I tend to forget the connection I have to the feeling of spring until it arrives again each year. As soon as the days get longer, I feel a shift in energy all around from the excitement that the easy days of summer are so close. This time of year reminds me that there are specific sights, places, smells, sounds, and emotions we relate with each season. The scent of new flowers blooming, neighbors beginning to cut their grass, and warm potting soil combined with the sounds of my girls playing outside longer each day, lawnmowers, birds, and breezes that create the unmistakable feel of spring. It's these ties to spring that gave me the idea to try out a new process combining the carving element of printmaking on a new series of floral clay tiles.
If you've read earlier blog posts, you know that the tiles I create share little parts of the places that make my story. The new tiles I've been working on are just the same in that they are sweet, little parts of places that are very special to me. Each floral tile depicts a flower that I identify with the homes where I grew up, where we first lived as a family, and where we live and visit now.
The first flower in this series is the pink camellia that grows outside my aunt Polly's kitchen window, and this flower is first because it reminds me so much of this exact time of year. Growing up, the first full April weekend meant I'd be at my aunt Polly's because my parents would head down to Augusta for the Masters. I'd spend the weekend outside for hours on a four-wheeler making lap after lap around her house where I'd pass by her camellia bush full of huge, pink camellias. I can't picture these flowers without seeing her waving at me from the kitchen sink window just next to the camellia bush because she always seemed to be right there, watching and washing dishes (now that I'm a mom, I'm pretty sure she was using the dishes as a reason to stand at the window and make sure I behaved on the four-wheeler). Now, whenever I see a full camellia bush, I remember the exact feel of those weekends--the sound of the Masters on in the living room, the sun setting later, and my aunt Polly at the kitchen window. I made sure that when we moved to our house in the spring of 2012, a camellia bush was the first thing I planted.
I'm so excited to share more about the people and places that have inspired this series, and I've loved talking to friends who already have a connection to other flowers to come. Those conversations are my exact hope for h.made studio--that others will recognize bits of their story in my work and want to make my tiles a part of their home.
Pink camellias in full bloom.