Reflections on Venus round table and reception

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The community loom opens colaboration to the public

Saturday Sept. 20 approximately 30 artists and community members participated in the round table conversation for the Venus exhibit.  My intention for the conversation was to provide an opportunity for

participating artists, poets and community members to sit together and have a conversation about what it means to collaborate.  To share the challenges and joy, the process of what happened in creating pieces for this exhibit and the relevance of this work to other aspects of work and life.

What is collaboration?

The dictionary defines it as working together.  Somehow that isn’t enough.  Successful collaboration requires willingness and intention.  The words of Napolean Hill about intention and risk taking certainly ring true for this endeavor.

Let me take a moment to give some exhibit background, to outline some of the process participants worked within.  Fiber artists and poets were paired at random one cold January evening by poet Ellie Schoenfeld, bead artist Jo Wood and I.  We gathered in Ellie’s Duluth hillside home over a bowl of chocolate, and 2 bowls of names…. 1 with invited fiber artists, another with invited poets.  We drew from the bowls between bites of chocolate  and the pairings were created.  At a meeting of  invited artists and poets in Oct 2007, the group decided that working in the create and respond method would deepen the collaboration.  Two teams chose to work fully collaboratively…. the rest created, exchanged, and responded.

What did the round table reveal?

• artists and poets took risks in creating  that they would not have taken working alone.  Many allowed themselves to create experimental work that is inspiring new directions of working.
• Surprise at how well partners were able to work together.  Styles of working together ranged from fully collaborative with regular meetings between the partners, to only occasional email idea sharing  until the night before the deadline.
• There is more interest, curiosity, understanding, respect for the other’s medium.  New relationships have been formed.
• Energy was high, people were inspired, and a deeper level of conversation was opened that carried  a new level of seeing and richness into the reception that followed.

Perhaps J.Ruth Gendler’s words from her book ‘Notes on the Need for Beauty’…summarize best.

“We live in a reciprocal conversation with the world.  There are so many ways to say this….  Whatever we work on — music, creek resortation, teaching, gardening, cooking — works on us.  It is always a conversation between the cook and the vegetables, the gardener and the plants, the artist and her materials, the bee and the flower, the body and the soul.
How do we honor this exchange, the generous reciprocity that sustains us?  …. Praise, celebrate, honor, bless this moment…. remember to trust the wisdom of beauty…. Beauty connects us to what is holy…. Beauty lives in heirloom apple trees and seeds and the soft luxuious wool called cashmere, in so many things that I don’t think about in my world — in motorcycle dealerships and junkyards, in hospital corridors, the tender tentative steps of people walking after surgery, in the birds-eye view out of the airplane of the line of the river and the patchwork quilt of the field and forest.
We are travelers passing through.  We belong to this place, to this time.  Growing into ourselves, we meet each other.”

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