Kandinsky Circles

I started making these circles in March of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. I was suddenly unable to read any fiction and I found my legendary attention span and focus were now reduced significantly. I’d always made afghans in one piece before, had always felt like it was a huge annoyance to make a big project in pieces and then have to put it all together. I wanted to see and feel the project growing in my hands until it was finished—and then have it be done.

But the world had turned upside down and so had my sense of myself and my interest in handwork. It was no longer about creating usable end-products. It wasn’t about practicality as it had always been before. It was about doing something to keep me from going absolutely insane with everything changed. And so I began to focus on a single circle at a time. I didn’t know then what I was going to do with them. I didn’t have an end plan at first. I slowly began to work my way toward the idea that I wanted the circles to span the gamut from blue to yellow.

The yarn that I used for the circles was from two trips to expensive yarn stores. I don’t usually allow myself to splurge above one hundred dollars for a single project. But the yarn for this project alone was almost $800. It was a ridiculous amount of money for a single project that wasn’t even intended to have a useful purpose. I’d spend all my life thinking about my handwork as an outgrowth of my Mormon upbringing and my years as a mom of five small kids whom I could barely afford to feed (sometimes) and whom I needed to clothe either by making stuff by hand or by thrifting diligently or passing clothing down from one kid to another.

I also hadn’t thought of the same project when I purchased the yarn. I just went and bought yarn that spoke to me, that I loved so much I couldn’t leave the store without buying it. One store’s haul was partially paid by a friend who had given me a Christmas present two years before. He’d asked if I’d used the gift card and I realized with embarrassment that I hadn’t, so I went to look for it and then went to the store in part just because I wanted him to feel like I was using his gift. I would never have gone to that store without his encouragement via a gift card. And then I ended up spending three times that very generous amount. The other store was in California, when I went to visit my daughter there, and I hadn’t purchased any other kind of souvenir, so the yarn was it.

Night by night, I made a circle or two, usually an hour for each one, as we played games. My two younger kids, a bonus kid, my now ex husband and I, playing mindless games that would normally have driven me crazy because they have too much in-between turns time. But during the pandemic, it felt right. I had never let myself do nothing before. I always had a sense that I needed to GET THINGS DONE and there was always a clock ticking. But time stopped during the pandemic and so I was working painfully slowly on something that might turn out to be nothing—and that was exactly what I felt like I was meant to do.

Months later, I had over a hundred circles. Not all of them ended up in the final product. I played with them over the course of a couple of weeks, laying them out on the living room floor, not needing to move them because no one seemed to really go into the living room anymore. I tried an arrangement with all the yellow in the center, and all the dark colors at the center, gradually growing lighter or darker at the edges. Then I tried the corners arrangement. I kept changing one circle here or there until somehow I knew that it was RIGHT, just as it was, and that I didn’t want to change it anymore.

It took another month to make each circle into a square and then to put them all together. By then, my ex had asked me to leave the house, and so I took the finished project with me to my first solo apartment since I was in my twenties. I’d been married longer than I’d been single at this point, at age 50. In fact, just a few years before this, my now ex had given me a special gift of jewelry to indicate the new “half-life” I’d passed out into. I still have that jewelry. I haven’t been able to get rid of it, though I left almost everything else from my old life behind when I left the house.

I got a brand new job a few months after I left the old house, and because it was still pandemic times, I worked from home, on Zoom often. In back of my face was always this piece of art. Many people noticed it, and I explained that I did yarn art, and that I frequently had yarn in my hands and was working on other projects during Zoom meetings, while waiting for phone calls, or sometimes on the phone calls themselves. Working on a project with my hands helped calm down my nervous system, which had been turned to “high alert” after the upheaval in my life and the sense that my new job was way over my head, and that I was an entirely different person here (I even changed the pronunciation of my name to the traditional Danish Metta rather than Metty as my family uses).

This new art has been a touchstone of a new world and a new me that exists now. It has allowed me to get through numerous calls with angry customers, as I’m now a supervisor and deal with those frequently, and it has helped me think about the future in the midst of some very deep suicidal ideation. As long as I had a new project in mind, I was going to finish it before doing anything permanent. And now I have a whole new house full of afghans. My brother and his wife (a long-time quilter) came over in the early days of the divorce to help me put them up. Now they’re everywhere, and I have to keep taking old ones down to put the new ones up. It is, perhaps, excessive. Some people love it when they come to visit. The ones who don’t mostly don’t say anything.

I recently won my first ever award for visual art that I sent to a local magazine. I was astonished because none of the poems or essays I sent in won anything. And two pieces were chosen to be part of the magazine. I won’t pretend I’m new to crocheting and knitting. I started knitting when I was a teenager, as part of the Mormon young women’s program. I kept knitting and learned crochet when I was in my twenties. Sometimes people express astonishment that I can do it without looking at it or apparently thinking about it—it’s that automatic. But yes, three or four decades of the same movement will do that for you. This new artform was born out of pandemic and divorce and terror of being fired on a daily basis. And the reality that it is beautiful not in spite of those things, but because of them, is not an accident. Art has always been a way for me to express deep trauma and deep truths. The pandemic is over and the divorce is finalized, but my art continues

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