Ciao dearest Needleworking Masters!
This garment is for a part of the body that doesn't often get its own fabric-celebration. The male phallus. I have been dialoguing in great depth with the man whose lingam this is for, and our expansive conversation has been always profoundly healing, liberating and protective for me, as much as it has for him. My returning his innumerable gifts by making this robe has taken me considerable time; it is part of a 'set' of four which I've worked on for months, and have been thinking-feeling-being-guided into for much, much longer...
This one is particularly special - and I have been ruminating on it for the longest: it is from the same leather garment that I took apart to make the shoes (recently completed). It is soft, natural, flexible leather - quite delicate whilst at the same time very robust. It seems to play this beautiful dance between the masculine and the feminine, which resonates with yin-yang harmony and all the potent creative force that a symbiotic feminine and masculine can free up: not a romantic relationship in any way, but a working spiritual healing friendship.
The robe wants to be soft and yet robust, sturdy and flexible, easy to wear and expansive for all kinds of length of one lingam to be inside. The measurings have been interesting and fun: it is an incredibly healing frequency, to engage in deep discourse with another human, but without any of the conditioning or the negative entanglement, of conventional programming around the masculine and the feminine communing. I sense that not many of us have the space with another being of 'opposite' 'gender' to communicate deeply about all things pelvis-related, but without the weight of cultural distortion around what is yin and what is yang. It is a delight and it is most revelatory in its essence, this space that we have cultivated over the years, to allow is to always speak more openly-expansively-freely about what is going on at the root of our Being - at the 'point' where all energy-consciousness is born and emanates from.
The actual making of the lingam robe has been such a long time coming (naturally, because it has such depth of significance), that I have been despairing to some degree; why will it not simply appear in my hands for me?? Why is it so very ephemeral and intangible, before it comes into being. We have discussed it, this dearest of friends and myself, and slowly, slowly, glacially, it has come closer to the surface. I have struggled with things taking so long in my sewing mastery journey; the inferior AND the superior egos vying for control of the beautiful natural chaos of making.
This is the perfect environment in which to face one's demons (
The physical aspect of making of this lingam garment in the end took relatively little time - which feels like an appropriate natural creative process: like birth after many months of gestation, or the shoots bursting up through the soil after a winter of alchemising underground - I spent a very full morning, but no more than half a day to cut, construct, sew and finish details on this cloth, and now am taking more time to consider if it will require another finishing border at its base....
I've been enjoying the process of Making Clothing Magical Again (McMA Clothing.) - finding my way into Not A Brand, and into a new purpose outside of painting and drawing. It is a cathartic and transformative experience to let go of a decades-long practise - and pick up another one. I still feel quite disoriented at times, like I'm in a new landscape or culture and cannot quite find my path. Everything is so soft and fluid in making with fabric, instead of the tension of the canvas on a frame or the hard surface under the soft brush, instead of the toxicity of solvents and oils, and the mess that pigments make when they get caught on the 'dark side of the hand' or elbow, then stamp themselves around the house... The fluff balls gathering in every corner, and the fibres making me sneeze occasionally are a welcome diversion.
The feeling too of stepping into a world of playfulness and self-expression that ISN'T as twisted as that of the 'art' 'world' - phew, such relief of that immense weight on my soul. Being able to wear my Art. now, rather than having to make an 'exhibition' of it, or have people in my home who have all their projections and unwelcome expectations out in front of them like a flasher about to take of his mac... It is beautiful to be able to keep the boundary of my work - at least on the surface! - within the human body; to be able to set a pair of brackets either side of it.
This is very different than presenting Art. in the conventional sense. The same magic, colour, composition, freedom, creativity and uniqueness are being expressed, but there is not the projection onto the Art. maker, nor the presumption of contract. A new world indeed.
Especially with fabric, I feel this natural fluidity of movement, that I know exists in my paintings, but which very few viewers were able to grasp. Clothing naturally closes the boundary between us, at the same time as setting a healthier boundary (I feel) between us and our Art of Life.
