Ode to an Orange

 

“Oh, those oranges arriving in the midst of the North Dakota winters of the forties—the mere color of them, carried through the door in a net bag or a crate from out of the white winter landscape” (excerpt from “Ode to an Orange” by Larry Woiwode). There is just something about those netted produce bags that I like. Maybe it is the way they stretch in just the right places to cradle the citrus cargo they carry. Or maybe it is the way they seem to proudly display their bounty—all the little holes leaving the fruit exposed for an onlooker to admire. I don’t know, I just like them. And so I took this reading and this assignment as my chance to try making one. My attempts at crochet only go back a couple weeks or so now but it has already become something I really love. I’d scrolled past dozens of crochet market bag tutorials in the days leading up this assignment, so I picked one out on YouTube, collected my cheap white yarn on my lap (I’m still too novice to justify nicer yarn), clutched my crochet hook like a sword taking me into battle, and I starting chaining rows. I chained and chained and chained some more, all the while imagining walking through a North Dakota winter in the forties, homemade market bag in hand as I heaved some bright and beautiful oranges home.

Selecting the digital medium by which to share my orange-inspired creation proved more difficult. According to the Thevenin reading, there’s first the element of text that needs to be addressed. The reading seems to define text as the medium used to express the art. Film, drawing, poetry, song—these are all examples of texts as provided by the reading. The next thing to consider is process. In the reading, the first part of Ms. Cage and her students’ process was responding to a piece of art. My initial response to “Ode to an Orange” was first, of course, to notice its mention of a net bag. I also noticed how slice-of-life it was, like a series of snapshots from someone’s family album. That made me think of Instagram, which I haven’t used in over two years. I’ve never gotten very experimental with Instagram because I never use it. But I saw the medium as fitting for this assignment and paired something I do know—Canva—with the unknown—Instagram. Canva offers tons of formatting ideas to create unique and eye-catching Instagram posts. I’ve never used any of them for the reasons mentioned above, well, until now, that is. The second bit of process is the actual creation of a piece of art (when I “chained and chained and chained some more”). Then I took the most flattering pictures of my crochet market bag I could manage at 7ish in the morning and got to work with some editing and stretching and cropping and styling. An Instagram post displaying my creation was born. The third part of process is actually the part I’m doing right now: critical self-reflection.