Faith Wilding's Fearful Symmetries

Memoirs Excerpt

CALLING THE WORLD

Faith Wilding

I am lying in the back of a rumbling, horse-drawn wagon gazing up at the boundless night sky pricked with stars blinking and winking as though signaling to the sparkling glowworms darting around me in the hot, humid night. I rock to the rhythmic clunk and grind of iron axles and heavy wooden wheels in the sandy track, lulled by the clopping hooves, creak, slap, and jingle of the leather harness and bridles, murmur of distant voices. Faint singing drifts in from afar; half asleep, I sing along: Slow, horses, slow, as through the night we go; We would count the stars in heaven; Hear the grasses grow… . Sounds of other wagons approach from all directions; horses whinny softly in greeting; human voices call out in German, English, and languages I don’t understand. Who are these travelers? Where do they come from? Where are they going? The wagons draw together side by side, a protective bulwark against the night. A bonfire flares up, people begin to move around it in a slow circle dance holding hands, singing in German: …schliesst den Kreis! schliesst den Kreis! bunt und weiss, horch und sieh, horch und sieh: Harmonie, Harmonie! I long to join the circle but can’t move from my nest in the wagon. The fire dies down; people climb back into the wagons that rumble away into the night, scattering in different directions until I can no longer hear them. I wake up sweating, still humming Harmonie, Harmonie…

OUR FAMILY BOOK

My mother kept meticulous records of the births and early development of each of her first three children. To this day, I can read the exact dates on which Vivien, Rick, and I were fed our first solid foods, turned over, got our first teeth, and spoke our first words. The book’s worn, dark blue cloth cover bears the title, Our Family, embroidered in yellow chain-stitch below a simple cross-stitched border. The lined pages are foxed and brittle-edged now, but Mum’s rounded, cursive script in black, or blue ink, is as clear and legible as on the day she wrote it in her teacher’s neat handwriting. On the reverse of the flyleaf Mum pasted my father’s rough, black pencil sketch of the interior of the dining hall of the Cotswold community in England where my parents celebrated their wedding on September 14, 1940. Though the entries trail off in 1950, Our Family Book unlocks vivid early memories before I became fully conscious of the world I was born into.

Edith and Harry Barron Wedding, Cotswold Bruderhof, September 14, 1940.

Edith and Granny Appleton, last holiday in Blackpool before Edith emigrated to Paraguay, 1939.

Sometimes, as a special Sunday night treat, Vivi and I begged Mum to get out the Family Book and read us bits of our family’s founding story: How she and my father met during a Methodist Whitsuntide outing in Snowdonia, Wales; how Dad became a conscientious objector at the beginning of the Second World War, and quit his job in the accounts department of the Manchester Cooperative Society, and began his search for a more meaningful way of life serving the poor and needy. Dad searched all over England, until he discovered a German Christian commune on a farm in the Cotswolds, and made up his mind to join it within two weeks of his first visit there. Here, Mum would pause, look up and wink at Dad, before continuing the story of how he had sent her a telegram in Widnes where she was teaching Primary School. Solemnly, she intoned the fateful words: HAVE FOUND IT. COME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. STOP. LOVE, HARRY. And guess what? she’d add, pausing dramatically for us to chime in: Mummy came on her holidays, and liked it, and then you got married in a Registrar’s office. Dad jumped in at this point to paint a vivid picture of the part of the story we never tired of: Then England declared war on Germany, and the British Home Office warned the commune that they would have to leave England, or else all the German men and older boys would be put in a camp while the war lasts. Rather than be separated, the commune decided to stick together, and look for a new home far away from war-torn England and Europe: And then someone told us that Paraguay was full of monkeys, and orange and banana trees, so we decided to go to Paraguay! Dad would say solemnly in his broadest Yorkshire accent that always sent us into whoops and giggles.

Dad, Vivien, Faith, and Mum Barron, 1943, Primavera, Paraguay.

Maureen, Vivien, and Faith at Sawmill, Primavera, Paraguay, 1958.

I was born in Paraguay into a world still at war, on Sunday morning, June 6, 1943, exactly three years after the date on which my father had arrived on his first visit to the Cotswold commune in England, in June 1940. This auspicious coincidence was one of the reasons I was named Faith, for as my mother wrote in Our Family Book, We wanted her name to remind us always of the faith for which we live. In naming me Faith, my parents marked me with a prediction and expectation that I never fulfilled in the way they had intended.

THE HOLY TREES

As a child I walked enchanted among holy trees gazing up into their leafy crowns so high above me. Dad came to know the botanical characteristics of the different trees intimately during his work in the sawmill, and taught us to distinguish them by their bark, growth patterns, leaf shapes, blossoms, and seeds. I would run my fingers slowly over their ridged, smooth, or crenellated bark, chanting their musical names in Guaraní or Spanish: Lapácho, Urundemí, Curupaí, Samahú, Ombú, Yvirapitá, Yataí, Aguaí, Paraíso, Espina de Coróna, an incantation I still sing to myself. Often I’d climb up into their top-most branches and perch there light as a leaf, completely happy, while birds sang around me and branches swayed in the wild wind. From this aerie, I surveyed my world: tall-grass campos stretching to the horizon on all sides, sap-green, straw-gold, or umber depending on the season, encircled by the spiky silhouettes of dark wood-islands edging the campos like the scissor-cut forests in my book of German fairy-tales. The sky was silvery, blinding – it hurt my eyes to look at it too long. Everything shimmered and undulated in the humid heat. I’d run home barefoot, hopping from shady patch to shady patch to avoid getting blisters from the hot sand. When it rained, I’d hitch up my long skirt and apron, tuck them into my roomy knickers, and splash joyously through puddles and squelchy mud.

We lived in long, low, mud-walled, straw-thatched multi-family Hallen (halls), surrounded by a wild tangle of bougainvillea, loofah vines, moonflower bushes, citrus trees, climbing roses, gardenias, honeysuckle, and jasmine that exhaled intoxicating bursts of perfume at night. Safely in bed on stormy nights, I’d listen to the wind roaring through the treetops, clouds exploding thunderously, and rain rushing down, imagining that I was in Noah’s Ark with all the animals safely below deck. The storms died down as abruptly as they started. I’d kneel up in bed and stick my cupped hand out the window to catch the last fat drops seeping from the straw roof. The rain tasted of sun-dried grasses.

Tapiraquay river, 1953.

After the electricity was shut off at ten o’clock at night, we had only stars and moon for light. Dad taught us the constellations: the Southern Cross he’d never seen in England, the Great Dipper turned upside down, bold Orion who took a year to travel the sky from horizon to horizon, the foamy river of the Milky Way arching brightly above our heads, setting the sky aglow. When it was my turn to sleep by the window, I lay gazing up through my mosquito net, trying to stay awake until I’d seen a shooting star. The moon drew me with its mysterious power: After finding me halfway up a tree one moonlit night fast asleep, one of my parents sat by my bed on full moon nights to keep me from sleepwalking.

Faith Wilding, Moth Triptych, 1974. Watercolor, gouache, graphite on paper. 40.5 x 26.5 inches each. Photo credit: EK Waller.

Coming to Becoming

An Introduction

Shannon R. Stratton

For three summers I taught a class at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan, called Party As Form, a strange experiment in pedagogy at an artist residency and camp about the potential of the in-between spaces, and how, in those spaces, to be a good host, how communitas is created, and how groups are formed and dissolved. For the most part, the class was about play and how play can suspend people in a kind of liminal space, where possibility reigns. Our conversation about play, and parties, inevitably (given our context, at an artist residency) would lead us back to the studio and a consideration of that site as a liminal space – a protected space of becoming, which has to remain constantly hanging between before and after.

In 2013, the spring before teaching the first iteration of Party As Form, I’m in Providence, Rhode Island, with Faith Wilding, pouring over slides and flat files, giddily conceiving of the exhibition of her work that we are planning for Threewalls that coming New Year. I had expected to see about 30 percent of what I found when Abby Satinsky, Threewalls’ then Associate Director, and I arrived at Faith’s apartment, having been operating from a rather limited knowledge of Faith’s work. I knew Waiting (1972), I knew Crocheted Environment (1972), and I knew Faith as part of the collaborative subRosa. I assumed that there would be a trail of artwork leading back to her years working with the Feminist Art Program in Fresno, California, but I hadn’t expected to discover the rich archive of paintings and drawings that had been tucked away in storage units around the United States, some for over thirty years.

Faith Wilding, Untitled (the parents), 1990. Watercolor, ink on paper. 87 x 57 inches. Photo credit: EK Waller.

When I first heard that Faith would be awarded a lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for Art at the 2014 College Art Association Conference in Chicago, it seemed only appropriate to celebrate her achievements with an exhibition. Threewalls had built its reputation on making solo exhibitions for artists, primarily from Chicago, at all career stages, but with an emphasis on exhibiting work at a pivotal point in an artist’s career. Nothing seemed quite so pivotal now than to celebrate her lifetime achievement by mounting Faith Wilding’s first retrospective.

In Providence, Abby and I delved into Faith’s archives while she told us about her youth growing up in a Bruderhof community in Paraguay, a childhood, we discover, that is as richly remembered for its anachronistic conventions as it is for its rich culture of literature, theater, and song. Growing up in the jungle, completely isolated from the mid-century distractions of her American or European counterparts, Faith developed an intense relationship to nature that would leave vivid and lasting memories of the flora and fauna that surrounded her in youth. Coupled with developing in a community that eschewed mirrors, alongside its embrace of traditional modes of gendered dress and modesty, young Faith was shown a fairly immutable picture of what it meant to be a woman (or a man for that matter): a body that went from childhood to childbearing with very little time in between.

As Faith told us about her childhood (she was simultaneously writing her memoirs, selections of which are included in this book), she shared with us the work stored in closets and flat files in her Providence home. Chief amongst these works were two large untitled watercolors, parents and mermaid with parent. In both paintings a slender, sinuous female figure appears to drift between and alongside the larger adult bodies, like an apparition or a strange companion. Faith talked about growing up in the Bruderhof community and wondering about the adult bodies that were so heavily concealed under the layers of clothing that her parents, aunts, uncles, and other elders wore. With no mirror to contemplate her changing body and a culture that forbade any kind of revealing attire, Faith explored her developing self from a skewed point of view. Not surprisingly the watercolor bodies are headless, body-costumes that remind me of paper-doll outfits, appearance or personas that can be, will be, pinned on.

As I considered these relatively recent works in light of Faith’s famed performance Waiting, the Crocheted Environment (which has come to be known as Womb Room) and the back catalog of drawings and paintings Faith had made since the 1970s, I started to see her vocabulary of imagery (iconology) differently. Repeated throughout a lifetime of work were the following: leaves, the cocoon or chrysalis (also shroud, mummy), mermaids, various flower and bud forms (usually unfolding or opening), the dress, spirals, moths, and other vivid winged insects. Spring, new growth, rebirth, emergence, transformation, potential, possibility: these were the words this set of symbols seemed to conjure. It appeared to me, stretching back to that significant and pivotal performance, Waiting, that Faith Wilding’s work was an index of becoming. As we set about choosing works for the exhibition, which Faith would ultimately name Fearful Symmetries, the connective tissue across years of work appeared to be that of the process of transformation, but without ever having to make the ultimate arrival.

Materially, while guache, pen and ink, pencil and collage were consistent elements, the thin wash of watercolor also connected years of practice, even finding its cousin in Faith’s installation Flow. Consisting of two chemistry beakers filled with colored ink-dyed water, Flow anchors in each beaker the ends of an arc of cotton cloth that while suspended between them, slowly absorbs the color by capillary action until the colored washes meet somewhere in the middle. Flow is like an automatic watercolor – allowing the nature of the material to make its own mark in time, rather than have the artist direct it.

As a young art student in the mid-1990s, watercolor had always struck me as the most feminine and amateur of art-making methodologies. Along with flowers and the color purple, it seemed best avoided. Despite the strides feminism had made before my formative years in art school, there I was, surrounded by male painting professors (and sometimes women as well), who derided anything potentially perceived as vulnerable, and thus feminine. Leafing through Faith’s Tears series, a grouping of small, 12 x 9 inches watercolors of tears, some with, and others without, texts, both personal and borrowed, I felt a flood of disappointment. I had missed the opportunity to explore both the fragility and strength of bare emotion when I was a student – too afraid to defend affect in my work, whether conceptually or materially. I found in the Tears series (and in fact, in Faith’s many other small watercolors and drawings such as Daily Texts [1987], Grimm Tales [1994], and other drawings not necessarily part of a series) evidence of the great strength of emotion – giving form to feeling. She had unwaveringly plumbed the depths of affect – whether it be sadness, longing, confusion, disgust, or joy – with such consistency and insistence that the vulnerability that I had been taught was weak was unmasked as brute strength. Those vulnerable, in-between affects that challenge and change us are not liabilities, but rather, the processes that continually fortify and connect us.

Faith Wilding, Flow, with Tears. Installation, Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries, A Retrospective, The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California 2015. Photo credit: EK Waller.

Later that summer I would head back to Ox-Bow to teach the first session of Party as Form, exploring themes of change and becoming in relation to group dynamics with a