Transitive Pattern… Okay, read those two words and just ponder them for a moment. What do they mean to you? Nothing? Sound like some kind of dense jargon? When I first encountered these words describing one of the art classes offered at the Arrowmont School, I was curious and mystified. Our instructor, Diana Calderon, gave us this ‘language puzzle’ to begin our journey on the first night we met. We began by making some simple journals and then she asked us to write about “Transitive Pattern.”
It may be hard to think about them stuck together, so let’s do this one at a time and reflect on them separately.
The word TRANSITIVE… what does that word mean to you?
And now the word PATTERN… what does that word mean in your life?
Here are some of the notes I took on the pages of my first bookmaking creation:
Transitive – motion, movement, changing, Liminal, i between the already and the not yet. Transit, the L-train, uptown bus, red line, circulator, on the way….
Pattern – repeatable, predictive, following a deep order, again, again, again… until I notice an interruption, a deviation that helps me see the pattern. Each repetition builds on the last until a new thing emerges.
From that moment forward, Diana’s instructions to us were to make art, simply make, don’t spend too long trying to plan or make decisions. Put all those perfectionist frameworks aside and simply make stuff. Here is paper, here is ink, printing presses and linoleum block to carve, bookmaking tools and supplies, wood, nails, hammers… explode with the inspiration of Transitive Pattern. It was awesome and completely overwhelming without edges.
This class was not going to teach me to craft, create, or perfect any particular technique. Instead, I was going to learn how to let go of my expectations, my judgements, my competition with self and others. I was going to allow the mystery of being transitive and patterned inspire me to explode with creative exploration.
Spirals and curves came together in my first linoleum carvings and I began to make a prayer book, illuminated with pattern and the transitions of each day: Morning, Midday, Evening, Compline. The image was inspired by the organic growth spiral found everywhere in nature and the movement of the sun throughout the day. I printed the image onto raw silk in various colors.
The second half of my prayer book traced the Benedictine transition from Stability, Obedience, Conversion, to a New Creation which becomes the stability upon which we begin again the cycle of spiritual growth. The image was inspired by the “Two Loop Lifecycle Model” shared with the Genesis II team by Tom Brackett and Steve Matthews. I printed the image on raw silk, paper, and black organza to create the different images.
I struggled at the end of the first day to imagine how all of this material I was piling up was going to become anything. I was enjoying myself, but I also felt pretty lost. The other 4 students in the class were digging into their own processes and explorations, and we were all headed in different directions. Everyone was clearly working out some significant transitions in our lives.
One woman was processing her husband’s decline with Parkinson’s disease. Another woman was working with fabric, embroidery, tatting, patterns, and objects inherited from her grandmother who lived at the turn of the century. An artist who teaches middle school was recovering her personal creativity with images of ginkgo leaves and fruit after a year of pandemic teaching. A grad student was exploring her own transformation through patterns of snake skin and ouroboros.
Our instructor invited us all to respond to a survey at the end of our first day to see how we were experiencing the class and what we might need. It was a brave move on her part, I thought. The end of day one in a creative process can often be a disorienting time and students might be full of doubt and critique. But I also recognized that Diana’s first language was Spanish and she shared with us that often she is translating from her thoughts to the words she needs to speak in English. The survey questions gave me a chance to reflect concretely on what I was experiencing. In my responses, I asked her to share more about her own journey with this open ended process. I needed to hear the narrative of her creative journey to help me settle into the path my own journey would take.
The next day, Diana asked if we could spend 30 minutes and she would share more of her story with me. She opened up her website and began to share with me her creative journey and each iteration of her exhibits and performance art. It was an amazing gift. One of the most meaningful pieces to me was a performance project she began after COVID inviting people to connect with her through the barrier of plexiglass. Invitation to Connect. She stood on one side of the barrier placing her left hand on the glass and the participant stood on the other side, placing their right hand over her left. Then they stood there, for however long they chose to stay, while she sketched their face onto the glass with a china marker. Person after person, she connected with in an intimate and safe way, making eye contact or not. And slowly the faces sketched became a community of connection, piling up on the glass like ghost images stamped in time.
Her vulnerable sharing set me free, opened me up, described a path that deeply resonated with my longing for connection and my sense of loss over the last 18 months. It also helped me acknowledge how my sabbatical time is both giving me space for nurturing exploration and is creating a grief as I let go of connection with the people and community of faith at All Saints’.
