It was a memorable weekend composed of a tightly woven schedule, vision, collaboration and nowhere near enough sleep. Nonetheless, after a six performance weekend the Monday Morning sunrise brought a compulsion to step back into my mixed media “Women’s Sphere” series again.
It was almost like a wind, stirring within me. Once it started, I had no control.
No sooner had I completed my daily “Mommy Schlep” time when I chose to raid my paint and old book supplies and discovered some dye I had purchased many months ago before my desire to continue this body of work was silenced.
I tore pages from books: a pronunciation dictionary, a freshman composition reader – I focused on women’s stories and multicultural essays, and an old favorite from my childhood, Franklin and Eleanor.
I wasn’t sure how this whole dye technique would work, so I wanted to use paper with different textures and porousness.
As I boiled the paper in a watery dye pot, stirring and adding, adding paper and stirring, it struck me how this process was intertwined in the Women’s Sphere across the ages. Here I was, cooking words, covering paper in purple as steam rose, spoon in hand, watching carefully as my creation took form to nourish and nurture audiences, to inspire, to “fill bellies” so to speak, with my art.
I snapped photos with my phone, since I was so “in the moment” I didn’t want to go anywhere. I saw the word “eelpout” and was compelled to know the meaning since I knew it would end up in my art someday soon.
It is a fish. In Minnesota there is an eelpout festival where the subtitle is “poor man’s lobster”.
I boiled my paper in batches, reading as I went. A little Sandra Cisneros, more dictionary pages, some Nikki Giovanni, some Mikako Yamauchi, some Rita Dove, some Audre Lorde, some of Eleanor Roosevelt’s biography.
I set the paper on my back porch to dry.
This morning the wind kicked it up and threatened to rain purple women’s words around my neighborhood. I ran after it and compressed it into what reminded me of a swaddled baby, different shades of purple, lavender, off white and white.
I took photos of some of the dried paper.
I want to begin creating with it, but I hesitate because I want people to write from some of the words first. I am not quite sure why this is important to me and it feels like it is, for whatever reason.
I just put out a call for writing buddies to join some improve creative fun. Let’s see where it goes next. Like with my purple boiling spree, I never quite know where the creativity will take me!
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Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She teaches a teleclass/ecourse "Discover the Power of Writing & Telling Engaging, Enlightening Stories" which begins again March 22, 2012. Find details by clicking this link.
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