Category Archives: Poetry

Oct 30 2019
2 Comments
book binding, creativity, fibre art, mixed media, Poetry, Publishers and Books, Sewing Projects, textile art

brick by brick

Brick weights/LauraWythe

My friend had a friend lay square bricks in a circle at the far end of her beautiful back garden. It looks like it’s always been there.

There were left-over bricks, and I don’t usually work with bricks, but “borrowed” a few to use as weights for a bookmaking class I’m taking though CEG London. The rough surface needed covered, so I pulled out the thickest felt on hand and made some of those geometry nets like we did in school. I attached the edges by blanket stitching first, then weaving a thick thread though to join the seams and seal the brick up inside. The joining is based on a technique I saw at a Textile Museum of Canada exhibit featuring Central American weaving and clothing.

Brick by brick, I’m approaching the new techniques required for book making, trying to understand. And this finished book cover looks good after a day of rest beneath the felted brick.

In Praise of Ironing (Pablo Neruda)
2019 Laura Wythe
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Sep 26 2014
7 Comments
People and Places, Poetry

Song of experience

A lot of my life is spent wondering. And I wonder at my mom, how she manages living deeper and deeper in dementia. A while ago, her older sister, who also had dementia, passed away.

I wondered how a person with dementia would respond to the news that a loved one had died. I wondered how dementia might have affected the sisters in the first place. Would they still have a relationship, each in their own world?

This playful drawing came after writing a short bit of fiction about this. Sometimes drawing helps with the wondering where words fail.

Sketches for the garden gate for Song of Experience by Laura Wythe

The style of the drawing is based on  William Blake’s work and this poem:

THE GARDEN OF LOVE

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

 

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