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Cloth & Culture
NOW
the artists - Katrin Pere, Estonia
To depict without depicting what cannot be seen or spoken, but
has to be remembered. What does this mean? I dare to say that I
am finally getting accustomed to living.
It is strange but such a natural process takes
time to be able to acknowledge and to comprehend how brief the
moment is that has been given to us. Half our time is spent on
becoming acquainted with it, beginning to understand it, starting to acknowledge
it.
What is the place, time and space that we call
home? What does it embody?
Primarily, its the people who are dear to us.
And the nature around us as much as anything else.
It is woven of the things that have surrounded
you for as long as you can remember. You remember where the vase
stood on grandma's chest, how home smelled when it was being prepared
for guests.
You recognise the spruce tree, which is as
old as you are and was once the same height as you were. You find
the old forest path hidden in the undergrowth. You can show your
children the boulders in the forest, next to which, in one old
photo, you feed the farm sheep with a piece of bread. And you are
barely able reach the sheep. Most important is the fact that the
boulders are there at all, although pine forest now towers above
them.
Nature is not only about breathtakingly beautiful
sights.
It is also the smell of the first thaw. It is this inexplicable
moment when you know that spring began today. It is the silence
of autumn in the damp forest full of dry-rotten leaves. It is the
sound of a falling leave as it touches the ground along the lane
lined with birch trees planted by your father. It is the hush of
the thousands of lives around you, when you are lying down and
gazing up at the low summer sky and knowing, that autumn will have
arrived the day this sky rises up and becomes painfully cold and
unreachable. You don't notice it until mother tells you. And you
don't yet know, that the chapel bell can sound so desperately sad.
It is the first strawberries on the straw collected for your children.
And you never take a cup with you because you fear that you will
not yet find any berries, although you long for those first precious
berries, every year again and again. It is the smell of fresh dung
in your garden and the warmth of the dirt path under your bare
feet as you push the dung cart. It is a bouquet of blue buttons for
grandpa, who is no longer able to walk to the meadow.
It is such a lot of things, that you remember
and experience again and again, which have filled minds before
you and will continue doing so after you are gone. And the most
important is that there are people around you who feel and speak
the same language, live to see and reckognize the same signs, reacting
to a common understanging of things. If I say September, everybody
knows what colour the ground is, or if I say May then everybody
knows how this ground smells. They believe that Christmas has to
be white and are afraid that it will rain on mid-summer night.
They know the smell of the first snow and the sparkling
enchantment of snow in March, the bright feeling of freedom when
winter is fading away and the first snowdrop appears. They remember
that the same sea, to which we came more than seven thousand years
ago, has fed us and killed us, united and separated us, but also
filled us with the zeal for freedom and knowledge that by standing
firmly on the ground we shall overcome, be it though nothing but
a breeze has been left of freedom.
I remember my mother talking about how when
she visited the health spa by the sea she wasn't allowed to look
at the sea. And I think I want to remember this in order to understand
all the things that have happened to my nation, but I don't believe
that I would want to forgive.
I have above all valued the emotions that guide
us through our lives and tried to keep my eyes open to see both the visible
and the invisible.
I suppose my work is about living, very simple
things, things that I care about. And not all simple things are
primitive. I talk about gladness, emotion, happiness, troubles,
memories and dreams, movements and moments. About the place between
heaven and earth, which I know. I feel comfortable here. I am at
home here. And I think the system of signs I use will convey its
message even to total strangers. Because I have tried to tell my
story in a language both beautiful and pleasant.
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