Enclosed: the Making of The First Five Years (Home, Thus Far) and a game of I Spy!
Dear Artist,
This month Shel and I marked five years of marriage. It’s been a long road! We’ve logged many miles, literally and figuratively. For our anniversary, I made him multiple artworks to commemorate our journey thus far, and wanted to share one of them with you: my 5-year anniversary tapestry.
The First Five Years (Home, Thus Far) is free-motion stitchwork and mixed media on cotton canvas. Each object represented in this artwork is significant in our marital journey, with an emphasis on the special anniversary gifts we’ve given to one another through the years. In times of continually asking where our home might be, these objects compile a semblance of our identity. It feels like a portrait of us at this current time: Lots of abundance and detail and beauty, golden gifts from past: future promise and possibilities, and also a feeling of searching, or being lost or swept up, and looking in seperate directions and reaching for one another.
In this letter I challenge you to a game of I-Spy! Find all 25 storied objects in the anniversary tapestry, write me back, and you’ll get a special personalized prize/privilege! 🙂
Then I’ll share my process behind making the work. Plus, since I rarely use my personal social media, enjoy some family pictures taken this month, and of course, (our favorite section): a bit of the latest Mo-cabulary.
I Spy: Anniversary Tapestry Edition
Objects are sorted by season/anniversary theme.
Premarital (6 objects): 1 sunflower of friendship (sheldon gave me when I first visited him), 1 Home Book, 1 dove star vortex form of Ladybaby herself (IYKYK), 1 engagement ring, 1 Anaconda house, 1 South River Street House.
Wedding (6 objects): 2 wedding bands, 1 wedding quilt (which we work each year), 1 bridal dress, 1 crown, 1 veil, (all handmade, btw).
1st “paper” Anniversary (3 objects): 1 Anniversary poetry book, 1 embroidered leather briefcase, 1 Herrnhut paper star from Germany.
2nd “cotton” Anniversary (4 objects): 1 stillwater floral quilt, embroidered turqoise poetry on 2 cotton bags for matching jewelry, 1 glenwood “house of clay” (not pictured is the red apron).
3rd “leather” Anniversary (5 objects): 4 leather photo albums, 1 woven leather basket. Extra bonus item: 1 baby!
4th “fruit” Anniversary (5 objects): 3 potted fruit trees: pomegranate, cherry, passionfruit, 1 bunch of whole passionfruits, 1 table from a centenarian apricot tree.
Fun Extras (39 objects): 21 stars including 7 ‘north star’ sky stars, 6 red hearts, 4 books, 1 novel tree, 1 man tree, 1 light tree, 1 blue hand, 1 novel fountain, 1 bunch of seeds, 1 bunch of roots, 1 bunch of lighting.
If you can find all 25 objects and/or 39 fun extras in this artwork, let me know you found them, and you’ll get a special prize/privilege from me!
The making of my Anniversary Tapestry
Underlayers
When I started the piece, we were under contract for a house. I initially began the piece thinking I’d make a compendium of the houses we have both lived in, but as the house contract fell through, I shifted gears and those writings and drawings became the understory for this piece.
I began with a red oxide/ochre gessoed ground prepared this summer, and began making the house map.
After the house fell through, I began integrating figures.
Forming the Composition
As I navigated across the surface via stitching stream-of consciousness, the composition began solidifying.
Layering layering, stitches over color over stitches
There are always so many versions of the work, hidden under layers and layers. I love that the work has stories beyond what is visible at the end.
(Here you can peek at some of the previous versions of those stories).
Special Object Hide-and-Seek
I constantly was retrieving these special objects– like the notorious Home Book and Shel’s Anniversary poetry collection– out of their hiding places for reference.
The very act of unearthing them from slumber felt good: revisiting those pages full of hopes & homes & dreams, returning to those earlier places as a pause from the chaos of our present lives–where many of those formational feelings feel covered over in a day-to day survival.
I always love pausing to see whats going on below!
(Especially during the creation process itself, when the light is shimmering through all of the holes made by the machine. It feels like a magical little secret I as the artist get experience.)
I hope you enjoyed this deeper dive into a more personal artwork and its various symbols! Write me back and tell me how many you found! As always, I welcome your open-ended questions to fuel my future responses!
October Mo-cabulary
(a new term coined this month by grandpa Bill):
“Stem off” : For months, Momo has been saying “stem off” to ask one of us to take the green bits off a carrot or strawberry. This month he also used this command to ask me for help with his hangnail. And then he coined this new noun:
“Milk Stem” = nipple. Ha!
Enjoy some family pictures snapped this October:
xoxo
Your Artist,
Jenny Welden
P.S. get your advance tickets for my scottsdale show here!