Dear Reader,
Serendipity seems to be circling without boundary. The experiences and themes from one day flowing into the next. A seemingly preconceived stream to flow within. And, no wonder, right?
And as we work out the kinks of our individual stories to (re)connect with our Universal story, what happens during translation?
What gets lost?
Translating INPUT into PROCESS in order to produce OUTPUT
ToolBoxEarth will be releasing a new collection inspired by Tom Robbins' Skinny Legs and All (a novel's who's mood is described as 'defiantly upbeat')
If you are willing to make the time, dear Reader, I'd like to read an excerpt to you.
One of those excerpts that takes a heavy bag off of a shoulder:
'Patsy would dance at home alone in cute white boots.
Ellen Cherry liked to watch her mother dance, but, to be honest, it wasn't Patsy's fast-stepping that had channeled Ellen Cherry toward art. Rather, it was vertigo. And Colonial Pines.
Twice each year, the family would drive down to Florida to visit Patsy's folks. Inevitably, Ellen Cherry got caresick. To keep from vomitting, she had to lie on her back in the rear of the station wagon and look up. As a result, she began to see the world from a different perspective.
Telephone poles went by like loops. She would register the light from signboards first, then the tops of the signs, then their blurry message: the melting Marlboro man, the expanding slice of pie. Gradually, she experimented. Played what she called her "eye game." By squinting, and controlling the squint, she could achieve a figure-ground reversal. Figure-ground, ground-figure, back and forth. She could make herself color-blind. For miles, if she wished, the landscape would be nothing but red.
"How's Daddy's girl?", Verlin would ask from the driver's seat. "Need to pee-pee?" Often Daddy's girl failed to reply. Daddy's girl was busy, sliding her focus to muffle or distort the normal associative effects of object and space, stripping them of common meaning or symbolic function, forcing them to settle in the highly mysterious region that lies between the cornea and the brain- and fooling with them there. The parallel lines of electrical wires, under her dynamic gaze, would tend to overlap, so that they would break their continuity and magnify the open areas between them. This was especially interesting when a flock of blackbirds could be stirred into the optic mixture. Or, she would be looking at the field of vision itself, refusing to favor a central form, such as a water tower, but concentrating instead on the zone surrounding the tower, finding pattern and substance in areas our eyes tend to regard as secondary, vacant, vague. And all the while viewing everything
upside down, sideways, and nauseated."
The large bag being that I used to perform this secretive ocular play during long car rides as a child too. And when that bag made a thunk on the cold floor, I realized that is how I design the weavings within ToolBoxEarth still.
Through this same process of finding spaces where there shouldn't be.
I used to hide a lot as a kid too, even throughout high school.
Sometimes still.
But during long, confining car rides there was peace to be found in vertigo.
When I picked my bag up again to move it into the next room, I realized ToolBoxEarth is an attempt to take something that calms me, spaces I have found to rest in, and offer them to you.
To dream in,
gaze in,
sit in,
and (re)connect in.
To help you process.
To help us process together.
INPUT share the "eye game" with you
PROCESS share the truth I see with you
OUTPUT share ToolBoxEarth's meditative art with you
during a time to re-imagine the normalized constants we walk amongst
The new collection SEVEN VEILS will be released April 22nd to celebrate Earth Day.
Make a little eye contact today.
If these ideas are too abstract,
a little too 'where in the world wide web am I?'
ToolBoxEarth is feel good fiber art
made by someone who didn't have internet at home until 2018
someone you can trust
Look good. Feel good. Do good.
-Jack O'Neill
From my defiantly upbeat guts,
