Corky LeTellier, Walking In Love Artist

Corky LeTellier

Statement:    I have been working in fabric since taking a Parks and Recreation beginning

quilting class in San Francisco in order to learn how to make a baby quilt for my firstborn.

After many years of being a traditional quilter, I have started branching out into embellishment

and original design and it has taken hold of me.  This was an opportunity to celebrate the vast

wonderment of Trinity County in a new way and I chose to portray the nature all around us.

We live in a beautiful place and need to be grateful each and every day for the mountains,

the lakes, the trees.   I feel so very blessed - walking in love to me is being outside.

Corky was one of the first people to give me an enthusiastic "yes!" when I asked her to make a panel for the installation. I saw her in Weaverville at a community concert given mid december 2010. Truthfully, her yes was the encouragement I needed to know this project would actually turn from a dream to reality. Thank you Corky! I have seen her quilting work every year at the Trinity County Fair. Last year she entered a marvelous and large dragon of her own design. I have felt Corky to be a kindred spirit in the realm of art quilting. It is a great pleasure to have her panel hang in the Walking in Love installation.

Feedback for the Walking In Love Installation

" I felt filled up with love."

"I want to make a panel!"

"The porcelain piece is an interesting addition. I had to hear how it sounds so I used my program to move it!"

"I came out of the walk a better person than when I entered it."

"Love the copper work."

"Great lighting!"

Over and over again visitors to the installation found me and raved over their experience in the spiral and all the people who made this happen. They were touched, amazed, in awe. Awe was a frequently used word. One woman decided that Awe is the word form of the fullness of love, something she experienced as she stood in the center of the spiral! I have to say it is gratifying when complete strangers to this work and anyone involved are profoundly moved. It validates the premise that art made while holding the feeling of love has the ability to impact the lives of those who experience it. It also validates the premise that my own personal experiences that led to this work are but one way in which love can be understood. Others who did not have my experience added their own deeply held and personal understanding and it all worked together.

The Sacred Threads show is arranged in general categories: spirituality, joy, inspiration, peace/brotherhood, grief and healing. Our installation was placed in between grief and joy. I overheard one woman say that to walk through the quilts depicting grief and then wander into the white room was relief. In my own personal life I know that the death of my mother, a woman who was my best friend, mentor, heroine, might have been intolerable had it not been balanced by the sure feeling of her transformation into that peaceful  energetically riveting crystalline light. I have not been a person who sought visions. It took me some time to have the courage to share this experience with others. At this particular show the people who found me wanted to know more. There is a hunger I think we experience as humans to understand something about what comes after this physical existence. I am by no means an expert on this. But I do know that when each of us has the courage to share those encounters with the mystical aspects of life we enrich everyone. Our culture, even the culture of our most sacred religious institutions, often disallow or downplay the more intangible aspects of touching the spiritual. I have found that the head knowledge aspect of learning with regard to spirituality is quite common. And yet we are so much more than only our brains. There are other cultures which view the heart as the seat of the 'brain'. I feel that the intangible is known intuitively through the heart, not the head.

The spiral work will grow. Several people asked how they can get involved. Lisa Ellis and Christine Adams set up a station outside the exhibition hall where guests were invited to write their prayers, hopes, dreams onto strips of white silk which were then tied to a potted palm tree. Lisa had the idea that these white strips could be a panel, the Sacred Threads panel. I say a big "YES!" to this. How wonderful to take these heartfelt thoughts/prayers/feelings and add them to the ever expanding Walking In Love Spiral.

Rachel Rickard, Walking in Love Artist

When Rachel and Jacob moved to Hyampom last summer with their baby Alora we met outside the post office. The post office is the one place where everyone in town is bound to come sooner or later since we have no mail delivery to homes. It wasn't long before Rachel and my daughter Sydney became friends. Not too much later they both made their first quilt projects, panels for the Walking in Love Installation.

Rachel is gentle, deep, humorous and a homesteader in the making. She takes on many different aspects of gardening, preserving foods and holistic health. Their home is filled with music and friends.

Rachel Rickard

This is my first fiber arts experience! My vision for this project was to capture the lightness and beauty of love. My quest led me to creating a 3 part mixed art piece. My inspiration, being a mother to my baby daughter Alora, who radiates pure love and joy from every fiber of her being! This project opened me up to the depths of a mothers love, as a mother but also as a child of the miraculously bountiful earth!" 

News from the Artist Reception for Sacred Threads June 25, 2011

Walking in Love is but one part of the entire show of Sacred Threads, an exhibition hall full of the amazing vitality that makes up our shared human experience all depicted through fiber. Celebrating our frailties, our strengths and joy, the quilts here radiate astonishing stories. Vikki Pignatelli founded this show and trusted it to the care of Lisa Ellis and Christine Adams and their faithful and talented committee who have successfully opened the first showing in Herdon, Virginia. How wonderful to Meet Vikki and hear first hand why she created this venue. A quilter who was accustomed to her work being judged, nevertheless Vikki was stung when a judge commented unfavorably on a quilt which was more spiritual in its nature. Vikki took something that did not work and turned it into a show that offers viewers a breadth and depth of the human condition that I have never seen anywhere else. Vikki and her husband Denny came out to  Herdon to pass the baton of Sacred Threads into the good hands of others who also care about showing the world art infused with the deepest feelings of life in this body.

The women I met, the stories they have to tell, encourage me to keep expressing all that I might otherwise bottle up inside. The Walking In Love Installation sits in the center of this jewel of a show. It was quite satisfying to hear complete strangers respond to the power of the art that was made holding the feeling of love. Two women who met in the center of the spiral spoke of how they were so surprisingly affected that they committed to speak with each other in a few months to talk about how Walking in Love has impacted their own fiber art pieces and how they create.

One lesson I came away with: if you have any desire to express yourself, do it. Peg, one of the artists, told me that she takes more risks now in her life. The risk to expose who you are and what you have experienced enriches everyone. What you have to share is important to us all. No quilt is too small, no emotion too trivial. However, I will tell you that when you dare to touch on, even dive deeply into, those topics which "polite and dignified" society (whatever that is) keep as taboo then you help all of us open up our hearts to a fuller and richer life. I met women who have been dealt so many difficult things in life. Betrayal, cancer, the death of multiple children, a childhood filled with the aftermath of a parent who suffered atrocities, addictions and more. These difficulties were transformed into stunningly surprising fiber art. The artists found healing for themselves while gifting the rest of us with brilliant fiber art to contemplate.

Themes  of joy celebrating natural beauty, the way light illuminates stained glass in a cathedral, ephemeral beauty of a time when beloved children walked wooded paths, women's retreats to replenish the wells. These quilts remind me to look around and take stock of all that is good and true and beautiful. Life is for living and nothing is to be pushed aside or hidden away. Great invigoration exists when we open up to acceptance that it is all good and worth sharing. Sharing it, whatever it is,  makes life better.

I learned all of this over the course of a three hour reception in which artists walked around visiting with each other and a delicious Italian dinner party afterwards. Friendships were forged, hearts shared, encouragement found. 

Faye McGough, Walking in Love Artist

I have known Faye through our local quilters guild, the Log Cabin Quilters, for many years now. Faye is an extremely productive quilter as well as a soap maker and the creator of many assorted crafts. I suppose her years of raising seven children and working full time as a nurse have something to do with her ability to multitask and get things done! I sure hope the lucky relatives who receive her quilts are grateful for her design and color sense. Her quilts are treasures as is her company. Faye is always ready to laugh at the absurdities in life. 

"When I hear the word love, I immediately think "family", hence the funky family tree.  It holds my 7 living children, 21 grandchildren, and 3 great-grands.  At the foot of our tree you will find 2 children from heaven.  Look up and down the trunk and you will see my message."

Faye McGough aka grammy

Working in a one foot by eight foot format can create some design challenges.  When viewed from a distance her family tree is reminiscent of a giant sequoia or a redwood and not at all funky. 

Frances Sherman, human or angel?

When Frannie told me she would be my adopted mother five years ago and I accepted neither one of us knew the roads we would travel together. Never did I guess we would share a bunk bed in Fortuna, California at Dixie McBride's Quilter's Escape. I had the top bunk. This is when Fran learned that I like to carry little rocks in my pockets. Ummm...because one rolled out of my pocket and fell onto her in the bunk down below. NO harm....just surprise.

I had known Fran for many years before she decided to adopt me so I guess we both had some inkling that we cared for one another. Yet most people know that once you commit to a decision things happen. We have walked each other through many things in the last five years. Illness, personal difficulties, all the dramas that most human lives have. There have been joyful laughter filled times playing canasta crammed in the tiny cabin we share with our other friends when we travel as a pack to escape everyday life and quilt with abandon.

When I offered an art quilt retreat series at my place Frannie amazed everyone in her joyful leap from meticulous traditional quilter into full bloom as the fine artist she is. What I experienced was her unwavering support of me in my own metamorphosis as a teacher. In fact Fran has been the most steadfast mother anyone could ever want.

These last few days as we waited expectantly for Travis to arrive with our trailer in his cross country journey, as we have run into technical difficulties with our copper room build, Fran has never faultered in her generosity, calm, humor and ability to let my stressed terseness roll off her back. Isn't it true that a mother is usually the one that children go to with their meltdowns? It is a measure of the grace with which Fran lives life that she loves deeply, hugely, solidly from the depths and forgets the less than perfect. I am blessed to have a mother that I can talk to in less than perfect and sometimes brusque ways and she loves with warmth anyway.

You would laugh to see Fran and I butt heads. I mean this quite literally. I have heard it said that what bothers me most about another is often a mirror back in to myself. When Fran and I put our foreheads against one another and push it is truly amusing. My goats do this. I suspect it has to do with establishing dominance. Something about testing who is the alpha. You would never know Fran is in her 8th decade of life when we butt heads. I have to tell you that I must push pretty darn hard in order to take the lead form this competent leader among women. Anyone witnessing this from the outside might think our process to be a little harsh. But we both know that this is the surface, not the deep down depths of our love for one another. For the two of us walking in love can be and often is walking in friction. Friction creates smoothness out of roughness just as iron sharpens iron.

There were many issues to be addressed this last day of our build for the Sacred Threads show and Fran, who came to Washington DC to be love, support and a person who climbed a ladder to hold up the plywood ceiling, was everything I could hope for and more in a mother. Thank you Frannie. I love you.

Inside the hall we begin to make room to Walk in Love

Ceiling

Our plan did not go forward quite as rapidly as we had hoped. We allowed three days to build and hang the show. It became apparent on the morning of day three that this would not be real. John and I had a very good conversation about walking in love instead of stressing in love which we both had indulged in a little bit. We reminded ourselves that this project was about process and how we worked together was very important. Now please understand that everyone on board is quite adept at creating finished product. There was no doubt this would occur. But we also knew that we were creating a prototype. Wikipedia dictionary defines prototype as follows: A first or preliminary model of something, esp. a machine, from which other forms are developed or copied. Of course! This explains why there were things we did not anticipate. Like the fact that the ceiling of the hall was nine feet 6 inches and we needed more space than that. Oops. We were not able to install the lighting in this first build. No room. I can't say that I was happy to accept that we would tear down the installation and then need to rebuild it again to finish the work. I don't imagine anyone else involved was too thrilled. But no-one complained. In fact people were good natured about it. "This is a prototype," became a mantra. The structure took four days to build. Many people helped, including those who had come to the artist reception we had scheduled for day 4. A party went on outside the hall! We ate well. Everyone got to witness our build and look at the panels as they awaited hanging on the many tables. I noticed one man moved to tears, to his enormous surprise, simply looking at one panel on a table. Frannie worked all of one day making white curtains to serve as walls. I know that everyone was grateful when Christina showed up one night with a dinner of the most delicious pasta I had tasted. Yum for the garlic!