Produced by: The Only Animal Theatre
Lead artist: Barbara Adler
Textile artist collaborators (Slow Calendar): Megan Lane, Sena Cleave, Kinar (Kira) Saragih
Slow Practice is an installation created by The Only Animal Theatre comprised of a variety of handmade textile works, eventually becoming the immersive, tactile set of ‘Mermaid Spring,’ a music theatre concert by The Public Swoon set to premiere in 2026.
“Slow Practice is an everyday rebellion against the Capitalocene, centering connection over consumption, and close attention over endless, glancing novelty. This is the core of Slow Practice: the sense of something you repeat until you become better, while becoming more deeply enmeshed in the weave of people and place.” (The Only Animal Theatre)
One component of Slow Practice is a project called “Slow Calendar” in which Barbara Adler, and collaborating artists Sena Cleave, Kinar (Kira) Saragih, and myself (Megan Lane) hand crocheted and knitted a lush tapestry of (currently) 250+ squares made from salvaged yarns and material scraps. Eventually, this hyperbolic textile tapestry will include around 365 squares, each unique square representing each day of a year.
Photo by Steven Yang
Photo by Megan Lane
Photo by Sena Cleave
Photo by Barbara Adler
Photo by James Meger
Not only did we take on this slow and intentional practice of finding, sorting, and choosing salvaged yarns, planning (or improvising) stitches for each of our squares, we also wrote a 1-3 sentence journal entry to accompany each square as their own calendar entry/reflection. For me, that looked like anything from what I ate for lunch that day to working through deep and sudden grief.
Photos by Megan Lane
By the end, I had contributed 89 crocheted squares, and consequently, I had recorded 89 snap shots of my life through these journal entries. As someone with a propensity for valuing some feelings as more worthy of experiencing (or even relishing in) than others, this was a beautifully subversive exercise to my normal way of dealing with my expansive range of feelings and experiences– boredom, depression, sudden joy, grief, the mundane, laughter, catharsis.
I am proud of myself for how I learned to value walking through all feelings and experiences slowly — not trying to sprint through some, and refusing to let go of others, but letting myself move through them all slowly and intentionally. I am by no means able to take on this perspective everyday yet, but I am proud that there are at least 89 instances where I could.
Through this project, two original responsive works came out of it. The first is a multicoloured weaving pinned onto the sleeve of a denim jacket. Hoping to embody the idea of “wearing my heart on my sleeve,” each of the 89 coloured rows in the weaving is representative one journal entry, and the colour corresponds to the overall feeling of each journal entry (i.e. orange = happy, joyful, energetic, proud; blue = cathartic, nostalgic, vulnerable). This work attempts to represent my experience of living everyday life in a visual manner.
Photos by Steven Yang
The second responsive work is an original song I wrote and recorded called “Emeline,” which expresses my desire to continue improving in the practice of walking slowly through life.
You can listen to my song “Emeline” HERE!
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