Isabella Amstrup
In my mother’s womb,
a spiral
songs of deep time,
of water and rock
rivers converge
water meets water
In August of 2021, I returned to Succurro for a week-long residency. I had visited twice before — the first time for a long weekend during a Fellowship Festival and the second time, in the middle of winter for a Fellowship Retreat, followed by Mod 1 of SourcePoint training. During the week-long residency, I slept in a glamping tent on the hill overlooking the valley and spent my days exploring the creek and weaving in the attic studio. The first time I had gone down to the creek was during the Festival where everyone went to hang out and cool off from the sun. This time, I was alone and the water was much shallower after several weeks of no rain, making it easy to walk in and follow the curving walls of greenery and wild flowers. I became completely entranced with the eco-system of this waterway and the wildlife that depended on it. As I explored its curves, I noticed the sound of flowing water had an incredibly calming effect. I felt my system soften and a sensory attentiveness emerge. I had recognized this as a familiar, yet distant memory of which I have had glimpses of. Living in cities all my life, nature immersion was something I longed for but rarely got the opportunity to experience.
Over the course of the week, I made two long weavings from cones of undyed cotton and linen yarn I had brought with me. After finishing the first weaving, I cut it off the loom and brought it down to the creek. I lowered it into the water and watched in awe as the water activated the yarns and fractal-like patterns danced through the cloth. I was totally mesmerized. I spent hours observing, listening, and attempting to record these patterns as best I could with my iPhone camera. When I made the second weaving, I left much of the cloth unwoven except for a few inches here and there, allowing more space for the water to flow through and activate the yarns. Choosing to do so just felt natural, obvious. Much of the process over the week felt as fluid as the creek itself. I did not sit down to plan any of it, nor was I thinking or analyzing much. Each step was made clear after the next and I was moved to respond in a way I had never experienced before. For me, art making had mostly been saturated with overthinking and often paralysis, but this was entirely different. I had entered a slipstream, and was being moved by the creek itself.
After I returned to Philadelphia, I remember thinking wow, what was that? — trying to understand and relive the experience. Now that many years have passed and my relationship to the land at Succurro has continued to deepen, it has become much clearer to me. During that week, I had accepted an invitation — from the land, the water, the beings of the land — to stay, to rest, to engage, to be moved and to create. I don’t know for sure when the invitation first came, but I know that my whole system said yes; with each movement, with each action.
returning to her,
i remember that
i am
I have been learning to pay closer attention to the flow of change, noticing not just seasonal, but daily changes on the land here at Succurro. Engaging in the ancestral practices of weaving and farming for the last few years, has helped me live better attuned to the rhythms of nature and cycles of life, death, and rebirth. In 2022 I moved to Succurro to train as a practitioner, while also seeking personal nourishment and better health. What has been cultivated over time is an understanding and practice of nourishment that reaches far beyond just myself. Through growing, raising, and processing food, I am nourished and in turn, nourish the web of life and the community of which I am a part. What has emerged is a commitment to practices that foster responsive communication with the eco-system I live and work within — the hyper local human and more-than-human community of Succurro and the surrounding county.
When I first learned to weave on a floor loom back in 2013, I recognized something that felt very old and very familiar, deep in my bones. My training came through a graduate program that was geared towards industrial textile production, heavily focused on the technical aspects of weaving. That initial embodied recognition stayed for a while but eventually became overshadowed by a more mechanistic lens. I found myself pushing to innovate for the sake of innovation. It was only after completing my degree and several years of working in the textile industry, that I began returning to the basic principles of weaving in their simplicity and depth. Since then, I have learned to honor weaving as an ancient craft technology deeply embedded in all cultures throughout history. Evidence of weaving can be found as far back as 50,000 years, and that’s just from humans. Our spider kin have been weaving for far longer than that, around 140 million years.
When I spent that week in residency at Succurro entering a slipstream, I was moved to create, not weighed down by the sense of “me”. That experience of meeting the water brought me back to the liminal space of the womb. Each time I visit the creek or any body of water, I acknowledge the waters from which I was born, and the journey unfolding.