There are things you want to pass along and things you don't. What do we choose to keep, what retains value, what needs to be moved on, altered or soundly rejected?
It feels like we are thick in a time of reckoning, scrambling to assemble a scaffolding of cultural meaning as the ground under our constructed reality erodes. I move around the house of my life looking for things that cease to serve me, I hold on to the idea that magic will be revealed if we strip enough of the rest away.
I'm avoiding going home to a dark house with no power on this stormy night, but relishing in a memory from 4:30 this morning. I've had a good run of a few days of getting out to the studio very early, and I'm confirming some suspicions. Early is a good time of day for me, and cultivating a regular practice (regardless of how long I have to work on a given day) bears fruit of exponential value. It doesn't even matter if I'm moving toward a linear completion of a project as long as I'm making something, organizing, looking, drawing, prepping materials or anything else that exercises those muscles.
Cowl in progress, 2017
From Octavio Paz, Seeing and Using, Art and Craftsmanship, translated by Helen Lane
Studio, 2017
Thinking of the many times I've been surprised, learning that a friend, acquaintance or even a family member has a creative life that exists outside the realm of daily contact. Secret gardeners, poets, makers, musicians and more, they breathe in to their craft when or where others might not witness it regularly. What happens when we make the assumption that people come equipped with this capacity for making beauty in the world, when we don't predetermine the value someone brings by virtue of the job or role they appear to inhabit? What happens when we open ourselves to seeing, hearing, feeling, experiencing those treasures that are part-obscured?
Treasure, installation at Lo-Fi, Smoke Farm, Arlington, WA, 2011, photo by Timothy Firth
Spent the day sitting and listening and looking and then talking together, which I love. Of the things that stuck in my mind was a wondering about the difference between sharing information and telling it. How do either of these methods reveal power structures, how can they be used to help subvert/reclaim power? As an educator I've witnessed a radical shift over the past ten years from didactic, top-down telling to crowd-sourced, open forum sharing. But I also see the ways we bump up against the perceived need to feel right in our way of thinking or doing, and this gets in the way of true openness. Vulnerability and discomfort are such hard emotions to inhabit.
For some reason, these amber and bronze earrings from early 5th century BC, snapped by me in a crude photo excerpt from a jewelry history book, offers one way to begin. Take things you treasure and put them out in the public realm in the simplest way possible. Let them prompt conversation. Be open to taking them off and trying on others.
Excerpted from 25,000 Years of Jewelry
Let's find something that can last
Like cigarette ash, the world is collapsing around me
Let's try to do the best we can
I think I need more than the flowers and letters, man
from Sharon Van Etten, Ask
Obituaries, Mission District, San Francisco, 2016
‘Kind people reveal plenty about their own failings. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that sometimes being a bad parent, a poor lover or a confused worker is not a malignant act of wickedness, but an ordinary feature of being alive that others have edited out of their public profiles.’
from Just Do It, Hans Ulrich Obrist
How to illustrate transformation?
as narrative unfolding in space
seeds to sprouts to leafing plant
(standing in or standing for truth)
notes to self and drawings from sketchbooks, 2017
