Angel Of Love

 

   So, in 2017 I began a small wasps nest in raised needlelace. It was a bit of a challenge with the circular chambers and the angled formation of the nest. How I made the base was crucial to the overall stability of the piece but there was no way of doing a practice piece I just had to do it.

When a piece of work really tests you it can be like a banana skin in your mind, it just keeps slipping away when you think of it! So the following year I did some more but by this time I was fully involved in my medical residency and the making of the surgical models. I was filmed making the piece but actual progress was slow. It was still unformed in my mind and therefore hard for me to come back to with much certainty of whether it would actually work out properly. There is no small amount of anxiety when you invest so much time in a piece.

   

Then, after much upheaval in my life I came back to the piece in 2024. I picked up where I had left off with the top nest section and quickly realised that it was all okay! I had been so close to resolving in my head and hadn't realised it. The branch followed and then early this year I made the smaller section and there it was.

What drew me to doing this was a photograph of a solitary wasps nest and a long term fascination with the paper that wasps make themselves. To reproduce the making process of another being was key to the whole work.

I found that I had to think like a wasp, think how I would construct pod shapes from the inside and how they would link together. Each construction section be it the base, the pods, the lids or how I moved (stitched) from one area to another was only solved by doing it and being it.

It is the second piece in a series called Angels of Heaven based on a text in the gospel of the Essenes; the quote I worked from here is  ''Loving words are as honeycomb''. The first piece is featured on this blog and is called "Angel of Eternal Life" under the search term 'angels'.

Angel of Eternal Life

  At some point in the early C20th Edmond Bordeaux Szekely  claimed to have discovered and translated lost gospels from the Bible called the Gospels of the Essenes. In the second gospel Christ describes fourteen angels and their tasks and I was very taken with the beauty of the descriptions. 

  Many years and several version later I have started a series of needlelace pieces reflecting on the angels and here is the first, the Angel Of Eternal Life.

                                                          

 

 My inspiration is often from nature and this time it is the lace lichen found in California, Ramalina Menziesii. A hanging lichen which grows in the most extraordinary shapes, no two are alike, their looping web shapes are intricate and full of wonder.

  This piece is about 20x20cm and is made in hand dyed silks. From start to finish about fifty hours work, it took an hour just to unmount the lace from the backing. It has a pleasing 3D effect as it was designed in the round and so hangs from any point in a curl.

  The design started life several years ago as part of another piece, still in progress, and it was an epiphany when I realised that it should be entirely separate. It quickly came into being after that which goes to show that some ideas take a long time to brew before you get the right one.

 

 Angel of Eternal Life,

Here and now

Is the mystery revealed.

Here and now

Is the curtain lifted.

link for the angels here

link for information on the lichen here