Artful Engagement:

Reflections on my Creative Journey

By

Melinda Schwakhofer

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I embarked on the InsiderArt Art in Mental Health course as part of my exploration of
the territory where I can merge art, creativity, spirituality and counseling. In January
2007, I was asked to give an hour long presentation on my development as an art
quilter to the SouthWest Quilters. This opportunity and the reflection that I have been
doing on the Art in Mental Health course have allowed me to begin telling my creative
story. Two weeks ago when I walked the labyrinth in my back yard the words “artful
engagement” came to me as soon as I reached the center. This is my creative story
so far.

Beginnings

I spent the first 35 years of my life in Los

Angeles – a very urban environment. Southern
California is a very beautiful place, but it was
settled and planned by real estate developers.
Every piece of open land has been concreted
and built upon. Even the rolling hills are graded
and housing-tracted. Miles of streets and
freeways connect places like cement arteries.
Even the Los Angeles River runs through a
concrete channel. Public transport is so poor that everyone has a car. It was like
living in a machine.

Ever since I was small, I had a deep longing to connect with Nature. I remember
standing in my backyard one autumn when I was about seven. A vee of geese flew
overhead, honking to one another. I knew I was witnessing something very special.
I have never seen geese fly overhead in LA since then. I went camping whenever I
could to the amazing National Parks in the Western US – mountains, deserts and the
Pacific coastline.

When I got into my early 20’s I started going out to the deserts of the Southwestern
U.S. by myself for 2-3 weeks every year. I gained a
lot of confidence and fed my deep need for
independence and solitude. Those trips nurtured my
soul and I developed a deep, deep spiritual
connection with the land. I have Native American
ancestry from my father’s side of the family. I’m
named after my Great grandmother Melindy Davis,
who was a full-blooded Muscogee (Creek) Indian. I
think that we inherit spiritual as well as genetic traits
from our ancestors. I can recall my dad saying that
when he was at the ocean he felt ‘connected to
everything that ever was, is or ever will be’. When I started my desert journeys I
understood what he was talking about and feeling.

I also longed for seasons. In Southern California we had two seasons – hot and
smoggy from April to October and the rainy, mudslide season from November to
March. There was one park near me with a few maple trees. Sometimes I’d go
there in the autumn and watch the leaves color and fall. In the springtime I’d go out
to the desert to see the cacti and California poppies in bloom.

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 Creativity

I’ve been a creative person all of my life. Not just in making things, but the way I see
the world. When I was six, I got a dollhouse and swapped the kitchen and bathroom
around. If the dolls were outside playing and wanted to come in to pee they could go
to the toilet downstairs and go right back outside. The kitchen was upstairs so they
could make food and then go eat and read in bed. I used to entrance my teen-aged
siblings and their friends with stories about how our mom would drive home from
work through the telephone or kitchen faucet.

My mother Nell encouraged me to notice and appreciate the natural and cultural
world around me– such as it was in suburban Los Angeles. She’d often call me
outside to look at the sunset – gorgeous corals, reds and oranges, courtesy of L.A.
smog. Another time we had just got home from my preschool and she said ‘Look at
those dandelions in the front yard’. I didn’t know they were flowers and was looking
for some real lions!

My mom was also a creative influence on me in the way she created ‘home’. A very
artistic flair for decorating our house and she was a great gardener. She was a very
stylish dresser and sewed most of her own clothes. She used to paint a little bit and
we had a painting in our living room of hers. We had a big bureau and the bottom
drawer was full of art supplies – construction paper, glitter, crayons, paints, glue –
and a craft book. When she had time, my mom and I would make projects out of the
book. I loved that

Nell used to take me to art house cinemas, Kabuki theatre performances, plays,
concerts, musicals, museums….. We didn’t have a TV until I was 9 and even after we
got one if I was watching it during the daytime she’d say, ‘Melinda, why don’t you do
something constructive like read a book or paint a picture’.

The story of the ivory fish

When I was about eight I went to an arts and crafts class. One day the teacher gave
us each a bar of Ivory hand soap and a knife and asked us to make something out of
it. I carved a crude little fish which I was very proud of and brought it home and put it
on top of the piano. A couple of days later a dog appeared next to my fish which my
18 year old sister Susan had carved. It was perfect and looked like a real dog that
had been turned to soap and miniaturised. I was gutted and felt really ashamed of
my fish. I never talked to my mom or sister about it, but I took my fish to the
bathroom sink and scrubbed all of the fishness out of it. I wasn’t able to reason that
my sister had 10 years of carving skill on me and different creative/artistic talents.
She was very artistically talented and probably could have been a graphic designer
or illustrator. The ‘Ivory Fish’ not really a huge incident, but it stayed with me for a
really long time.

So on one hand, even though I just was a creative person and had a quite rich and
stimulating environment, my relationship with my older sister impacted on my creative
self esteem. Even now, at times when I make something or see someone else’s art
work, I struggle with feelings of inadequacy and thoughts like ‘This isn’t any good’ or
‘Theirs’ is better’.

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 Identity as an Artist

When I got out into the world and started meeting people they would often ask if I am
an artist or what kind of art do I make. But I’d never thought of myself as an ‘artist’
because I hadn’t gone to art school. Although in my 20’s I did a lot of exploring in
search of a medium in which I could express my feelings and responses to the world.
I tried poetry, photography, wood working, collage, pastels and acrylic painting.
None of them quite hit the mark until I started quilting and then I felt that I had ‘found
my medium’. I love the combination of colour and tactile sensuality of fibres and
textiles.

When I moved to Scotland in 1998, I think it was being away from where I grew up
that allowed me to start saying to people “I am an artist”. It still felt risky and I had to
really trust the first people I showed my quilts to. I realise now that being an artist is
about the way I see and respond to the world. Now that I have found a medium in
which I can express myself, I do consider myself to be an artist. Making art doesn’t
feel like a choice for me. I have to create and I am always thinking about what I am
working on and will work on next. The seasons have taught me about the cyclical
nature of the creative process.

Fibre art

I took my first quilt class in 1996. My first few

quilts were quite traditional. After learning the
techniques of quilting I was ready to start
designing my own art quilts.

I took a Studio Art Quilt class in Autimn1997 with

Barbara Kennedy in which we were invited to
bring an image or idea and she would guide us
to design and make an original art quilt.
Celestial Jewelbox, 1997

I had just spent a really relaxing week camping in

Utah and made Dreamtime at Zion.

This quilt captures the time in autumn when the

harvest is over and the earth is settling down to rest
– silently awaiting winter. It’s a very peaceful quilt. I
also started what is sort of a trademark of mine in
which I include images that the viewer doesn’t see at
first. Just as I put what I deeply see and feel into my
art, if a viewer really takes the time to look and see,
the more they deeply experience the piece. Barbara
was a great teacher and at the end of the class she
said “I’ve taught you everything I know, now go out
and make quilts”.

Dreamtime at Zion, 1997 Barbara encouraged us to enter whatever quilt show

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was coming up, so I had it professionally photographed and entered it in 1998 World
Quilt & Textile, which was in Pasadena, California that year where I was living. And it
was accepted! It was my first big quilt show and I quickly discovered that I felt more
‘at home’ with the art/ contemporary quilts than with the traditional ones.

Inspirations

My main inspirations are nature, the ebb and flow of the seasons……how do we say
when a season begins or is over? I am fascinated by the delicate nuances of season
and the borders between the seasons.

Elegant Decay is a piece about the very

end of autumn when all of the leaves have fallen
and are lying broken on the earth, rotting back
into the soil. There is such a rich, multi-layered
beauty about that time.

Splendid Profusion is about the riot of new

growth that occurs in spring time. The quilting is
a tangle of vines and budding leaves and moths,
butterflies, spiders and snails abound.

When I made these pieces I was experimenting

with a more organic way of finishing the edges
of my quilts and being in the world. My borders
are going from being neatly bound and finished
to being curved and fluid, sometimes a bit raw
and raggedy!

Elegant Decay, 2003

Splendid Profusion, 2003

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Desert River Goddess is a quilt which honours the wisdom and divinity of Nature. I
met and got to know this goddess when I used to spend time in the desert.

“I am wild and succulent, joyous and free.

I flow with the desert rivers and bring forth
the springs.
I am the divine presence in the hollow
canyons.
My dance brings life into the dry empty
spaces of sand and stone.
I am midwife to coyote and rattlesnake.
I flower the cacti in springtime and ripen the
summer corn.
I beckon autumn storms into being and
cause flash floods to rage,
tumbling boulders and uprooting trees.
In winter I blanket the resting earth in snow.
At daybreak and again at dusk, the sun
follows me over the horizon.
Each night I place the moon in the heavens
and scatter stars across the velvet sky”.

Desert River Goddess, 2002

I made Beneath the Summer Moon

after I visited one of my cousins, Jane
who lives in Virginia. She had taken
me out to see some property she and
her sister had purchased which was
bordered by a beautiful swamp filled
with cypress trees and water lilies. I
took some photos and later imagined
what that magical place would be like
on a hot, sticky summer night, with mist
drifting through the trees.

Beneath the Summer Moon, 2003

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 Beneath the
summer moon,
wide-hipped
night trees
grow deep
into the water.

Leaving Home

In 1998, I had the opportunity to move to Scotland and go to furniture school at the
Chippendale International School of Furniture. I moved into a gardener’s cottage in
East Lothian and in one fell swoop got nature and proper seasons.

The curriculum was fairly conservative and most of the other students were making
reproductions of antiques. At this point, I had been quilting for a couple of years and
wanted to design and make furniture combining wood
and textiles. There was one other artist on the course,
a silver smith from Barbados named Pat who was
making her own designs and she encouraged me to do
my own thing. We had had a design competition at the
end of the first term which I won and that further
encouraged me.

Laburnum oyster tray, 1998

The first piece I designed was Solstice Moon which

captured the first ‘real’ winter in my life – bare trees,
ploughed fields, bonfires, ravens and the full moon.
I also experienced for the first time the long dark
nights of winter.

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Solstice Moon, 1999
My final project was Enter the Forest of Dreams. I wanted to make a bed that was
like going to sleep in the forest. The two primroses on the forest floor came during
the making of the quilt. I looked ‘primrose’ up in a Victorian book entitled “The
Language of Flowers” and discovered that their meaning is ‘Dawning Love’, or ‘I
could grow to love you’. I envisioned that a person would go to sleep this bed and
dream of their True Love.

By the end of the course, I decided not to pursue woodworking as an artistic medium.
Working in wood requires that my designs and my creative process be too static and
planned out. I prefer the sensuality and fluidity of textiles. A lot of people like the
social aspect of quilting, belonging to a guild and getting together for quilting bees,
but I prefer to work on my own. The process of gathering and stitching together
various textiles and fibres is a wonderful metaphor for gathering and piecing together
my life experiences. In some of my most recent work, I feel that I am healing the
collective and cultural pain of my Muscogee ancestors, as well as the broken places
in my life. I have set up a studio at home and have been exploring the cutting edge
(pun intended) of art quilts and fibre art for the past 11 years.

After living in Scotland for about six years, I moved to Devon

and am now living in converted cider barn in the Teign
Valley. I am completely immersed in nature and notice
every nuance of the changing seasons every day. I’ve really
been making up for all of the years I lived in L.A.

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 Artistic Influences

While living in Scotland I got to know the work of the

Scottish artist Margaret MacDonald McKintosh and her
architect-husband Charles Rennie McKintosh. Their
creative imagery and relationship inspired In the Fullness
of Summer in which I used images of the sun and plants to
represent an organic, inevitable, natural growth of love
between a man and woman. This quilt portrays my ideal of
a creative, dynamic, romantic partnership between soul
mates. John Rose, a furniture maker, designed and made
the frame.

Another of my favourite artists is

Marc Chagall. I love his color
palette and the dreamy, romantic,
poetic images he creates.

In the Fullness of Summer, 2002

In 2005, I was commissioned to make a piece for a

20th wedding anniversary. I was given a very free rein Roses et Muguet, Chagall
with the design and based the piece on a painting by
Marc Chagall.

I wrote a beautiful quote of his on the

back of the quilt which reads:

“In life, just as on the artist’s palette, there is

but one color which gives meaning to both life
and art - the color of love.”

The Color of Love, 2005

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Another one of my favorite artists is Jann Arthus Bertrand who has photographed
images of the earth from the air. As well as being visually stunning, his photographs
invite us to consider how beautiful and fragile our world is and to educate us about
the impact (usually negative) that Man is making on the natural world. Shortly after I
moved to Devon, I was asked to make a fibre art piece for a group show called
‘Looking at the World’. The pieces were all inspired by his photography.

I was inspired to make a fibre art piece based on his

photograph of a mangrove swamp in New Caledonia,
Papua New Guinea. He has photographed this same
image two or three times over a 10 year period. The
mangrove swamp is a unique ecosystem. It is
intertidal and alternately bathed in saline and fresh
water. The borders
of this swamp stay
essentially heart
shaped, but subtly change over the years and in
response to both the ecosystem and
environmental degradation imposed by Man.

This image reminds me of the fragility of

Relationship. Like the mangrove swamp, a
romantic relationship expands or contracts,
waxes and wanes depending on the conditions it
finds itself in and how well it is cared for.

It reminds me also of the strength and resilience

of the heart. That even when one’s heart has
been broken, instead of breaking apart and falling
to pieces, perhaps one’s defensive shell is what
has broken and something different can emerge –
a new understanding or a true love based in the
reality and vulnerability of our humanity.

Ultimately, the heart is a universal symbol of

Love.

Dis-Integration, 2005

“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult task of
all……..the work for which all other work is but preparation. It is a high inducement to
the individual to ripen……..a great exacting claim upon us, something that chooses
us out and calls us to vast things.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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 Motherline

Naomi Lowinsky calls the feminine line

of descent the motherline. Grandmother
to mother to daughter. When I was 16,
my mother died from breast cancer and
I have made the conscious decision to
be childless. I never knew either of my
grandmothers. For much of my life, I
have felt disconnected from my female
lineage. A few years ago I re-connected
with the Lost/un-Mothered child and
later went on to make a fibre art piece
called The Motherline.

I made the doll from white cotton fabric

and swaddled her in a doll quilt.

Motherline, 2004

I pieced the front of the quilt from photographs I had printed onto calico of myself, my
mother Nell Rose Martin and my mother’s mother, Maggie Sue Baugham. I printed a
quote from a sundial which my mom and I found in a garden on a trip back to the
East Coast to see her family four years before she died.

“Time flies, suns rise, flowers bloom and die.

Let time go by and shadows fall,
Love is forever, over all.”

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 Cradleboard

I made a cradleboard to hold the doll. I

embroidered my Great Grandmother
Melindy Davis as a Creek Indian queen.

“She changes everything she touches,

Everything she touches, changes.”

Cradleboards were used by nearly every Native American tribe to keep babies
secure and comfortable and at the same time allowing the mothers freedom to work
and travel. Primarily the cradleboard is a bed: horizontal or vertical. It also serves as
a baby carriage. For travel, cradleboards could be hung on a saddle or travois.
Bound and wrapped on a cradleboard, a baby feels safe and secure. Soft materials
such as lichens, moss, and shredded bark were used for cushioning and diapers.
Cradleboards were either cut from flat pieces of wood or woven from flexible twigs
like willow and hazel, and cushioned with soft, absorbent materials. The design of
most cradleboards is a flat surface with the child wrapped tightly to it. It is usually only
able to move its head. Cradleboards are believed to help strengthen back and neck
muscles and develop erect posture because the spine is kept in continual contact
with a flat surface. Since an infant would spend approximately a year in a
cradleboard, a tremendous amount of time and care is invested to imbue
cradleboards with symbolic ritual content ensuring the infant's spiritual and physical
well-being.

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 Roots

In 2001 I had connected with one of my half-brothers, Mickey and my half-nephew,

Shane from my father’s first marriage. These two men are both really interested in
our Muscogee heritage and Shane has researched our family tree going back to the
1860’s. While in my 20’s I was almost morbidly fascinated with the Jewish Holocaust
and became very interested in PTSD that manifests in children of Holocaust
survivors. Quite recently, I’ve been researching the Muscogee history and realise
that my ancestors went through the North American Holocaust, which is still largely
unacknowledged and unprocessed by Americans of both Native American and
European descent. There is some very fascinating work being done with Native
American groups called Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Intervention which
meets the need for culturally based trauma theory and intervention.

Future Work

I have worked as a crisis counsellor with diverse groups of people – survivors of

domestic violence, adolescents exploited through prostitution and pornography,
women with reproductive concerns and homeless women and young people. I would
like to work with people who are more settled on their deeper issues. I am
considering move back to America in the next few months. I am creating
opportunities to combine my counseling and creative skills in working with people. I
will work with people of Native American descent to create healing art work. I am
also working now as an ‘Inspirationist’ to help people identify and move beyond their
blocks and impediments to creativity through the medium of fibre art.

In my personal art work, I am exploring surface design and printing text and
photographs onto fabric. My book ‘South Bank Stories’ is made from photos I took
along the South Bank in London on New Year’s Day 2007 and on the back of the
piece a map of London published in 1653.

South Bank Stories, 2007

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I’m also experimenting with three-dimensional fibre vessels and developing
techniques fusing sheer fabrics and Angelina fibres.

Spring Returns, 2007

Coracle, 2007

‘Coracle’ contains a poem which is written in four lines and can be read in any order.

beneath the light of the eclipsed full moon

an amethyst lantern lights my way
as I embark upon my night river journey
diffuse moonlight filters through bare winter branches

A coracle is a type of boat made from willow or ash laths and animal skins or canvas.

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 Artful Engagement

Making fibre art is a way into and out of my inner world. Artful engagement is the
way in which I use my artwork to engage with the worlds around me, inside of me
and between my Self and Other. Making a piece of fibre art gives me the opportunity
to show how I am transformed and enlightened by the world around me. And just
maybe, my artwork transforms and enlightens other people and the world around me.
It so happens that quite often when people view and experience my artwork, they are
invited to meet a new facet of their Self that they had not met before or a new way to
look at the world.

I am deeply moved by the world around me and inside of me and my art making
comes from a very deep and still place. I take sights and experiences deep within
where they co-mingle with Soul. These things live inside of me: barn swallows
inscribing their aerial calligraphy across the summer sky, the first glimmers of dawn
which bring to a close the longest, darkest night of the year, wild violets nestled
amongst the moss-covered roots of a 300 year old oak tree, water striders making
their ripple-marks on the surface of a pond, dandelion seeds borne aloft on a warm
Spring breeze. My artwork is successful if I can infuse it with even a glimmer of how
wondrous and sacred these things are to me.

One person recently said to me “You give form to the hidden, the ‘gift’. Really, really
beautiful. Thank you”. This sums up my personal definition for a successful piece of
art – that another person has been able to see and experience what is beneath the
surface, hidden, but to those who take the time to look and really see.

“Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time –

we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world
for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.”

~ Georgia O’Keeffe

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