Waiting for Normal

Moving during a pandemic has been intensely weird. I realized the other day that I don’t know what the majority of my coworkers look like because I haven’t seen them without their masks. I have also been working primarily from home so if you required me to line up all of my de-masked coworkers and tell you what their names are, I would probably fail.

As I write this, my county in Oregon has been moved back into an extreme risk category for Covid. Two steps forward, one step back, or is it three steps back? Due to the job that I do in my “real” life, I have been fully vaccinated for a few months now but that just means I have been in a weird limbo with every other fully vaccinated person.

But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been dreaming of what life might look like when things begin to open up. My whale is complete and I am just waiting to gather up some money to have it framed. I have also begun to lean into the idea of coordinating a fiber art coral reef.

If there is one thing I excel at, it is coordinating a large project. I LOVE to come up with ideas and then work my butt off to bring them to fruition. I haven’t done it for many years and when I think about rallying PNW fiber artists around creating coral pieces for a community coral reef, I get VERY excited. Can you imagine, as the world begins to open up, traveling up and down Washington, Oregon and maybe Northern California or Southern BC to yarn stores and talking about freeform and hyperbolic crochet and knitting and getting people interested in creating pieces for donation? It would be CRAZY! And who knows, as we are all proficient Zoomers, it would be relatively easy to reach out to anyone anywhere.

This morning, as I was driving along the Oregon Coast, I thought of creating a ghost net installation with knitted or crocheted nets and felted weights or buoys. If you combine it with pieces of healthy corals, bleached corals, and perhaps some corals made of recovered “trash”, it could be both educational and artistic.

All that to say, wear your mask, get vaccinated if you can and keep holding on. Tomorrow is coming!

Thar She Blows!

I am almost done with my whale.

Social media has been reminding me of where I was last year, just starting out in mid-January 2020, full of hope and expectation. It wasn’t long before my cleverly lined up plans for auctioning off my Deception Pass canvas and applying for a residency at a lighthouse, came to a screeching halt with the pandemic. As I moved to working from home in my paid job and things felt ever so wrong, I puttered away on my whale. Somewhere in there, I packed up my life and moved across country to take a new job near the Oregon Coast.

I had estimated that it would take about 18 months, as that has consistently been my timeline for my other canvases. Knowing that this one was three times bigger than anything that I had ever done before but with a lot less coral detail, I had hoped it might go quicker.

I haven’t officially sewn down the last pieces but they are done. Now, it’s just a matter of getting it framed. That will be a bit pricey!

So, now I have started to pay more attention to my bleached reef and I have begun thinking about another big project. I would still love to do an actual coral reef installation with fiber artists from around the world donating pieces. I am hoping to connect with aquariums or colleges or science centers to see if this might be a possibility.

Watch this space!

On The Move

There hasn’t been a lot of work going on with my whale over the past month or two as I have been dealing with some life decisions. The house that I have been renting is being sold and I had to make the decision whether I wanted to find another rental which would tie me down in Wisconsin for the next year or if I wanted to take this opportunity to look for a job in a geographic location that would make me much happier.

Can I just say that looking for a job and planning a move across country is stressful enough in ordinary times but doing it during a pandemic is just weird. At least the jobs I interviewed for didn’t demand that I fly across country for a thirty minute face to face interview (I have done that twice in my life. Not fun!). Interestingly enough, I received two job offers on the same day, within about thirty minutes of each other. One would have had me an hour from the Atlantic Ocean, the other an hour from the Pacific Ocean. I really loved the idea of both of them but the job out in the PNW was just calling my name.

All that to say…I AM COMING BACK TO THE PNW!!!

Three years ago, at about this same time, I moved away and I have felt like my spiritual self has been withering away. It has been great to meet my wonderful coworkers here and to reconnect with family but the part that makes ME tick has been gone.

So I have packed up my artwork and I will be driving my life out to Oregon in the very near future. I have done this enough to feel like I have things under control (kinda) but this pandemic has played with my head enough that perhaps a good three day road trip and some salt air will get some of the cobwebs out.

Talk to you on the other side!

Treading Water

The last time I poked my toe in the water here, the world was a very different place. The Covid pandemic has had me (and the rest of the world) working from home for about three months now. If there has been a single good thing to come out of so many people not going to work, it would be the ongoing support and continued pressure applied by protesters at Black Lives Matter rallies across the world. There is such a dichotomy of hopeless and hopeful happening, depending upon the hour that you check your news feed.

The only thing I can report personally is that progress on Hejira is continuing. I set myself the arbitrary goal of one year to complete the canvas, which is a tall order since my other, much smaller canvases have taken longer. Halfway through the year and I think I am on track. At this writing, I have about five or six inches of watery background to complete and the rest of the water as well as the whale are sewn down to the canvas.

Plans are to create and sew down the majority of the coral reef and get the whale to the framer. After it comes back, I will complete the flipper.

Along with every other creative person out there in the world, my schedule of shows and a potential artist residency have been cancelled. 2020? Not a fan…

Reading is Fundamental

I suppose the modern equivalent is the school book fair. Whether it is a physical event or kids bringing home the order forms for their parents to peruse, the intoxicating nature of books can be seen from a very early age.

For me, it was the RIF program in elementary school. Reading is Fundamental was a program that allowed kids the inescapable pleasure of walking into a roomful of books and picking one out to take home FOR FREE! You got that young’uns….it was FREE. The seventies may have had environmental pollution, gas lines, Three Mile Island, and Jodie Foster playing child “prostitutes” at the movies, but it also had a magical space where a kid could pick out a book of their own choosing, without parental intervention, for free.

I was interested in whales a long time before RIF came around. Probably my interest in whales came from Mrs. Clarke at Garner Elementary School in Clio, Michigan. During rainy days or special days or whatever her motivation, Mrs. Clarke would play the reel to reel movies of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I loved Mrs. Clarke. I loved her encouragement, her kindness, and her ability to inspire kids to explore what interested them. For me, I was absolutely rapt. Maybe the other kids in class were climbing the walls, I don’t know. All I saw was an absolutely fantastical world that I wanted to be a part of.

It was midway through third grade that I was wrestling with how I could get to the ocean and what job I could do. I learned about marine biology, scuba diving, the US Navy and the Merchant Marines. By hook or by crook, I was going to get there.

As an adult with access to Youtube, I have gone back and watched the old episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. One of the episodes on whales and whaling actually showed very little of the whales, by modern standards. The video technology of the seventies just wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t until I walked into that RIF book fair that the final puzzle piece fell into place.

It was Farley Mowat’s A Whale For The Killing that did it. It was an actual grown up book, which appealed to me. It had “whale” in the title, which also appealed to me. And when the teacher overseeing the book fair stopped me momentarily and asked “are you sure that’s going to be the right book for you?” I knew it was the right book for me.

I had picked the book up and I had read the quote on the first page. Later on, I wrote that quote down several times over the years as it moved me so much:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” ― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

As a third grader, it was very heavy and I loved it. I then read the book and sobbed. I then watched the movie and sobbed even harder. It was a fight between the powerful and the powerless.

I must admit, I got a little moxie back when, quite a few years later, I read Moby Dick. Once, twice, and yet again.

I always was rooting for the whale.

Man vs. Nature. Good vs. Evil. The powerless vs. the powerful. As a third grader in Clio, Michigan in Mrs. Clarke’s class on a rainy day, I was already drawing my own conclusions.

The Importance of Being Ernest

I am prepping for putting my Deception Pass Canvas up for auction starting Monday, March 16th. Half of the proceeds will go to an Orca conservation non-profit in Seattle.

I know a lot of my social media peeps will know that I am interested in whales and ocean conservation because I JUST WON'T STOP POSTING ALL THOSE DAMN WHALE VIDEOS!!!

What you may not know is that my birthday present for my 7th birthday (or there abouts) was a membership in Greenpeace. When I was a little bit older, I got a certificate from Greenpeace for writing them a lengthy letter about my experiences with lugging my tape recorder into the Michigan woods to play the birds the songs of the humpback whale and noting their response. (Note to future researchers, Michigan songbirds LOVE the songs of the humpback whale. Tippy Hedren had NOTHING on me!)

When life seemed inexplicable as a kid, I buried myself in the cetacean section of the library. I learned the facts and the science and formulated confusion into order. I wanted to study whales and the ocean called to me.

I got a little older and made my way out to the Gulf of Maine where I followed whales around in a little Zodiac raft and learned the absolute beauty of knowing that I was tiny in the face of absolute majesty. I then sailed in the merchant marine where I would be rewarded, on occasion, with seeing the marine life from my "office window".

I then later found myself on the shores of the greatest inland sea, Lake Superior. As one of my marine ship handling instructors stated "It's just like an ocean, but it doesn't smell right". Lake Superior will always be my secret mistress.

After awhile, I made my way out to the Pacific Northwest. Whenever I felt the world was out of control, I could, in the words of John Masefield, "Go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky...". The Pacific Northwest will always be the home that I am homesick for.

My Deception Pass canvas was a recognition of that "home away from home" and a deep and abiding love for the creatures that dwell there. I hope that folks who are interested in my art and the story behind it, will watch my social media spaces.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQAswwHoM0o

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/coral_knits/?hl=en

Twitter https://twitter.com/ChristyHarkness

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy2ekEL6u8TR8mUaza6nkJA