The Public Arts Initiative of Egg Harbor, WI

Between the Cracks features 14 pieces and came out of a 2021 winter challenge about facing the unknown and undefined within two virtual workshops lead by local artist Dawn Patel. Artists were asked to create from the in-between spaces of life where everything familiar disappears and one steps into the unknown. View the image below in person at the Kress Pavilion from March 15 through Memorial Day 2021.

I tell stories with hand stitch and applique that point to the beauty and hope found within life’s simple moments.

The Caregiver’s Job Has Ended

I know we planned and discussed. Does that all start now?

Wait. Where did you go? Are you in the air? If I leave, will you find me?

Look. We raised the bed, so you’d be more comfortable. Were you? Are you proud of me? Did I do a good job?

Look at the time. You’ve been gone for 24 minutes.

I have such a long way to go without you.

This piece honors all loving caregivers. I lost both my brother and mother in 2015.
Their empty beds remain warm in my heart forever.

Hand stitch and applique, tinted with watercolor and pastel

Exhausted, recovering art fair exhibitor discovers new life as fervent stitching zealot

This workshop about exploring and honoring liminal space has reminded me how much I love to explore the creative process. I was encouraged to enter a zone that was both uncomfortable and surprisingly productive.

This piece potentially had many more examples of liminal space – more doors, doors with windows, portholes both withholding and excreting more doors, etc. While wrestling with this mental collage, and searching through my ample stores for inspiration, I discovered this long forgotten black display box. It quickly became a welcome boundary to my project’s unruly girth and the ideal exhibit tool. The spiral embroidery was both thematically perfect for this current project as well as a lovely example of the most recent way I am making colorful marks on my world. It nestled inside the box beautifully, needing only minor adjustments.

The ‘front door’ is purposefully left ajar so the viewer can see it as well as what it reveals within. If you are very gentle, I invite you to open the piece by the black frame. (not the painting of the door, please) Inside is the spiral embroidery surrounded by the night sky, further framed by pieces of an original drawing I created during the workshop.

Linoleum Print Block/#1 Reduction

I am working my way through a four-color reduction print depicting a winter landscape in the woods. I see snow, thinning ice with cracks, and a dark, pooling path of water alongside bare trees.

My first step was to carve into the block you see here. The negative space, the beige areas, will not print when I ink up the plate and will read as the white color of the paper I am using. The color of the paper “counts” as one of the print colors. For the first impression using block #1 I will roll gray ink over the blue areas of the plate and print this plate ten times, re inking each time. I will then cut much of the blue away, leaving small areas within the white lines you see on this block for the second inking. I plan to use a darker, more transparent grey for the second impression with block #2 and again print ten times, re inking and registering the paper as I go. Then I will cut the block again, removing the last of the blue, without touching the areas you see penciled in black. The last steps will be to roll black ink over the remaining areas of the block #3 and pull that final, third impression ten times. The finished print will read as a mirror image of the carved block.

Bio
I am a printmaker balancing my time between Fish Creek and the Chicago Loop. My printmaking often experiments with color and overlapping, repetitive layers. Additionally I enjoy creating collagraph prints from found objects, inking one plate with both intaglio and relief techniques.

Retired in Southern Door, now have time to learn, explore and create.

I have been working at Abstract Painting for several years. Many of my pieces contain a path or after learning a bit on liminality, maybe a liminal space?

I am a white woman: I am speaking to other white people. This poem is based on real events. I choose to say “events” because the statements and racist ideas within this piece have been personally executed, witnessed and re-produced in other all-white spaces; they are being produced today.

Utilizing the prompt of “between the cracks” and liminality, the only thing I could see was my own silence and complicity in maintaining white supremacy. The United States was built on racist ideas and is fortified by racist systems.

Racism is a white person’s cultural inheritance.

If I can’t admit that I produce and uphold racist ideas, there will be no end to my production of racist ideas.

My hope is that other white people see themselves in this poem.

She is infinite, making brief appearances in this place,
this plane of reality limited by narrow constructs of belief.
She pulls back the veil.
What was once in the shadows is meant to be revealed.
Millions exterminated by colonizing violence and greed.
Millions erased from “his” story.
Every being relegated to the margins
writes a new story to include all beings.

The grid-like structures enclose our sentience,
blind us to our radiance and the truth of our being.
Promising safety, belonging and livelihood,
they create limitations and separation.
The liminality of infinite space at first feels unstable and uncertain.
Leaving the cage can be scary.

This liminal space project has truly been a wonderful experience for me to stretch my creative wings!

The thoughts of liminal space quickly took an unwanted opportunity to change my focus.
In fact, I couldn’t see anything clearly. A bout of vertigo hit like a blinding whirlwind of total
chaos. My artwork in progress needed to double in size to emphasize the quaking blurrrrrr,
becoming head aching art!

Now I totally understand, literally, living a liminal life between the cracks of sanity and grace!

These Knee Weaves were created in 2019 after a fluky accident left me unable to work and needing to learn to walk again.

Though, as an immigrant to the US, I’ve lived in liminal space— the in-between—my whole life; that singular experience catapulted me into an intense separation from even the usual rhythm of my own life.

This led to deep surrender and choosing to creatively explore my own healing thru art, Biofield Tuning, depatterning trauma, and embodiment.

My body has daily messages for me now. Here are a few!
1) There is a lot in us that was never given permission to express
2) The still small voice and I are working together.
3) We are electric. We are whole.
4) A wound is a message… not a place to live.

Carrying the threads
Shaken awake to the bone
where everything is tangled, tender.

From scared to sacred
Stories in the ancestral river

As a maker, introvert, and creative being — I have been familiar with liminal space all of my life.
It is only recently that I have learned the name for it. Dawn’s class has deepened my understanding
and appreciation, as well as enriching my artistic process.

“Rememberings:
marking place
to hold her here
let
go
again…”

“Rememberings:
begin the bitter
sweet
sacred journey
awake in dreamtime
awash in tears”

I live on the unceded land of the Anishinaabe. Making food, making art, making love.

Erika embraces her creative endeavors from her humble abode in “The Hermit” Tarot card, embracing the cottage-core dream with her two familiars in-toe

I am a traditional quilter trying to work toward art quilts and textile arts. The concept of liminality is intriguing, as it not only describes quarantined life during the pandemic, but the struggles moving from precise quarter inch seams and quilt piecing to the abstract. This is my first attempt using variations of a photo I took in an iPhone photography class.

The gallery up close