I came into this wonderful workshop at the beginning of the pandemic in need of anchoring, and the desire for communion with other creative minds. I knew that I needed to focus my attention away from my life's chosen medium (dance) to wander into something tactile, something I could attend to daily with my hands, while reorganizing myself around new realities. I was eager to be paired with a non-dance artist and someone close to my age, who, like me, would be dealing with the energy around loss of work and fuzziness of purpose, while also exploring the murky and liminal middle-aged space.
I committed to making a rag rug, to learning the technique via the crazy rabbit hole of youtube tutorials . I wanted to use hoarded materials that held both memory and trauma. And so I began! My partner, Kelly, was in a different time zone, but we held each other accountable for the doing and making and ultimate intersection of our projects. This last part was as surprising as it was gratifying. One of Cori's brilliant content prompts had led me to the conclusion that my rug was no longer a rug , but , inspired by Kelly's in depth explorations, was for a moment , a nest, and a vessel for the future. It ultimately became so full of topography as to become a sculptural landscape over which I could observe my own home. It hangs on a hook now. I touch it often.
— Megan