prayer flags with Marie Catrett

It’s summer, and Marie Catrett (an amazing artist, early childhood educator and Nicole’s sister and life-long collaborator) came to visit, with a new show for the Peep Show Art Gallery, and a collaborative printmaking project to share, inspired by traditional Tibetan prayer flags.

Marie created the first version of her prayer flag project at Burning Flipside, a Texas regional art and music festival. Traditional Tibetan prayer flags depict a horse, and by hanging the flags in high places the lung ta will carry the blessings on the flags to all beings. Marie’s prayer flags depict grackles, cicadas, cats, butterflies, and other personally meaningful symbols, and she invited people to add their hopes and intentions to the flags. She brought her portable sewing machine to the festival, and over several days and nights she added the flags to a collaborative display that was mounted to a mobile shopping cart, and was lit up like a lantern at night.

Before trying Marie’s project out at Artschmart, we printed some flags from Marie’s linocut blocks in the workshop (also known as Nicole’s garage).

To try Marie’s project at Artschmart, we brought the printed flags to embellish, as well as supplies for people to carve their own blocks and print their own creatures. Marie is the founder, director and lead teacher at Tigerlilly preschool in Austin, TX, where she developed a really accessible printmaking technique that we brought to Artschmart. Instead of carving blocks, we used ballpoint pens to draw onto thin sheets of foam to create our stamps.

A really lovely and diverse group of people came to try out Marie’s project, and it was so fun to see them talking and working together. There were all sorts of strange and interesting creatures created, including trilobites, a pigeon, a squid, moths, moons, bugs, a snail and a pirate ghost to carry our good intentions out into the world. Come check them out next time you're in the neighborhood!