Dark Beginnings

The ancient Celtic calendar year began at Samhain, a festival that marks the end of harvest season and the beginning of the "darker half" of the year. On a modern Roman calendar, Samhain would occur on the night between October 31 and November 1.

All Celtic festivals would begin at dusk or sunset. They measured the passage of time in nights not days, and measured their months by the cycles of the moon. During winter, the beginning of the Celtic year, plants go dormant. Trees appear to be dead. But the ground is full of potential energy. The flower emerging from the soil is not the beginning of that plant's life. It's life began as a seed, inside the dark earth.

For "TIME", I used an ombre background fabric to represent the Celtic idea that a day begins at dusk rather than dawn. I added machine quilting with metallic thread to create branches (or roots) in the empty spaces. The spiral is made with yarn, which I crocheted into a chain to represent interlocking days and nights and the cycle of time. Then I hand stitched the chain into the shape of a spiral, an ancient Celtic symbol of life and potential energy and the idea of cyclical time.

The spiral is divided into 13 sections highlighted by hand-sewn glass metallic beads. I chose the metallic beads because they seem to appear and disappear as you walk around the piece. Depending on the light, you can see the lines between a few sections but never all 13 at once.