Tree Ring (blue) #8

These are tree rings I made between December 2024 and March 2025. The were part of an installation called Sacred Forest, at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven, CT. Sashiko and embroidery floss on cotton and linen.

I am selling the pieces/rings individually but show them together in the image for size/context. Please refer to the numbered image and make sure that is the correct ring you are trying to purchase (in bold, below, and in the Product Name).

1. 49, 12 inches

2. 45, 10 inches

3. November 19 & December 14, 8 inches

4. 37, 7.5 inches

5. 36, 7 inches

6. 8 & 22, 6.5 inches

7. 25 & 27, 4 inches

8. Jupiter Moon, Dec 14, 5 inches—$25

9. 63, 12 inches
   
   About this series:
   
   I grew up running around my family’s small lumberyard in rural Maine, playing in the sawdust,

   obsessed with the curly pieces that would fall to the floor when anything was planed. My

   grandfather started out as a lumberjack; my father was a brilliant carpenter who could design

   and build houses and douse for water with a stick. I spent my childhood running around the

   woods, finding peace in its solitude and shelter. I never felt alone when in the forest and I still

   don’t. There are sounds and textures and colors in the forest that are a form of family, for me.

   I chose blue for this series for its associations with spirituality, which I was deeply in need of as I

   worked each piece. I was thinking a lot about Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book I read the last

   time I was in the middle of a big loss— and that takes grief and love and its relationship to the

   color blue as its object:
   

   “71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

   72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the

   problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? –No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms.

   But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sot of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.”
   

   Lately, I’ve also become more interested in textile work that incorporates data visualization.

   Cross sections of trees I’d argue are nature’s most intense data visualization system. Tree rings

   mark what has happened and the effects of an environment on an individual, as well as that

   individual’s response.
   

   For this series, I needed to understand how at the heart of grief exists an obsessive need to

   make sense of disaster. I based each piece here on dates, years, ages, moon cycles, and

   personal numerological analyses of the people and events responsible for a winter that was

   deeply painful. Stitching these allowed me to process and manifest in physical form some of the

   “data” about what happened that was nebulously floating around in my heart and head and

   body. I can look at these pieces and see what my brain was spinning; they document

   the facts adjacent to my feelings (grief, sadness, anger, disbelief, fury, denial, disgust, hope,

   desire, and growth). It is data made visible via an object—a tree, a grouping of trees—with a lot

   of metaphorical weight in my personal symbology. I’m tethering my shit down to something

   substantial and objective, a forest of meaning and care.
   

   My experiences with wood(s) and the forest undergird my most fundamental understandings of

   how the universe works. My higher power might be the moon but she has giant pine boughs for

   arms that, in the sober queer words Eileen Myles uses to describe their higher power in A Blue

   Jay, she “wraps around me like a porch.” Each stitch is a prayer and/or an intrusive thought,

   every single one. The rings are tea leaves, spelling out a story. I worked on these mostly during

   AA meetings, and so Higher Power talk is embedded in each by the motion of my hands

   endlessly weaving in and out, disappearing and emerging with these murmurings, chants, ritual

   sayings, and confessions.