Strange Bedfellows

Sometimes I wake up with scissors in my bed. Of all the things I could find next to me in the morning, they’re not the worst - a disappointing one-night stand or the head of a prized racehorse come to mind - but they’re certainly not the best. Sharp implements do not play well with bedclothes or sleeping bodies.

How, one might ask, do the scissors end up under my covers? To answer, let me unpick the seam of this story, tracing it back to my infancy.

I came into this world sketching designs in the air, my pudgy fingers constantly moving, translating my thoughts into patterns long before I could express them in words. My mother, a landscape painter, was well-prepared to foster this creativity. I can’t remember the first time I put brush to paper or shaped an animal from clay, because art was omnipresent in my upbringing. Before the age of ten, I was accompanying her on yearly plein air painting trips to the Oregon Coast.

My artistic training was osmotic. I listened as my mother and other painters discussed contrasting values in the light and shadow of a group of buildings. I watched as they traced the peak of a mountain in charcoal or the curve of driftwood with the tip of a brush. I still have - and on occasion still use - the Winsor and Newton travel watercolor kit that she gave me for my twelfth birthday. I remember that the box had been opened prior to being wrapped, and that she had made some small but significant alterations: replacing the black pigment brick with a glob of Payne’s Gray, and meticulously labeling each color (Alizarin Crimson, Burnt Sienna, Sap Green) with Sharpie. Over the years, we developed a rhythm, painting side by side for hours before breaking for snacks and critiques. We painted together in Italy, Ireland, Canada, and many of the United States.

There was one downside to this unparalleled, organically-acquired creative education: my art, like my pale complexion and resounding laugh, mirrored that of my mother. In every pencil mark and brushstroke, I saw her influence. I struggled for many years to find my own artistic identity, separate from but linked to the woman whose biological and artistic genes I had inherited.

I sought to differentiate myself through science. In high school, I fell passionately in love with chemistry. Once again I traced three-dimensional shapes in the air before me, now visualizing molecular structures and movements. Meanwhile, I continued to make art, continued to travel abroad on mother-daughter painting trips, and even found an academic route that combined my passions. I graduated college with a degree in art conservation, and headed directly into a graduate program in chemistry, hoping to one day specialize in conservation science.

In the winter of 2012, as I finished my first semester of graduate school in DC, it was clear that this plan was not turning out as I had hoped. I lost an unhealthy amount of weight and all of my cheer. My formerly deep-flowing artistic drive dried to a mere trickle. I returned home for the holidays with a single Christmas request: a sewing machine. I wanted to make the clothes that I couldn’t afford to buy on a graduate student’s stipend. I wanted some distraction from the low, constant hum of scientific instruments and the solvent aroma of the laboratory. In January, I boarded the plane back east with a Brother Simplicity 3129 as my carry-on item, the unwieldy plastic case drawing questioning looks from the other passengers.

In my tiny Georgetown apartment, I had no room to spread out. My entire desk was taken up by that sewing machine. So when it came time to cut fabric or hand-sew a seam or add beaded details, I worked on my bed. Late at night, streaming old episodes of Law and Order, I cuddled up with yards of cloth, a pin cushion, and of course, scissors. Large, orange-handled pinking shears. Tiny, silver thread snippers. In my weariness I would lose them in the covers, only to find them as I crawled out of bed the next morning.

In the years since, I have moved around the US and abroad, bringing my Brother along whenever possible. I continued to make my own clothing, and slowly began incorporating sewn elements into my artwork. Fabric adds to my art practice that extra dimension - literal and metaphorical - that I sought for so long. My work has become a mashup of my mother’s painting lessons and my passion for textiles. With this combination, I recreate the innumerable textures of the natural world. A dab of white paint replicates the glint of afternoon sun on a strawberry’s ripening skin. Beads, sewn at regular intervals, become its seeds. Brown and green wool fibers are felted into uncannily life-like mildew, slowly consuming the fruit. The seemingly infinite capacity of fabric to be shaped, manipulated, and embellished thrills me. Often, the rhythmic whirring of the sewing machine cannot keep up with the ideas in my head.

Like many a millennial, I moved back into my parents’ home during the 2020 pandemic. When I’m not teaching chemistry online, I share a studio with my mother. She paints and draws as I sew and bead. We still hold critiques, pushing the boundaries of each other’s work. To this day we travel together and paint the landscape, but even in the absence of fabric or sewing machine, I feel secure in my artistic identity.

I still habitually work in my bed in the evenings, as always against the grisly backdrop of Law and Order. I’ve gotten better at checking between the sheets and duvet and under the pillows for any sharp objects I may have left behind. But every so often, after a late night of creating, I awake to the gleam of sunlight on steel.