Textile artist Nadine Levé’s work of fabric books abound in bold blossoms and tributes to womanhood, her tarot cards of mice are delicately embroidered and she has stitched thoughtful still lifes. Her gentle work reminds me of the beauty and peace in small things, things not really so small when given more than a passing moment of consideration. Linger longer and one can experience appreciation at the majesty and magnificence inherent in the creative process.
Levé and I were connected by way of some fortunate social media algorithm years ago, and the exuberance of her whimsical work transgresses my own myopic propensity for focusing on the pragmatic and practical, a delusion that everything I do or create must somehow function feasibly to be worth my time. I am sure this is a misfortune, a vestige of my young adult perspective, a formative decade of commitment to building a career and raising a baby by myself– a time which diapers and lesson plans reigned over everything, no time for something seemingly self-indulgent, no l’art pour l’art. Many small fortunes came together to move me back towards freer creative experiences in my middle adulthood, including a poetical thinker also brought to me in social media.
In addition to the serendipity of finding Levé’s work, some other blessed algorithm prescribed the Cryptonaturalist, whose quote below beautifully illuminates the reasons Leve’s work defied my short sighted obsession with pragmatism. The Cryptonaturalist published this piece on the fanciful nature of creativity, turning my thoughts around on the issues. He wrote:
And suddenly with those words, whimsy turned punk, “enthusiasm that refuses to defend itself” with the crippling imposition of values from counterfeit sources, rejects the way a world will project it’s self serving assay, and measures your worth with corrupt or distorted principles. Whimsy was thoughtfully defiant, not childish or wasteful. I came to realize it was noncompliant to the things I’d been conditioned on some level to believe mattered more than my own humanness. I took comfort in how it flies in the face of modern life’s endless pressures, and it’s hard, uncompromising twin overseers, productivity and profit.
There is power in whimsy.
Whimsy is enthusiasm that refuses to defend itself with practicality.
It is finding meaning in pure enjoyment.
It is the practice of honoring delight for delight’s sake.
When being awake feels gray and stale, try inviting more whimsy into your life.“
In turning toward whimsy and so toward myself, and in defiance of pragmatism, I hand stitched three little birds in the style of the Nadine Levé, and in doing so, felt some alignment, some solidarity in the making small thoughtful stitches, in colorful scraps of textile pulled taut between my fingers. During this time, my world narrowed down to these few ancient elements of fibers and needle, my thoughts passing carelessly by the ungraded essays, unread DMs, passing the political news droning on in the background, the dirty dishes in the sink. Instead, I immersed my attention fully on the making of small fabric birds that carried my mind up into a limitless imaginary fabric sky, a moment free from the corrosive mindset that my art must serve something other than its own creation. It wasn’t for money or household uses. It was simply for the joy of creating something whimsical.
Years later I uncovered the fabric birds in a storage box, and appliqued them onto a man’s collared button down I’d recently bought for three dollars at Goodwill. Deconstructing the shirt with a stitch ripper, I marveled at all the hours of work that had gone into what eventually came my way for a few dollars. The buttons, the top stitching around the placard. The plastic stays some unknown person pushed into the collar points I was removing. And again I found myself marveling at the astonishing nature of small things– the cotton that started in the soil and grew from sunlight and rain, and the person who picked it and person who weighed it and person who bailed it. Someone drove it and people sold it and wove it and cut it and on and on to where it hangs between my fingers as I quickly dissect it for my own practice work of newly learned techniques– reverse applique, kantha type stitching, and paper piecing scraps on adding machine tape for trim.
Why does this matter at all? Because one’s focused attention matched with some measure of creative freedom is empowering, inoculating a person from much of the toxicity we suffer in a society bent on telling everyone who they are supposed to be without regard for the power of variety and beauty of radical authenticity. Deep attention such as Levé has for individual strands of mice fur in her embroidery brings one to the wonder of it all, the profound mystery of being, and that is the doorway to gratitude, to the appreciation for the witnessing of greatness in the seemingly minuscule. Researcher and storyteller Brene Brown talks at length about how a joyful life depends on gratitude, one of the only venues to feeling and maintaining joy in a world that we all know can so quickly take what is most precious to us. In her seminal book, The Gifts of Imperfection, she talks about “foreboding joy” and how “the best way to transform our compulsive need to dress rehearse tragedy at times of overwhelming joy, it to proactive gratitude…” In such a moment, there is no space for anxiety, no room for societies suffocating roles, if we shut out the nagging fears stitch by stitch with focus on the small wonders of life.
