by master shifu artist hiroko karuno. i took the train from brockville. i was gone only a few hours. in that time i experienced many amazing things.

the AGO. an amazing collection. reinvented with these wooden ribs that vault to the ceiling of the old structure. i was here in 1975 or thereabouts. then i looked at the henry more sculpture. now i look at the group of seven and some inuit work. and wendy took me to soma. serious chocolate. heaven. i had hot chocolate that was like a meal. 


wendy and i went to the japanese paper place to hear hiroko karuno talk about her work, about a special installation she did last spring, and see her demonstrate spinning (twisting) kozo for her shifu.

 straightening paper prior to cutting

 opening up the sheets after cutting

spun kozo

 spinning (twisting) kozo

 skeins of naturally dyed kozo

a sample of hiroko's shifu

hiroko concentrating, with a smile

we got to know hiroko and her wonderful husband riding home together. the spinning wheel had pride of place in the front passenger seat. so funny because as any spinner knows, the spinning wheel takes as much space as it needs to! people can squish together, wooden spinning wheels do not!

you may remember this tapestry. it now is used by the children that wendy golden-levitt works with. this girl used my tapestry as a part of her sand table healing work.

 do you see her treasure? i am sheltering her. this young girl is anorexic, eight years old, and she almost died. 

she told me she doesn't need to look pretty anymore. "now i try to just look." i love that! wendy transcribes the children's messages to the artists whose textiles wendy uses in her work and places them in a special cairn on a table in the studio. when i read notes from s. or p. i am so moved. and i learn from them, too. 

and the velma book is still being used, it has place keepers in it, a stick, textiles. can't really be transported in it's current enlarged state, but once the children remove them, it will be movable. some work with it has been done by first nations elders and children. then it travels with wendy to the place she works with these wonderful people. i feel often like these pages that i made, these plants that became paper have much strength for people. more than i ever thought possible!

this trip was surprisingly centered around two other things, unexpected things. one was a deepening friendship with wendy, another was healing from an unsettling taxi experience. i came home with new ideas, hopes and dreams, friendship, taxi-induced headache, some books...and a sense of having been through a threshold. or a fibershed.