Blanket weaving

Fresh willow is harvested between October and April. In fields north of the city, the branches lay in high heaps. They shoot out from stocky, unassuming trunks in every direction, small explosions that hang atop dozens of horizons. Furry buds give way to thin leaves of bright green. Things quickly get out of control and so, fresh willow is harvested between October and April to keep horizons regular, to make sure that they remain down to earth. 

Traditionally, fresh willow is made into fences and screens. This happens in several ways. The informal way is a variation on a pile. High posts are drilled into the earth along a property line or waterway on a slight angle. The willow is then laid horizontally and added to every time willow is cut. This method of boundary-making is flexibility solidified: a mass grave of youth. Another, more formal way is through weaving. Posts are installed at a regular pace, usually every 60-80 centimetres. The minimum number of posts is 3 but that really isn’t enough for a good weave. The lengths of willow—varying thicknesses, green and pliable—are gently jogged around each warp, alternating from left to right to allow for each willow branch’s tapering length. A rubber mallet or a good shove is used to keep the weft tight and after the desired height is achieved, small nails are used to hold the top edge like a binding on a blanket. The thin ends of excess are then trimmed. If placed in a vase of water on a window sill, they can generate their own inheritance. 

There are seven bundles of willow in the side garden. I moved each piece from the street where an amiable young man who only works outside used a tiny forklift from the back of his truck to place them on my sidewalk. Five meters of willow is longer in the city; each burst of excess growth wrestled against my door frames and kicked at my kitchen counter in passing. When this rain and wind stops, I’ll steer the fresh willow up to the terrace garden. Four posts are waiting. I’ll make some mediation there between the earth and many horizons.

New Year

I imagine one without strength to go outdoors. I imagine another watching the electrical box outside her studio window. I see one, looking from great windows into boreal forest, waiting for it to be consumed in white. Another, in a suburb with a long commute, calculates the accumulation in extra time while another—older, earned—cashes it in for sleep and books.

The epiphany was that we each have our confrontations.

Damp patch

Now there are clear mornings. When I pull back the drapes from the corner, the window that opens reveals a lightness in the sky that we never see. There is no pink as the sun rises. No orange, no heat. The ink of the blue only thins on the horizon. Like the runoff from that indigo pot.

I thought of it yesterday when I was talking to her about doing things you aren’t sure you should do; like going to live in other places for a while, with other people, in the hopes that new things can be made. Of course you can make things in the place where you are but there are moments when invitations can be answered for journeys to be taken. She said that the house she was given was unbearably cold—a confrontation in a cold January—being cold made her tense, she said. She wrapped my shawl around her waist; she wore one pair of pants atop another. The situation I dreaded before arriving there was that I could not sleep. They provided me a private room in the shared apartment across the hall from the shared bath. It was comfortable and clean and directly above the town tavern that stayed open until the early morning. I thought about leaving but that was before walking up hill, before breakfast with strangers and before the runoff from that dye pot. 

I just found a damp patch in the corner of our bedroom. It’s right near the floor, where the east wall meets the south. It isn’t a leak; it’s developing from within. The cold that comes with this new sky has altered the possibilities in the interior and there is even a bit of mildew growing. Last year the conditions just weren’t right, I guess.

Dark soles

Look, he said, proudly. Black on black on black. They won’t show anything. 

Five days of walking filled all their crevices. Not at home but abroad, on the slopes of modestly sized mountains and down service roads. There was welcome rain during one day and two nights that filled the guts carved into the clay and didn’t penetrate. The texture of buttercream but not the colour. I smashed the black soles on the edge of the small front stair. 

A trip into town relieved some of the pressure. There was rain there too but it was more a rinse than a soak. The creamy lime stains on the laces washed away. The resistance provided by paved surfaces worked thin lines of grout from the cracks but there was excess. It had been applied like fondant, liberally, on the level that held my foot above the earth. In the airport lounge with the travellers who had come from places with firmer ground, it remained visible. I rubbed each toe cap against the commercial grade carpet. Black on corporate blue.

In the side street that bends with the house named Trial and Error, the residue finally gave way. The stones were smooth under foot and it was pouring. It didn’t take any effort. I came home clean. 

Cutting with a dull blade

Don’t think that pressure will change things. It won’t.

It’s hard to remember the last cut. Certainly on those two tables pressed together in the dining room bay window, light in the morning if there was any to be had and through the funnel of the rear hall in the afternoon. That cutting mat was taped down to stop it from sliding. Pressure was a problem then too.

It’s easier to remember all of the actions made to bind things together. At the sewing table in the window that overlooked the island of stones, overlooked by the boughs of the cedar that got scary in the wind—edges round, straight, smooth and rough—then standing with the machine atop a makeshift box in the bay window again. Better light when there was any and a lighter bodily burden too.

There are two extra blades left in the box even thought it looked like one, bound together with grease applied to keep them apart. Remove the time with the grease. The blade beneath is still fresh, its body intact. Up to the task. Pressing threads apart until they break.

Just now the cutting mat slid a bit. The new meter stick has its own backing but the mat just takes it along. It’s the pressure. I applied too much.

Sleep story

We had no mattress when we got there. We left the old one behind in the apartment made of glass. The new owner was hurrying us out. The old mattress needed transport to the dump. I have a van. I’ll do it. My renter wants in. It was lying there on the floor when we pulled the door closed for the last time. Years of sleep or the equivalent.

The small house was unbearably hot when we arrived so it wasn’t so terrible to sleep the floor. We had an air mattress but it was precarious. He leaned in to kiss my forehead and gave me a black eye. We went to the store with the nice mattresses shortly thereafter. This was what I would spend the prize money on: a mattress made of latex that I would have for life. This is what my accomplishments could afford me: sleep at night. Rest for my left hip and his right shoulder. A mattress made of latex with a merino wool cover that resisted dust mites and bedbugs. Protection from calamity, awake and at rest.

I slept beautifully on that mattress. Truly, it was the best I have ever slept, even while waking life escalated daily with absurdity in the name of education. Our bodies sank into it at the end of each day and remained thus, unconscious and undisturbed until we heard cardinal song or commuter traffic. While we worked, it quietly re-established its form, expanding to fill pits born by our heaviest and pointiest parts. It was always remade by evening.

When I was pried from that house in late September, the complimentary mattress bag provided by the movers was insufficient. It was thin, foggy and had obviously been used to hold inferior mattresses. This isn’t good enough I said before driving away and crying in a parking lot. I hope you survive this a neighbour said before waving goodbye. On the other side of the country, at another small house the mattress reappeared as resilient as ever. That bedroom was cold and damp but it proved resistant to this too. It held its form but never the dust, even as I laundered a hundred meters of unbleached cotton. He propelled himself through one bad job and two better and I made soft things for long journeys. We always slept well at night except that Christmas Eve but it wasn’t the mattress’ fault. This is a mattress for life, I told myself. You earned it with your accomplishments. No one can take that away from you.

Of all the things left behind, this is the heaviest burden.

Some foreground

I see a shadow. 

The edges are fuzzy and not sharp. I looked again right now and it faded from view.

I breathed. It came back. 

When I make colour, I want it to be flat. I don’t like delineation. I want it to be even and subdued. Heather said I wanted it grey. I said I preferred gray to grey. Not somber. Modest.

This isn’t modest but mute.

Just now I saw a shadow. The contrast is low, there is a blanket on my knees and the door shouldn’t really be open. But finally, I saw a shadow; some foreground in the depth of field, some action of the tongue.

Hard of hearing

I heard the harmony again in the chorus. On the inside of my ear, not the outside.

No one taught me to sing harmony. I could just hear it, but then suddenly it was gone. It was around the time that we lived in the place with the front porch that I loved and the peonies whose hearts bled fuchsia. They exploded out of the ground almost as soon as the snow melted but that was the way that it was there: a tyranny of ice followed by a tsunami of sweat. When I try to recall the moment I stopped hearing the harmony inside of my ear, it’s that street that I remember: seven houses long on our side with the small apartment block on the end closest to the river whose surface burst in the spring. They laid dynamite all over it.

I am walking toward the river when I realise for the first time that I am hearing everything differently. I’m on my way to do the thing that I was convinced was mine to do and I felt—wanted—willed that this was the way to do it but I couldn’t find harmony anymore, inside of my ear. Not with my headphones in the heavy heat nor teetering up the ice. Not while working in my studio with the stereo up loud, alone or close to the others. You’re having a good time in there, the undergrad painter said without any envy. I was having a good time but I couldn’t hear harmony.

All this time that I haven’t heard harmony on the inside of my ear, not the outside, I’ve been apologising for things that weren’t worthy of apologies or criticism, like earnestness, ambition or enjoying the colour pink. Ten years of apologies, building up like a sheet of ice. It’s so thick that it looks like it’s frozen all the way through. I get that people think that but down below, at the bottom, there is movement. The workers who lay the dynamite know it. They know when they release the charge that there will be something left to carry away the pieces.

I heard the harmony again on Wednesday afternoon. On the inside of my ear, not the outside. It was the low register, the one the never strains my voice. I was washing residue out of the kitchen sink. Chunks of cauliflower had created a blockage. I picked the big ones out with my fingers and let the inconsequential disappear in the current.

Sleep talk

I keep talking to you in my sleep. Last night I was trying to explain to you that it was my crippling self-awareness that did this. I don’t have any naïveté about it left. I lost that a long time ago but it took longer for the optimism to vacate. When you have a good rest and the sky is clear on either side, optimism grows but it’s a bit like pond scum. The sun made it from the miracle of micro-organisms but what is pond scum really doing for you? It hangs out where you wish it wouldn’t. It takes the reflection out of the waterline. It obscures where grassland begins and ends. It can make something look solid that isn’t. It can diminish a healthy fear of sinking.

This is the thing I was trying to make you understand during our sleep talk. You kept looking at me like I was choosing wrong, that I was killing something that deserved to live. When I woke, I looked up the number of grasses that grow here and found that there are more than 150 varieties with exponentially more variants. They are all blooming now and their pollen collects on our window screens and ledges. It’s residue with promise.

I see rust: Tomma Abts in Cologne

Don’t calculate it; tell it like it is.

They didn’t let me down.

I’m 46 now and being disappointed is familiar territory. This isn’t a sob story. Life is not terrible. Things are just other than I imagined. Everywhere. In everything. The bolts in the trim on the decking that I thought were perfectly maintained are coming loose. I see rust. I’ll need to have someone look at that. The sunny terrace is burning up in early June. The plants described as needing full sun would prefer that sun without so much heat. The anise that thrived a month ago is crispy. A lower frond, now orange, snapped off with the gentlest touch. It isn’t just at home where my powers of observation are heightened, where I will admit to being too sensitive, where every change in the equilibrium creates shockwaves. It happened also when I walked out of the train station and the cathedral was right there, like a sonic boom. I expected to find it, to discover it, but there it was immediately: the accumulation of a million choices, for better or for worse. I knew from reading about the older paintings that they were also an accumulations of choices. Jan Verwoert called it “choosing to choose” (1) and this made an enormous impression on me when I read it because choosing to choose seems to me an excellent mandate for any made thing, like a painting or a cathedral, or a day for that matter. At the end of each, or rather an end—because choosing to choose could result in any manner of endings—what we are left with is a reckoning. A reckoning which, if it is honest, reveals something about the agency involved in getting there. Standing in front of seven paintings by Tomma Abts, this is what didn’t let me down.

And can I say how afraid I was to be let down? I had made the paintings and the practice of Tomma Abts into a lodestar of sorts. Look at this woman: making beautifully-crafted, intelligent, modestly sized paintings at a humane pace and hanging them up on a wall in a nice gallery, and not even very often at that. She is not sharing process updates. She is not sharing views of her studio or what she eats for lunch. Frankly, I don’t know anything about the way Tomma Abts goes to her studio or makes her paintings except for what the paintings permit me to discover and this, if you have the good fortune to stand in front of them, is a surprising amount. The seven paintings gathered together for this particular exhibition present structurally in three small groups: the first group are two paintings like the ones Jan Verwoert wrote about in Choosing to Choose. They are modestly-sized (48 x 38 centimetres), on rectangular stretchers wrapped with canvas and set on the portrait orientation. The titles are names; a familiar beginning. The second group are not regular stretchers. These stretchers already have a form. Here, Tomma has made the first of two other choices about beginning. She has inserted roundness into the rectilinearity of two frames and another is compressed and has opposing corners removed. It feels like a parallelogram but it isn’t. The titles are still names; a slightly different beginning. Abts makes the second of her two other choices in beginning with the third group containing two paintings. One is delicately shaped—its upper right corner has been planed off at a straight angle—and the second is large but not very large (86.5 x 63.5 centimetres). These two paintings in the third structural group aren’t stretched with canvas but what the gallery records as sailcloth. It is thin but strong. Humble in appearance but technical in its performance. Light moves over it and also into it. These sailcloth paintings are a new beginning; they are not paintings in the way that I have seen Tomma Abts make paintings.

Tomma Abts
Ayelt, 2022
Acrylic and oil on canvas
48 x 38 cm

Ayelt (2022) is closest to the paintings that I know, the paintings I didn’t want to be disappointed by. The surface of this painting—its surprising revelation of form, dimension and colour—I can’t think of a better word for it than mystical. It is earthly effort amounting to transcendence and looking at it intently for a prolonged period was like being pierced through the heart, like Teresa in ecstasy. The line which is the subject of this painting unfolds with such a glorious lilt that one cannot fathom having just arrived here. There must have been a plan; there must have been a strategy; there must have been tape! But this is not how Tomma Abts makes a painting. We must accept it in faith: this all came about in the making of the painting (2). We have arrived here with Abts without knowing from the beginning that we would. This is even the case with the shaped canvases and the two paintings whose corners hold circular forms. This beginning decision seems to dictate the foregone conclusion that a circle will be present in the composition. At first I thought this a remarkable exception but now I think it is less so. Geometry is present in any beginning, like the sun or moon on the horizon.

Tomma Abts
VI, 2022
Oil on canvas
86.3 x 63.5 cm

Tomma Abts
VII, 2022
Soluble wax crayon on cotton and sailcloth
86.5 x 63.5 cm

One of the circle canvases, VI, shares its nomenclature with a painting on sailcloth (VII, 2022). This is curious. The change in title practice from name to number and these two particular paintings in numerical sequence is the happening in this assembly of seven paintings. They made me think, suddenly, about the books and diagrams my father used while taking sailing lessons when I was very young. He had several text books and also a binder of worksheets to solve equations. I can recall charts of currents and wind, explanations of sail sizes and functions and many drawings of knots whose competent constructions could hold enormous swaths of sail taunt. My father’s books also contained an explanation of tacking and jibing, the way the bow or stern of a sailboat could be manoeuvred into the wind. It was bizarre to me then that a boat had to head in the opposite direction of a destination in order to arrive there but this doesn’t seem so strange to me now. Excess effort, tangents, detours, disruption and residue is the material of middle adult life.

Let me explain this further. Ayelt’s pristine execution had me in raptures. It is a masterful painting and (satisfyingly) what I expected but VII is the painting that has stayed with me all of these weeks. In VII, Abts used soluble wax-crayon on sailcloth in place of paint. In looking and now looking again, I imagine her approaching the surface in the way that she approaches every other beginning. She chooses to make a mark but, significantly, this wax crayon mark dissolves. It dissolves into the whiteness of the sailcloth like incense ash in a cathedral or rust on the bolts of my decking in the rain. It softens and dissipates like the parched anise fronds between my fingers. In all of the paintings I have known by Tomma Abts, I have not seen her marks fall apart. They always hold fast like a good tack or jibe but in VII, they melt into the current and drift off course. The monochrome palette of VI with its hard line and radials seems to prepare us for it. It’s wound so tight that VII is an honest release. An honest reckoning.

Don’t calculate it; tell it like it is.

Expectations are tricky. They grow from an accumulation of choices, like a painting or a cathedral, or a day for that matter. They make us think that what we can imagine is all that can satisfy us. Expectations met are satisfying but not sustaining. Arriving somewhere you want to go is nice. Arriving somewhere you didn’t expect to be is better.

Tomma Abts was presented at Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 21 April 2023 - 24 June 2023.
All images via Galerie Buchholz, Cologne.

(1) “Choosing to choose” is the subject of Jan Verwoert’s essay “Choosing to Choose: On the Paintings of Tomma Abts” included in the collection Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (2010).
(2) Jan Verwoert, “Choosing to Choose: On the Paintings of Tomma Abts” in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, ed. Vanessa Ohlraun (Berlin: Piet Zwart Institute and Sternberg Press, 2010), 240-241.

Dry heat

And now the air is thick. Just yesterday I said that it hadn’t changed. It was still fluid, like water rushing in a spring thaw but now, it has density. I am pushing it around in the ways that I know how, trying to thin it out.

I remembered this now. After decades of dry heat in a house without air conditioning, she told me that the solution was closure. Closure as long as there was daylight. All of the openings must be shut. Windows. Doors. Skylights. Vents. Everything must remain dark within a house until darkness arrives without. A household in the heat of summer must ignore the day until the night. Then it can open up.

Last night it was light until past 11. Darkness retreated again before 4. Four hours cannot dissolve what twenty has thickened.

Sharp halos

Well, I guess that’s the end of it.

He said.

We sat on the terrace for two days in the afternoon. The sun was stronger than expected. Even he said so as he ducked inside to retrieve his cap.

I guess that’s all we’re going to get.

He said.

It’s already obvious that the chairs will dry and bleach in the light. He assembled them from flat packs that came in the post. There were pre-drilled holes for the slats in the back and the seat. Sharp halos.

None of the weather forecasters agree. Each presents a different parade of icons.

Sun ball with lumpy cloud.

Sun ball with lumpy dark cloud.

Lumpy dark cloud with broken lines, pointing left.