This morning I listened to most of a webinar as several artists from the latin world talked about their textile art and how the COVID19 pandemic has impacted their artistic process. I had to leave the webinar before the end – a load of firewood was being noisily delivered, my cleaning lady was approaching this zone with the vacuum cleaner, and I couldn’t find any headphones to fit into my sound system. The recorded session will be accessible for replay soon, but I might not have missed much substance – there was a bit of waffly philosophising.

However, by the time I left the zoom meeting, a theme had developed through all the speakers who, with some variation, were united on these points: (1) that the restrictions imposed by the pandemic offer unique opportunities for us as textile artists to reflect on our work and what we were doing with it. (2) Through video, photography and writing about it, documenting our process can help us reach deeper understanding of our own growth as artists. (3) Additionally, both making and documenting of our processes can be very healing in any troubled period such as the one we’re all living through.

I was recently telling a friend about something I was doing, and she launched into a bit of a lecture on how I should be sure to document it. She’s not an artist herself, and hasn’t known me long, so she had no idea that documentation of my process is one of the driving forces behind this blog, the nearest thing I will ever have to an artist’s notebook or a visual diary. Both of those quilts, of which you can only see details above, are well documented here here and here

My documentation always includes photographic images including some of mine and finally Eduardo Baldizan’s of the finished work and a brief written statement of <100 words about it or the series to which it belongs. I just finished a medium sized wall quilt that I named Pandemic Pattern, and feel sure that several ideas other ideas I have on this concept will comprise a series in time. Stay tuned.