21 March marks World Poetry Day & International Color Day
The Shaker Sisters at Harvard MA recorded coloring (they wrote collouring) in their Journal. Coloring meant dyeing. Dyeing is making color. Dyeing is possibility.
This poem uses text from their Journal and will be part of an upcoming exhibition, ‘anything but drab’ at Fruitlands opening in May.
we collour
we color scarlet on stormy days
we color indigo when we are indefatigable
we color butternut roses blooming abundantly
we color prusy blue pick some pease
we color logwood smelling lilacs
we color fancy blue to match azure skies
we color slate silk with sicily sumac to match slanted rain
somewhere between today & tomorrow on that illusive Leap Day Mother Ann Lee was born 29 February 1736 — 8 September 1784
Mother Ann Lee embodied cosmic feminist karma bringing a new religion into the world founded on principles so radical that they endured persecutions
One could say her broadsheet was verbal; she being illiterate to written words yet literate in all realms cosmic . The written Testimonies of her contemporary believers and works of the later visionists- scribes themselves of hearts and leaves and maps and flowers and trees-- scripted scrolls brought down from spirits’ energies spoke to her cosmic energy.
[excerpt from meetinghouse, Brece Honeycutt and Miriam Cantor-Stone]
[image, detail An Emblem of the Heavenly Sphere by Polly Collins, 1854]
[image, detail, From Holy Mother Wisdom…To Eldress Dana or Mother by Miranda Barber, 1848]
reds of cochineal and crimson yellows of bark gold brown yellow green greens invisible olive pea and myrtle blues Prussian deep royal slate drabs red sandy silver sage salmon and dove purples crimson deep marron logwood lavender browns fast damson fawn olive and claret greys bark liver dark smoke batwings and doves
sending new year’s rainbows joy and radiance for 2025 and thanks for your presence here
[studio doodle | work in progress for 2025 project dye book from Harvard Shaker community]
looking for brightneess in rainbows and revision structures on hand knit shawls dyed with goldenrod, gathered at wasteplaces stitched into circles emanating sunlight
Miriam Cantor-Stone and I are thrilled to have our collaboration, meetinghouse, published in Early American Literature.
Thanks to Moonbow for inviting us to make this collaboration. Thanks to Shaker Heritage Society for giving artists support and the space to do so. Thanks to Early American Literature -- it has been a true pleasure to work with all of you.
And a podcast to follow -- with interviews and performance excerpts.
words on the side of the road as in the Shaker “Wayside Pulpit” words found in advertisements as in the work of Corita Kent words about to be printed at Melanie Mowinski’s studio words printed, read, used, perused aptly, just begin
plants as prints as watercolors as thoughts as sky as poetry
.
‘Verbal creation, he [Seamus Heaney] writes,
is an archaeological dig,
“a dig for finds that end up being plants.” ‘
From Elaine Scarry’s book, Dreaming by the Book
and Heaney's book Feeling Into Words: Selected Prose 1968-78Caretaker Farm CSA flowers and summer ‘dahlia series’
plant inks and gouache on dahlia mono print
“Painting is a form of poetry
Colors are words
Their reflections rhythms.
The completed painting,
a completed poem.”
Sonia Delaunay
[from Kunst Please podcast
9.20.2021]
Substitute ‘painting’ for?
stitching
natural dyeing
………..
Images from ‘Sonia Delaunay’ catalogue from Tate exhibition 2015
Postcard from ‘Sonia Delaunay: Living Art’ Bard Graduate Center 2024