Lie down on your back. Close your eyes. Take three deep breaths, allowing air to fill your lungs and expand your rib cage. Fill your body up with so much air that the fullness distracts your mind and shifts your focus to the sensation of your body–it’s walls extended.
When your mind is still, you’re ready.
Breathe in.
This time, bring your focus to the top of your head. How does it feel? Not your brain, exactly, but the top of your head, the roots of your hair, your scalp. Can you feel it at all? Does it pulse? Does it tingle?
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Focus on your face: how do your eyes sit in their sockets? Can you feel the tip of your nose? The curves of your cheeks? Is there tension in your jaw? Consider every part of your face.
Breathe out.
Proceed down your body: breathe into your neck, shoulders, chest, arms, hands, fingers, stomach, pelvis, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, feet, heels and toes.
Breathe out.
A body scan is both a method and a tool. It’s a meditative procedure to bring oneself back–back to the reality of one’s body and skin. It aims to heal the disembodied, to provide grounding to the weary who are lost in their minds–a sometimes treacherous space where reality morphs into a form that is at once unrecognizable yet completely convincing.
A body scan calls for concentration: focus on the breath, allow it to take up the room of the mind that is often cluttered with the chairs and tables our imagination has arranged. A body scan provides a procedure to connect back to the body, the vessel, the tangible thing we carry through this world.
It’s a tool for clarity, it’s a tool for grounding, it’s a tool for presence, it’s a tool that facilitates a different understanding of self. It’s a reusable tool, one that never expires or requires an upgrade. It never rusts, distorts, or dulls. In fact, it’s a flexible tool: one as malleable as clay and as stretchy as elastic. While the method of a body scan never changes, the results do. Scan by scan, different sensations appear, disappear, grow and shrink.
The body scan has become a conceptual sister to the form-generating procedure I’ve developed to create my totems. I begin each knitted piece by creating an elongated knitted rectangle, the dimensions of which correspond to the length and width of either my entire body or a portion of my body. This rectangle, like the method of the body scan, is the root, the unchanging constant, the thing to return to in order to discover something new. In a body scan, the newness is derived from the unique bodily sensations experienced by the practitioner. In my totems the newness is derived from the tweaks or changes expressed by an exploration of the specific material I’m utilizing for that totem. I consider my totems to be the equivalent of a knitted body scan. A method and tool for exploring and expanding the way I express the body through fiber and textiles.
A totem is defined as a spirit being, sacred object or symbol that serves and an emblem. My totems are symbols of the body, perhaps my own. After knitting a rectangular frame, my protoform, I begin to react to the knitted frame. I consider the interior void a space for discovery, for change, for potential. I fold and press and twist and turn parts of the frame to discover new connection points. Depending on the material used to create the frame/body, I might have to force or cajole corners to connect. I build and connect ever mindful of the space in the center that I’m filling. However, the process is open, improvisational, and curious. My design decisions are led by the push and pull of my body’s movements and the response of the material.
Breath in.
Focus on the material. Allow them to fold and unfold.
Like the deep breaths in a body scan–the the totems simply…exist.
-Spring 2023
