Working dirty is a core of my work and art philosophy. “Work dirty” goes through my mind as I work or as I …pause… in hesitation. It’s the permission I need to take risks, to try something I’m not sure about. It’s the reason I make progress and try new things.
When I started dyeing fabric it brought up deep feelings in me that I knew I wanted to keep following. When I began working within this medium I produced pieces of fabric that were messy. Stained, streaked and splotchy. I improved, but only so much. Right now I am working on a time-consuming piece that has a mark right in a light bright white area. It is obvious and noticeable. this piece will have taken hundreds of hours by the time I’m done. It has a splotch of dirt right there for everyone to see. But these kinds of issues don’t always bother me. My kind of perfectionism has a different tenor.
I could not draw or sew for many years because I was afraid that I would not be able to make something as beautiful as I imagined. For me, making art and making beautiful things is a big part of what makes life worth living. I was afraid I would hate what I made. Afraid to hate my life.
A frequent question I get about my quilts is whether or not the dye will stay fixed. What will happen to them over time? This plagued me and stopped me from starting to dye and quilt for many years. Naturally dyed quilts, especially linen ones, are affected by sunlight, acids and bases, and wear and tear. Like any textile, they won’t last for ever but eventually they will turn back into dust. To dirt. Oh, eventually my dirty quilt will be exactly that, a dirt quilt, dirt. One day I decided that I would make a quilt that I didn’t like completely and that would not last forever. I would make one that might fade or fall apart. This decision to act has led me to continue my research on how to make better dyes, to mordant the cloth well so that the color will last, how to store the fabrics out of the sun, how to wash them carefully. The quilts that have lived in my house for the last several years are still bright and beautiful. Full of color. They will not last forever but they will live longer than they would have if they had never been made at all.
The philosopher Hegel referred to me and my kind of perfectionists as the Beautiful Soul. The beautiful soul is lovely name for an approach to life that Hegel despised. He said, "The beautiful soul, in order to maintain its own self-certainty, disparages the ordinary activities of life, as also the corresponding requirements of its own nature and of the nature of others; it depreciates these things as far beneath itself, and exalts itself to an attitude of virtue and sanctity."
The beautiful soul lives in the imaginary world, one that is perfect and harmonious. The only place it will ever be so. This is the world of the perfectionist. In a way, nothing is so low-stakes as the making of a quilt. But the perfectionist entire perfect world is at stake. We must leave it behind to enter a dirty one. We understand that we step forward to make something that will disappoint us.
This was even more true of my writing. I wanted to write for many years but I was more comfortable with the imaginary great words and essays and books I would write than with my trifling sentences.
Why would we rather have something imaginary than a materialized material? Why did I prefer an imaginary quilt to a warm and substantial one? The beautiful soul wants to be certain before they act. They are, rather, WE are wanting to maintain a position of virtue. We want the moral high ground. To be on the right side of history. We want to avoid the risks of freedom, of not knowing, of consequences and making mistakes. I love that Hegel names this character, this position, as the beautiful soul because this is how we see ourselves. He could have called it the self-righteous soul, since this is another term for what we are. But this name holds within it the allure of this life. Doing anything in this world is complicated and messy and we immediately lose the level of moral purity we strive for here. Our souls feel so beautiful in the abstract. But all the messy realities of human existence make us dirty. Just like my quilt. Stained. Marked.
For artists this manifests as perfectionism. We struggle to find the perfect way to make the art exactly represent the thing we have in our mind’s eye. Writers know that words are limited in how they can actually represent ideas. The language lacks the exact specificity to say what we mean. That is also true for me in fabric. The linen won’t turn on the points I want it to, it shifts and pulls. The dyes take up in unexpected ways.
Of course, these unexpected failures contribute very often to what makes the work feel most alive. When I post pictures of mistakes I make in my quilts, whether it is a misplaced block or a splotchy dye job, people often respond with statements of approval. “Keep it!” My oldest child tells me that the splotchy fabric looks like tie dyed and they are the favorites. I understand this impulse. While sometimes I disagree and I go back and fix something, there are many times where I like the asymmetrical, the streaks and even the misaligned points.
I believe the problem goes even deeper when it comes to translating art from our mind to reality. Artists work to find the thing they sense through their medium. The beauty, the inspiration, the feeling. But the feeling itself isn’t just one thing. It isn’t complete or clear. We don’t know what we love and what we want. It always eludes us. Even if the medium was perfect, we would still fall short. It’s hard to know that you will necessarily miss the mark of what you are trying to say. The silver lining is that this gap between what we want and what we make propels us to try again. It keeps us creating new work.
We deal with this in every area of our lives. As parents, as activists, as researchers, administrators, trash collectors or whatever it is that we set ourselves to do. (Speaking of working dirty - when I was a young child my dream was to be a trash collector. I used to fantasize about though high school.)
Working dirty has been particularly hard for me as a writer. If we are going to say anything, we must say it wrong. That means we will offend and hurt others. On the internet this can be exhausting and even people who you like may quickly rush in and call you out and cut you off or block you. The fast paced space of social media is hardly the place to have in depth discussions. I sympathize with being easily triggered and wanting to create walls - blocking people who offend me. How can you tell when someone is just getting off on rilling you up and someone who holds a different opinion that could help you sharpen your own idea? How can you tell the difference between someone who is working dirty and someone who want to play dirty for the sake of the dirt? An even more difficult question for me has been, how can I tell the difference between when I’m there to do real work and there to take offense?
Looking for ways to work through these ideas slowly and careful is good, but even with long form or in person I know that I will always fall short. Every attempt to say or do anything carries with the risk of being wrong or at least being unable to communicate what I mean. But I must still get the work out, get the words out, get the stitches on the cloth. To be an artist for me means to have an impact of some kind. To hear feedback means to be impacted in return. It’s a process of being bruised and bruising in return. To love is necessarily the possibility of hurting and being hurt.
This doesn’t mean that we should be necessarily satisfied with art we don’t love or love that hurts. I think it's the dream of the beautiful soul brought into the real world that can carry us forward. It will hurt though every time we fail to make, to love, to build. That is the nature of the beast.
In my work life I am an educational game designer. My spouse and I started a public media studio several years ago. I had some of hesitation about designing video games and putting them in classrooms. I asked him, “What if we are wrong? What if this hurts schools and kids more than it helps?” He responded, “Well, this is my best idea. I can only hope it’s a good one but you never can be sure.”
His response surprised me and bolstered me at the same time. I had been stuck for years trying to make decisions and needing to know before I started that they were good ideas. I see real courage in what he said. All we have is our best idea. Then we get feedback and try again to do better next time.
I enjoyed reading this post on working dirty. It's very encouraging!
Thank you so much for this post. Really helpful to me today!