Fossils

 Fossils

I wasn't really sure how i wanted to pursue the bottom of the quilt till this week.  I knew that it is the next progression for me. This week I have been thinking about my dugout shelter and what might have gotten unearthed...both physically and emotionally.  Because this quilt is a metaphor of a relationship of irreconcilable differences.  


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I thought of the fact that in this desert of a relationship that part of what makes it so hard is the fact that it is so foreign to my needs.  I need water and a desert lacks water.  I have to haul the water.  I have to drink more water and keep up with how much I am drinking so I don't get dehydrated.  I have to listen to the winds howling for days and even months.  I have to live with the forces of nature, and in this desert those forces can be brutal and even life threatening.


What can be life threatening in a human relationship?  Perhaps losing your own identity for someone else.  Having to consider the other person to the point that you cease to be a person.  When you become a cartoon or an actor in the theater of someone else stage.  This is life threatening as in a desert.  Because in this type of relationship there is the lack of consideration that is the element of a contract whether social or physical.


At first I was going to take different alphabets and create and abstract art of a lack of communication, to show a lack of understanding.  But this is not really entirely true of the relationship.  Sometimes we understand too much and in that understanding there is contempt.  So then I thought about how in building this area of protection from the desert, this earth shelter, we have unearthed a lot of dirt, and that in this dirt there is a history.  Geologist look for the fossil record and archeologist look for the physical signs of people or animals that lived in the area.  Sometimes these fossils or pieces of pottery are so small that they are unrecognizable as to what they are.  Sometimes though they are plan to see.


This is a quilt about finding my own symbols.  These symbols are within all of us.  They may not be the same symbols but they represent the universal ideas of love, hope, fear, loss, intimacy, beauty, separation and expectation.  When digging in our past we may uncover layers of meaning.  At first these pieces may have no apparent significance.  We don't discard them, but rather guard them.  We have faith that at the right time they will become meaningful.  That they are significant "object" lessons that we can use to leap to new understanding or enlightenment.


It isn't my goal to explain the symbolic fossils found here in my quilt, but rather to use this medium of abstraction to communicate "history".