My Artist Statement

Revisiting the Artist Statement I submitted for the 2010 show I was in at Gopalan Gallery.  It's still true.

Zann Carter
Artist Statement


at first it’s all about process:
the rhythms of
the spinning
the weaving
the knitting
the crocheting
the felting...

endorphin bliss of process

and then it’s about transformation
(the unspun wool becoming
the yarn becoming
the object)

all happening in my hands
                in my hands!

Oh, the lovely tools,
the healing ritual of familiar movements,
the spell cast by repetition,
the falling completely under that spell.
enchantment moves me through loss and sorrow,
                  the wound of the world in me,
into the sacred joy-space of creation.
it happens often enough that
i do these things again and again:

spin weave knit crochet felt

then it becomes about story
story told by bits of texture and form and color
colliding,
a wild trajectory of stitches, the way fibers meet
each other just so,
intersect, join, move away again, leap and arc
and play around spaces...

sometimes the story is whole,

sometimes there are only fragments,
solitary images that find poems to hold them, too,
pieces of a scattered puzzle, hints, clues
to a mystery that will never be solved
but wants simply to be.

i make garments to wear in dreams and fairy tales,
artifacts from a world permeated with magic and myth, a bearable reality’s

INCANTATIONS.