So long, Blogger!

Peeps,

http://www.olisacorcoran.com/cocoaeyesthestitcher/

Blogger has been GREAT. This blog is such an important part of my life. I'm still going to blog about my artwork... I've just move over to a new site on SquareSpace. I'm still working out the details of my new site, but please come visit me in my new home at www.olisacorcoran.com.

Don't be shy!

xoxo, O

Penultimate Stitch

Almost!

Spanish Eyes, March 29, 2015. 

RuStitch Rocks San Jose

Strange as it may sound, you enter my tiny Durham apartment through my bedroom. The first thing you see is my bed, with its deep red quilt, and a giant framed print of the RuStitch grid hanging above it.

RuStitch Grid, by 35 artists. Aubrey Longley-Cook, 2013.

So it felt oddly intimate to find the same image I see every day on the homepage of the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

It's there because Aubrey Longley-Cook's RuStitch x stitch/video art collaboration is now showing at at the museum as part of the exhibition "Common Thread."

I'm thrilled that my piece, Frame 11, is part of the exhibition. Woot!

Here are the details:

March 7, 2015 – July 5, 2015
A Common Thread, Guest Curated by Susan O’Malley

So if you're in San Jose before the 4th of July, go say hi to Ru. In the meantime, watch this awesome video of the finished project.

Can you say penultimate?

No time to celebrate, but my crazy, epic x stitch project has turned the final corner!

Spanish Eyes. WIP 3/13/15.

Last night I finished the penultimate section of Spanish Eyes. One more 50 x 50 stitch section to go!

Stitch code for the final section!

I have no idea what I was thinking when I started this self portrait of my eyes. Why did I design it so huge? (It's 6 x 14.5 inches, or 15.25 x 36.8 cm.) Because I'm insane, I guess. 

Stitching until my fingers are bloody and raw. Ha!

Ok, back to work.

Turn your head, Mami

This is my beautiful, complicated mother Min, at around 30-years-old.

Redwork Mami, 2015. Hand embroidery on cotton.

Mi mami, mi mami. ("Mi mami," because my mother's family is from Puerto Rico.)

Chain stitch detail of her thick, black hair.

I look at this image, based on a photo taken by my Irish-American father, and I'm back in the position of my five-year-old self. The longing I always felt for my mother. The desperate wish that she would turn her head and look at me. Smile at me.

For my parents.

Turn your head, mami. Please.

Struck

I took a hard blow. It knocked me down.

I got back up.

Vulnerable & confident... with a needle in my hand

You are who you are.

Detail from Redwork Mami, 2015.

I am who I am.

Rinsing. Still stitching.

Confident and still very vulnerable. As an artist, a woman.

Still so many stitches in the Spanish Eyes.

Right now I'm working on a redwork version of my beautiful, complicated mami. And I'm trying to finish Spanish Eyes, which is a piece where my eyes look so much like my mami's.

Flowers.

It is so hard. But I keep moving that needle. Even when I'm sad.