Angie over at gnomeangel kindly invited me to write a guest on my top ten crushes[edited 10/15: no longer on gnomeangel’s site] as part of her “gnovember” extravaganza! She is from Australia, so my post has already been up all night. You can check out some mosaics she introduced me to from her country at Mosaics in Australia: gnomeangel introduces me to some favorites. Here’s a sneak peak of the first crush, and be sure to head over to gnomeangel’s site to check out the rest!
Top Ten Crushes: Margaret Almon Mosaics
1. Log Cabins
Log Cabin quilt squares are a marvel of design, and turning the pattern into mosaics is a passion of mine.
Hands Mandala from Judith Cornell’s Mandala Exercises, by Margaret Almon.
In my early 30’s, I was at a spiritual retreat, where I was gravitating toward anything to do with making art, and took a workshop with Suzanne Halstead(artist and offerer of creative retreats). She led us in making healing mandalas, using Judith Cornell’s book, Mandala: Luminous Symbols of Healing, tracing our hands on black paper, using white pencil crayons, covering the spectrum of intensity from a thick layer of white, to barely brushing the stillness of the black paper.
I wasn’t certain of what I knew. I was a wanderer, with the imprint of depression and an anxious heart. I had turned 30, imagining that I would have a book of poetry published by that age, but that didn’t come to be. I felt anything I accomplished after age 30 was too late, not prodigious enough. There is pressure that comes with milestone ages, and with the fear of being perpetually reminded of all that you are not. But sitting there with the sheet of paper, and the pencil in my hand, I knew light and dark. I knew my hands, as I traced them, and I loved what I could do with them.
Judith Cornell’s book is a guide to seeing our bodies as conduits of light. I love that image. At my confirmation, when I was 14, I was given a Bible verse from Matthew 5:16:
Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.
Healing Radiating Mandala for Damona by Margaret Almon.
At this workshop, I was introduced to the creating of mandalas as a form of healing prayer, keeping the person in your heart as you draw, imagining the love as molecules of light, traveling through your hand and into molecules of light flowing onto the paper. I was having a hard time with prayer, with all the words in my head, with my arguments God, and to find another way to pray was a relief.
Healing Lily Mandala for S. by Margaret Almon.
In the following year, I made a mandala for someone who was having brain surgery, for someone who was having radiation for breast cancer, and someone whose heart was breaking. These were people I cared about, people who were suffering, and I felt there was nothing I could do, and yet, I could give them this gift from my heart and hands.
This was the beginning of my mosaic mandalas, in the elemental light and dark, in prayer as art, and art as prayer.
In the mandala below, I wanted to share my heart with my friend, to offer something from my hands, something beyond my fears and inadequacy: grace.
In 2005, I spent some time with Master Career counselor Damona Sain, as I was feeling restless in my librarian world. Every inventory I took said art, art, art, and librarian was not coming up, and in fact may have been on the “make me loopy” list. I was making collages at my dining room table, and loving the world of color and pattern, but I assumed that I wasn’t an “artist”. But I started listening to the voice that said “you can make art,” and when I discovered mosaic, I knew this was my medium. The challenge was the kernel of truth in my librarian self, my attraction to research. I read 20+ books on making mosaics. The photo of the tower of books only represents books I own, not the ones I checked out of the library!
I read until I thought I would burst if I didn’t make a mosaic soon, but I was still in a holding pattern, wondering if I should read one more book. This limbo was an uncomfortable place, as I searched for everything on “doing” but remained in my head. Making the leap was the scariest part, but once I landed, I was on holy ground, feeling truly like myself. I loved the poem The Waking by Theodore Roethke when I was in high school, which captures the paradox of learning by going where we have to go:
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Aptly, my first step was making pebble mosaic stepping stones, for the house Stratoz and I had just bought. I was in heaven, sorting pebbles, seeing the subtle gradations of color.
Pebble Mosaic in Progress. Photo by Wayne Stratz.Pebble Mosaic Stepping Stones by Margaret Almon.Big Pebble Spiral Stepping Stone by Margaret Almon.
What was a first step that you took toward learning by going where I have to go?
I’ll leave you with Kurt Elling’s lovely jazz interpretation of Roethke’s poem.
I was named after my great grandmother, Margaret Niemeier. I never got the chance to meet her, because she died the year before I was born. She loved her good dishes, and her eye was drawn to the gold. She even had gold flatware, and I must have gotten my magpie eye from her. A few years ago,when my Grandmother gave the dishes to my mother, some broke in shipping. My mother was sad about the fragments, and gave the pieces to me and said maybe I could turn them into mosaics. I made ornaments for members of my family, kept one for myself and took the surplus to craft shows, where people were very moved by the story of the rebirth of the dishes in honor of my great grandmother, a way to remember her and mend what she loved.
Gold Flame Mosaic Ornament by Margaret Almon
When I was in highschool in the early 1980’s, my first real passion about learning came when a friend was talking to me about feminism and Alice Walker’s In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens, and I suddenly realized that women were part of history, that we were there too. In my drama class, we had to write about a play, and none of them were written by women, so I searched the library and found Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and petitioned my teacher to write about that play, and read her biography To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. This desire to know about the hidden history of women has stayed with me.
I searched for Margaret Niemeier’s name in a database of newspapers, and she comes up at least 50 times, but as “Mrs. H.L. Niemeier”–her husband’s initials as was the custom in the 40’s and 50’s. The blurbs are about her singing soprano solos in church, and hosting socials. She’s a part of history, and part of my history, since I share her name.
My great grandmother’s dishes are also a legacy, a part of her history. I received the full set from my mother, who moved into a smaller house, and they were so carefully wrapped that not a single dish broke, and they were stunning in their graceful beauty. I looked up Meitel Norleans Courtley China, and discovered the design is attributed to Eva Zeisel, a designer who I love. What synchronicity!
Finally, one of the first poems I ever had published was about my great grandmother, and I’d like to share it with you:
Namesake
by Margaret Almon
My great grandmother
had a heart attack and died
but only briefly.
The doctors brought her back
even though she did not want to come.
I was named for her,
Margaret, meaning pearl,
that grain that worries the oyster’s
gray flesh into sublime moony layers,
ripped from the shell,
strung in strand after furled strand.
She did not want to come back
that’s all she said.
Break the string
the beads drop, rolling
as if they were going home.
Pink Pendant for October Birthdays by Margaret Almon
October-ites have the honor of two birthstones. First there was the opal and then in 1952 the Jewelry Industry Council proposed pink tourmaline be added. Opal is made of silicon and oxygen formed into spheres that organize into pockets and diffract light at different wavelengths, creating the prismatic multi-tones that make opals so intriguing.
This October birthstone inspired pendant is pale pink with a tinge of purple, rose violet gold smalti, glitter tile, iridescent glass tile, and ceramic tile, with two flower shaped Italian millefiori beads.
The summer of 2010, I reached a milestone 25 years of living in the United States. I left Edmonton, AB, Canada, in July of 1985, to go live with my mother and sister in Bethlehem, PA, the Moravian Mecca, where my mother was attending Moravian Seminary to become a minister. I was 17, almost 18, and couldn’t imagine ever becoming comfortable in my new home. Seriously, I didn’t understand flag worship, and my husband tried to explain it to me when I met him at 19. I felt like an alien. Now, after moving to several states, including Massachusetts, Oregon and Illinois, I have lived in PA for longer than anywhere else in the US, and it is my home.
I’d never heard of a rowhouse when I moved to the Philadelphia area, and now I live in one! As my husband says, it’s our 1 bedroom-2 studio house. There are still ways that I feel like an outsider, but this is where I have friends, where I know the back roads, where I make art, and now I can’t imagine going back to Canada. But growing up there did shape me, and I am grateful for the perspective it gives me. I always was a kind of alien, being born in the US, and moving to Canada when I was just a baby, and becoming a resident alien, a “permanent resident” which becomes impermanent if you leave for more than 2 years, and dont do arduous paperwork.
This photo is from the week before I moved to the US. The back of the photo is labeled, in my stepmother’s handwriting, “Hercules and Margaret Almon, June 28th, 1985.” Obviously, the most important person is listed first! Hercules was a big lug of a cat who wandered around my father and stepmother’s condo complex, in search of superior victuals, and found the smoked salmon at their place suited him fine. My haphazard buzz cut was from a woman at a $6 haircut shop, who watched tv while loosely interpreting Annie Lennox, left some bare patches, but overall, 6 weeks in, things were evening out. Finally, I am wearing a Brave New Waves t-shirt that I received after writing many letters mentioning local bands to this late-night indie music radio show from the CBC. I am taken aback by how currently “retro” it looks, with the old-school headphones emblazoned on the front.
How do you know when you are home? I’d love to hear your stories.
September and next in my birthstone color series is Sapphire Blue. Sapphire is made of corundum, which is the same mineral as Ruby. If it’s blue it’s Sapphire and if it’s red it’s Ruby. It takes only a speck of an impurity to change the mineral color. I like the turnabout that happens when an impurity becomes beauty.
Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture by Kaya Oakes
I picked this book up at the library, because I was intrigued by the title, and was soon staying up late to read it. Kaya Oakes‘ enthusiastic respect for the do-it-yourself process was energizing. Oakes herself is a poet, and an editor with Kitchen Sink Magazine. I can’t help but love the tagline, “For people who think too Much.” (Be sure to check out her About page, for a cool double bio–one in Third Person and one in First Person.)
I have crossed paths with different aspects of Indie culture, starting with going to an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading in-utero, through publishing my own poetry chapbook with a couple of friends, to making mosaics and selling them at craft shows, and on Etsy.
One of the last chapters, following music, comics, and zines, is on The Crafting and Indie Design Movement. It is interesting to take the wider view, and see my craft as part of a larger cultural movement toward “hands on” and handmade. There is something immensely hopeful about the idea that we can do things ourselves, be creative, learn as we go. Punk was an expression of creativity in the here and now–not part of a series of hurdles to get recorded, promoted, played on the radio and fill stadiums.
Oakes talks about the film Handmade Nation, directed by Faythe Levine, and though I’ve heard of it, I have not gotten my hands on a copy yet. There is a quote by Levine about the nature of the crafting community, “The important thing is that it’s a powerful creative movement that’s mostly women, and I don’t know if that’s ever existed before.” Oakes delineates an Indie world that has had women on the periphery, but DIY crafting is different and women are central, and in fact some critics dismiss it for this very reason, as unimportant or trivial. Slanted and Enchanted was a useful reminder that the community is real, no matter what permutations Indie Culture goes through.
I have been participating in the SITS Girls ProBlogger Blog Challenge, and I can vouch that discovering a community of creative women is invigorating! I suspect the explosion of blogging will someday be part of the Indie history, and I’m glad to be part of it. If you want to know more about the context of this community, be sure to check out Kaya Oakes’ book.
Wedding Plate for Margaret and Wayne’s Wedding June 11, 1992
I was thinking about handmade gifts, and how my favorite wedding gift was a pottery plate with our names and hand painted flowers. I was thrilled to have such a personal gift, and that our friend special ordered this just for us. I don’t know who made the plate. The only clue is an M within a circle on the back. It has survived 5 moves!
Our goal was to have a wedding under $100. We almost made it! We commissioned our rings from a local silversmith in Eugene, OR, and then fortunately, my mother bought my dress, and the flowers. One of Wayne’s grad school classmates offered her back yard for a potluck reception. I was moved that she made such a lovely space for us to celebrate. Another friend, who was a witness at our traffic court wedding, provided the “something borrowed” since we forgot to bring any money to pay the judge’s fee. Another classmate was dating a cake decorator, and he drove a cake in from Corvallis, as the icing started to slide down the sides! But it was chocolate, so how can you go wrong?? Did I mention we got married during finals week, right before graduation? We were a bit wild and crazy then.
Margaret and Wayne’s Potluck Wedding Reception
I have been honored to be commissioned to make wedding mosaics. I completed a Celtic Cross for a couple, commissioned by a good friend of theirs, who brought them into the process and we all had a wonderful time choosing colors and beginning the seed of the finished project.
Cutting the Cake. 1992.Cross Commission for Mimi and John by Margaret Almon.
What is your favorite handmade gift, either that you have received or given? I’d love to hear about them, or see photos!
