Yarn Fugue

Yarn Fugue

Yarn is complicated. Yarn delights in twisting, wrapping around. Getting in trouble. Insists on exploring options.

Yarn forms fast relationships, lovers' and Gordian knots that resist untying and must be cut or broken before it neatens into a tidy ball again.

A skein in the hand begs to be included in projects. Wants to be worked. Fulfilled.

The cat steals yarn, makes complicated art on the beige carpet, unwinds hanks in and out until the yarn melds with chair legs and vanishes under sofas. Accumulating debris during the trip. Yarn yields to this, complicit in its attraction to non yarn objects.

In these confused days of instant heat, light and food (at least for some), yarn links us. Its' strands reach diving down into time to the Egyptian Dynasty cotton spinner, the makers of linen shrouds, weavers heads bent in dim light working on Flemish tapestries, Colonial Era slaves required to spin a quota daily after all other chores were complete.

We stand grasping the end of an infinite line holding a ball of yarn as if it were an umbilical cord explaining who we were to who we are.

What shall we make with this hank? Something practical or ornamental? A gift? A blanket to sooth and share? Design for warmth or cover-up? Reveal or conceal?

Yarn's legacy and nature is connectiveness.

While we've been occupied treading the odd waters of this still new millennium, yarn has been unrolling, preaching its' dogma, twisting, plying itself a poised reality flexed between past and future.