The first garment I made of my own volition—that is, once mandatory high school sewing was on the distant horizon behind me—I made in 1986 when living in a small, cold fisherman’s shack beside the North Sea in Scheveningen, just outside The Hague. With no sewing machine, I hand-stitched a simple shift that I’d designed. That impulse came from deep within, where there are no words. What brought it about is beyond me.
When I returned to Montreal, and was given a sewing machine, I started sewing all kinds of things, and my high school sewing turned out to have some use after all. I then detoured, and over the next twenty years or so, I made some films, worked in B & W photography, had some poetry published (one with an accompanying photo), made a few runs of books, all the while earning my living in non-profit management where I was involved in advocacy and community development, first in media arts, and later in social and educational settings. (Life, quoi.)
The impulse to sew, though, made its gradual return, and with gathering force, and by 2009 it had taken hold like a taproot—my focus became more serious, and when my design ideas hit the limits of my technical know-how I took some flat pattern drafting courses and a few master-classes in cutting and draping.
I can now transform what I imagine into what can be touched. It all draws on that mysterious, animating impulse from that long-ago life on the Dutch shore, today now out here at the edge of the Pacific.
And lately I've gotten back into photo/text work. I don't know where it's going, but here's where it starts .... zoetrope.me and zoetrope-me.tumblr.com
When I returned to Montreal, and was given a sewing machine, I started sewing all kinds of things, and my high school sewing turned out to have some use after all. I then detoured, and over the next twenty years or so, I made some films, worked in B & W photography, had some poetry published (one with an accompanying photo), made a few runs of books, all the while earning my living in non-profit management where I was involved in advocacy and community development, first in media arts, and later in social and educational settings. (Life, quoi.)
The impulse to sew, though, made its gradual return, and with gathering force, and by 2009 it had taken hold like a taproot—my focus became more serious, and when my design ideas hit the limits of my technical know-how I took some flat pattern drafting courses and a few master-classes in cutting and draping.
I can now transform what I imagine into what can be touched. It all draws on that mysterious, animating impulse from that long-ago life on the Dutch shore, today now out here at the edge of the Pacific.
And lately I've gotten back into photo/text work. I don't know where it's going, but here's where it starts .... zoetrope.me and zoetrope-me.tumblr.com
