About a decade ago I read an article about building community through making ‘bad art thingies’ together. The idea: A neighborhood host volunteers his home and kitchen table, and participants bring potluck food and recyclable materials — empty cereal boxes, fabric scraps, sequins, wrapping paper, old birthday cards, toilet paper tubes, etc.

The host provides basics like scissors, crayons and markers, construction paper, glue and staples, and decides whether to open up the creative possibilities by including hot glue guns and paint.

The process: Sit down at the table and make something out of the stuff. It could be an oatmeal container with glitter, two straws and sections of the comics taped to the side. No rules, except talk, eat, share supplies and techniques. Then take home your thingie. Or swap thingies. Toss thingie.

This made me unexplainably, wildly happy. I ran to the garage and pulled out an empty laundry soap holder.  I brought it into the studio and started covering the sides, using old wallpaper, stamped cardboard, scraps of old paintings I never liked, postcards, spiraled pipe cleaners, etc.

Breathless with the complete absence of the ‘inner snick’—I was in kindergarten again, smiling and singing away.  The humble nature of the materials freed me up. The only part missing was that thick paste with a paddle attached to the lid that smelled like wintergreen lifesavers.

My husband who didn’t read the article, saw my thingie and said, “Uh, honey, where are you going to sell that?”

I still have it. I invite you to make one. Feed the Beauty.

 If anyone knows where I can find the article mentioned above, please let me know.

As an artist I attempt to make the unseen inside of me visible. Slow has inspired me to consider what affects the actions of creativity I take to make art.

I work in mixed media and acrylic. Fast. I wrestle with encaustic. Slow. Scanography-slow and fast.

I wait for the paint to dry, the wax to melt, the gesso to harden. Or not—because there are hairdryers and chemicals that will speed things up…and I use them all the time.

I’m in slow mode as I collect images and textures and ideas; fabric, paper, books, 3D objects. I make note of other people’s art and web content. I create from three themes that repeat and inspire: beauty, joy, brainfood.

This is not done as a rush job determined by a schedule. I once pulled out clippings of toys from a 1950’s Sears catalog that I laminated in 1992 to use in a scanner image in 2006. See ‘Kittens’ at www.sophielumen.blogspot.com

I went back to my blog recently to post about what was a previously private process. I’m curious to see if this affects what comes out, and to learn about the way people do the same in other countries. Because we are all slow artists of our invisible lives.

The launch of Australia’s first magazine dedicated to all types of slowness kicked off in August 2009 in the regional town of Castlemaine, Victoria. A full-colour magazine, ‘Slow. For those who think life’s too fast’ has attracted much feedback and publicity. Slow, a quarterly, is distributed through newsagents, bookstores and community hubs in Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, Melbourne and Sydney - with plans to expand into a national magazine after issue 4 - but hey there’s no rush.
Created by a media savvy team of treechangers, Slow is available via online subscription or via email to slowcoach@slowmagazine.com.au

Well, I’m in the publishing phase of my new novel.  Honestly this is the hardest part of the journey.  However my experience with Troy Book Makers, in Troy, NY, is proving to fit right in with my slow-style.  I never knew there were so many choices to make in the look of a novel.  It was overwhelming!  But I took the decisions one at a time, treating this publishing process as just another creative aspect of coming out with a book.  When you do it on your own (self-publishing), a writer can truly indulge in this final step.  Of course the pressure of getting my story out into the world at large, especially when my readers “couldn’t put it down,” is always there.  Today I’m thinking about the Slow Book Movement from the perspective of the writer versus the reader.  The average reader, after losing herself in a good book for a couple days, never stops to think about what it takes to writer that book.  Well, the easiest way to imagine it, is to take your experience of those few days of immersion in characters and a plot, stretch it out into a year or two of your life, and you might begin to understand.  The chapter you spend an hour savoring over a cup of tea one afternoon was also savored by me, during the month I spent writing, and then the week a year later re-writing, that I spent. A novel is best compared to a great wood carving, a kind of totem pole chiseled out of ink in paper.  It’s best done SLOW, with many walks and good food and coffee in between working.  And being a slow writer has nothing to do with being a lazy writer.  Once I figure out the picture upload problem I’ll post a shot of all the rewrites over the last 18 months, a stack of paper four feet tall.  Oh what a profession I chose.  There is no choice but to take it slow, like building a stone wall.

It’s great to be here!  I am in the process of launching both an idependent bookstore tour for my new novel, titled The Farmer, as well as what I’m calling the Slow Book Movement.  The goal is to create a resurgence in the lost art of literature, and to one day grow as large and widespread as the Slow Food Movement.  I want to involve writers, readers, publishers, and anyone else with a love and interest in good books.  This is my opening post of what will be an ongoing blog describing the adventure of a self-published book tour and starting up a brand new movement!  To begin, check out my portal for fund-raising on Kickstarter.com.  Search for “The Farmer Book Tour”.  This website is great, and may help other slow people get their own projects going!  Thanks for reading and keep checking for updates.  Right now my novel is at the printing press, so the big release date is coming up soon!!

I recently sat down to talk with Ellen Kochansky, an Artful Home artist who has always worked in the realm of Slow. For 25 years, Ellen made quilts, working in and around abandoned textile mills in South Carolina.  Her quilts always made reference to previous lives, as Ellen has had a fascination with re-use.  She uses the term “composting” freely, and holds a fascination for the re-use of materials, machines, and objects , giving them a new life.  The quilt below, “Counterpane” was “a farewell to the collage technique  I did for years, which became obsolete when the couching embroidery machine I used at a local factory was sold when the factory went under. The scrap from a decade of hangings became the compost for the last of the series.”The quilt is located in the White House Collection in Washington, DC.  http://www.ekochansky.com/Large-art/history%20art/counterpane.jpg 1992.

Ellen likes to use the term “spoiled rotten” when speaking of her current work, feeling that the excesses of our pre-recession lifestyles can be allowed to rot, or compost, in ways which bring about new life.  She is intent on creating from that which is in the wastestream, and understanding how we all fit into that wastestream.  Much of her work is like that shown recently  in her show “Embedded Energy” at the 701 Center for Contemporary Arts in Columbia, SC, an old mill town where the mill is long gone.  Ellen interviewed past residents and their families, gathered bales of debris from the neighborhood, and collected “rotting” examples of memories, including bridal gowns, letters, and clothes lines.  These came to new life in the show, with this compost harvested between transparent waves of fabric, tied into bales, or displayed reverentially. (Thank you Susan Lenz for your blog posting)
http://artbysusanlenz.blogspot.com/2009/02/embedded-energy-by-ellen-kochansky.html

She is now working on collective projects with a focus on community.  One community in particular was for a hospital which is trying to focus more on patient-centered care, on Slow involvement with patients rather than simply machine-focused data care.  For the Mercy Hospital in Charlotte, NC , Ellen sorted through materials which the  hospital threw away.  All who work in the hospital, from surgeons to janitors, were asked to make individual promises of commitment to patients on a strip of trash, which was then rolled up into a bead.  Hundreds of beads will be included in layers of a giant book-based quilt , showing the intentions of commitment, to be  displayed in the hospital entrance. Volunteers, patients, and hospital professionals have all gotten involved.  To quote Ellen, the project was about
“how do you do what you do,  rather than just what is  the technical stuff that you do?”

Ellen believes that  letting go is an energy field. “ If you compost it (an object, and idea), you protect it.  If you try to protect it, or try to insulate it from harm, you don’t spread it.  It is an active, violent process to let go.  Wrench yourself from your own consumption. “ As Ellen and I talked, we eventually looped back to the world of art and design.  Her opinion, and I don’t disagree, is that in recent decades, in the arts we have, “been spoiled rotten.  We were able to be superfluous, because people had the money to buy what they didn’t need.”  Her approach to re-examining and re-purposing that which is about to be tossed, her version of composting, provides a Slow lens on the world of consumption and art.

Allow me to introduce myself.    Trained as a textile artist and fashion designer, professionally I am known as an executive in the world of retail.   Retail is not particularly known for its dedication to Slow, but rather is a world which thrives on and requires speed to market.  In my field it is all about knowing your customers and responding – quickly – to their needs.  To counterbalance  this addiction to speed, I have retained my connection to my training as an artist and have become a knitter – a serial knitter, in fact – throughout the past decade.

Thought by some to be the domain of grannies, knitting allows me to start something from the ground up, focus on the practice and the journey .   It is amazing to start with balls of yarn and Slowly, Slowly, Slowly create something entirely different.  You can carry that creation with you to multiple experiences, keeping the slow rhythm of knitting a constant during meetings, long plane rides, boring waits.  Dr. Perri Klass, in her book Two Sweaters For My Father: Writing About Knitting knitted her way through medical school, much to the chagrin of her mostly male classmates.  She claimed it kept her alert throughout lectures, a not-to-be-scoffed at accomplishment for sleep deprived residents.  It also kept her balanced and focused on the lectures.

With knitting, if you make a mistake, unlike in the rest of life, you get to rip it out and have a makeover.  The steady movement of your hands and need for counting stitches and rows provides a soothing counterbalance to chaos around and seems to allow true clarity of thinking.  Instead of the mind wandering, the mind seems to focus while knitting.  Some think we are not listening when we knit;  I have been reprimanded for knitting while attending strategic planning conferences.  Silly non-knitters.  If they only knew.
This is my introductory post on the concept and practice of Slow Design.  The posts will focus on artists who, whether they have named it as such, engage in Slow Design.  Those who work in the media formerly known as craft exemplify Slow Design, with their dedication to the connection between the mind and the hand.  Stitchers, ceramicists, glassblowers, furniture makers all practice the Art of Slow.  As I learn from them, I shall pass it along.