family group abroad

Family Group

The idea for this piece came out of a talk I had with my NRSI Margo. I've been doing some genealogical research , I'm not sure where it's going quite yet, but Margo was asking me what I've learned from it. It's difficult to articulate. I see a lot of patterns, movements of great groups of people rather than each person individually. It seems arbitrary to me who gets written down and remembered and who is lost in time. Sometimes it's easy to find the information I'm looking for and other times I feel like I'm trying to cobble a past out of scraps. So, I've taken some recipie cards written by my great-grandmother and made digital prints. Then, I cut the prints into strips and wove them into a small square, using thread from the shoe mill where she used to work as a warp. Then, I sowed the fabric together carefully with my own, white cotton thread. This reinforced the small square, but also poked holes in the writing and made it even harder to read. I then sewed this patch on a blanket I own in an attempt to make the past relevant to my life. (I took pictures that show the blanket more clearly but I don't think they came out as well.)

Some more words and images

Dock

(Sorry for the delay on this post. I'm waiting for a toggle for the camera I took the images with.)

Polyhedron

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I was messing around with cardboard and repetitive forms.

Pictures and Words

In this exercise, I took photos from National Geographic in the 80s and tried to come up with sentences to go with them. The hope is that the sentence doesn't merely caption the photo but that it brings something new. Ideally, neither the photo nor the sentence can be fully understood alone. (The sentence on the final image is a little hard to read. It says "He smoked for three years after her death.")

Ashes, nest and collage

So, today I took some pictures of the ashes (now that the tiny building has had a chance to dry out). While I was doing that, I found a hornet's nest that inspired me to make my own out of cardboard. Then, I made a little collage out of the scraps from the projects. *phew*

On Fire

The next step in the process was to set the little field on fire. I was doing this to mimic the practice of burning the blueberry fields which happens seasonally around here. The building caught fire too, even though that wasn't the plan (but hey, paper burns) and I think it made for some pretty good photos. I'm thinking about how to put all these photos together. More on that tomorrow I suppose.

Building

So, yesterday and today I built this building, field, trailer park and cemetery. I used my writing and other, obviously typed writing. I wanted them to feel like they were fighting to cover the space.

Sock Monkey

Here are some things I made yesterday, a sock monkey that I photographed in a tree and the words "in a" now, I'm trying to make them into a slide show that should appear to the left of the blog.

Monkey

Here's the word Monkey, for the story I wrote earlier.

Collage

This is actually my project from yesterday (Tuesday), but I'm just getting around to posting it today. I was taking some notes on cardboard, then I cut them up to make things out of the cardboard, and I glued the scraps together.

Sock

Here's the word "sock" for the story I wrote earlier.

Artist Trading Cards

So, for yesterday and today I've been working on this project. It's an edition of 20 artist trading cards for an artist trading card swap at Freeport Square gallery. My cards are all little collages with random sentences based on the Noam Chomsky sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." that I worked with before. Then, today I brought the cards to the event and traded them with other artists for cards they had made. These pictures are a close-up of my cards and an image of them laid out on a table at the swap. The other cards visible on the table are by artists Sebastian Meade, Susan Philbrick and Megan Philbrick.

Story

So, after I made the word "tree," I started thinking about making some kind of a story where the words could all be treated in the same, or similar way. Specifically, I thought about Nina Laden and the way she treats the text in The Night I Followed the Dog
Then, I tried to come up with a fairly short, concrete story involving a tree. (It just ended up rhyming, that wasn't my intention.) Anyway, it's pretty silly but I may use it as an experiment with the letter forms.

Sock monkey
In a tree
Paul Bunion
By the Sea
Sees the Tree
And rapidly
Runs to the tree
Sock Monkey
Tries to Flee
Paul Bunion
Sees Sock Monkey
And starts to think
About the tree
It's more than just some sticks and Leaves
It is a home for sock monkeys
So Paul Bunion drops his axe
Sock Monkey can now relax
They become the best of friends
And that is where our story ends

Trees

This may look like one post, but it's really three days in one post. I made a T for tree, and then branched (hahaha... ugh) out into the entire word "tree". I liked the way the word turned out, and I'm thinking about moving into more experiments with the cardboard words and letters.

Post for This Past Weekend

My apologies for the lack of post over the weekend. I was out of town taking an intensive glass class. It was great! Hopefully I can find some ways to apply what I've learned to my studio work. Anyway, here's a photo of some pendants I made during the workshop in the kiln waiting to be fired. (The photo's a bit grainy. It was pretty dark in there.) Photos of the fired pieces to come!

Tree

The Font

Finally!!! Today's post is the font I've been working on. (know the process has been a bit slow on this project, and I apologize, but what can I say? That's one of the hazards of doing something daily like this. Some days there's plenty of time and others you just have to do whatever you can.)

The Stamps!

Today, I have some of those macro shots I love so dearly of the stamps I used to make the font.