Sheltering and Nurturing in Place

by Charlotte Moore · Phippsburg, ME

The Covid pandemic has provided me with what will be a unique period of time in my personal and artistic life. Not that this is any different from anyone else. There are personal benefits for me, but I am fully cognizant that the pandemic has created havoc as well as economic collapse and tragedy for many people. I often feel the discrepancy between the effect the pandemic has had on me and my family and the effect on hundreds of millions of people who have lost jobs, businesses, health, housing, and, especially tragic, family.

On the personal side, my daughter, her daughter, and their au pair have moved in with us here in Maine, after socially distancing in Cambridge, MA for the first two months of the pandemic. Once all of us had passed the required test in May, we moved to Phippsburg together. This afforded the opportunity for us to be with our only grandchild (age 7) full time. An opportunity that will never happen again, particularly when they move back to Cambridge and she goes to school.

There is another opportunity we have seized upon during the pandemic: the opportunity to work in partnership with my daughter to manage a household where she is working full time from home, her child is in virtual school, camp, and other virtual activities with the au pair, my husband is finishing a book full time, and I am creating my art. In my mind, partnership with my daughter has meant solidifying our mother/daughter relationship and beginning to understand and see each other and our individual roles.

My art: I am a felt artist, meaning that my medium is based on making handmade felt from wool fiber. I have seen the COVID pandemic as an opportunity to clear my head of the focus of my work for the past 4 or 5 years. I have taken leftover scraps from my previous 10 years of practice and am piecing them together to make a series of small, new panels. I have been asking myself what I can do with these, and what new techniques and other materials I can incorporate in my work.

Finally, I have been wet felting a rug, I love the physicality of pushing, rolling, stamping, banging on the fibers to integrate them into a finished thick rug fabric. I have been unable to do this for a couple of years, due to a back injury.