Deborah Gavel

Untitled

Albuquerque, New Mexico

I am traveling and currently in a public library in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.  Synchronistically, my visit here is to celebrate my mother’s 94th birthday.  I have been beading this piece while I sit with her.  It has been a perfect meditation to consider each bead the linage of my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s womb.  Although I am foremost an oil painter, assemblage and collage artist, I initially began my undergraduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design in Apparel Design.  When I was a little girl my maternal grandmother would visit and sew for me.  I often sat next to her witnessing the process of her careful stitching.  Her mother, Minnie, also sewed, she was an incredible quilter.  As I worked on beading this piece, I looked over the careful stitches on one of the quilts my mother has saved.  I could not match the steady precision of her work nor come close to her level of patience.

There was a different pace to the world then, a slower consideration of the moment that I hope to have touched into the process of taking time to bead.  We are forever indebted to our mothers for their maternal wombs.  We are, each one of us, born to an exquisite uterus, embellished with the cellular wisdom carried across time, like beads of glass on thread stitched by love.