Fabric Meditation Books

These soft books emerged out of a deep space of grief and overwhelm I found myself in at the beginning of the pandemic. I had just gotten divorced, lost the house I owned and many of my pets, had to close down the business I was running and moved back in with my parents in a different state. On top of all of that, I was in the middle of an intense healing journey I had begun a few years before and was struggling to figure out what was happening inside of me. With all of that, plus the pandemic and political stress and chaos, I retreated to the bedroom I had as a teenager where I set up a small table to make art. Every morning, I sat there and stared out the windows at the trees, trying to figure out what the hell was happening in my life. That was the landscape these books emerged from. One day, I was playing around with a linen curtain I had found at a thrift store, not knowing what I was going to do with it, and I discovered a hidden book structure inside of it. The idea to stitch by hand on it came intuitively. I hadn’t done much stitching or sewing at that point, so it was a new world for me to explore.

The books became and continue to be so healing. They are gentle containers for all that I am feeling and thinking about…they hold it all. I find that the slow hand stitching roots me in place while my mind processes so much. These books have emerged from a new relationship to stillness, silence and solitude that I didn’t have before. To make them, brings me so much peace. I feel like they take care of me as I make them. The process is intuitive and unplanned, I go stitch by stitch to build the story of each book and let it reveal itself to me.

The books have gotten quieter and deeper. At the beginning, they were cluttered and busy, like my mind and my heart. Now, they are spacious, quiet and full of subtlety. I didn’t plan that, it just naturally happened, which I find interesting.