Place

“We cannot conceive of a world without “nature” even as we deny its power and try to curtail its effects with our rising and falling cultures. The notion that natural order is expressed by instability and flux rather than by respectably predictable systems has been challenged on the grounds that it might unleash more immoral human behavior, not to mention the psychologically discomfiting notion that nothing is certain. Others argue that acknowledgment of constant transformation will increase human respect for nature’s complexity, that unpredictable change is not necessarily arbitrary. All of us wonder which concept might prove most beneficent in the world’s environmental crises, since all of us resist some aspects of our cultures and consent to others. The moral aspect of this discussion is made clear by Wendell Berry, one the most consistently inspiring writers on the specificity of American place, who nails us as accomplices in everything that happens around us, perceiving “the ecological crisis is a crisis of character – that is, of culture…. Our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.”

Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society

Thea’s Park, Tacoma, WA, 2016

Form

 “What I am saying does not mean that there will be henceforth no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.“

Samuel Beckett

Big project, 2017

Cells

Considering the subjective evidence along with the science indicating the positive impact of music on a cellular level. 

Floor at KEXP , 2017

Need

I feel like I’ve written here before about how art is a catalyst, but I’m not feeling compulsive enough to track back to earlier posts to confirm or deny. It’s evident to me that a big reason I am in the world has to do with art: art-making, art-talking, other artists, art-loving. But sometimes it strikes me how art is both the seed bomb and the guerrilla garden, both the question and the answer, the reason we get up in the morning and why we come home. I’ve felt word-challenged and so dead tired for the past month-plus, and still art shows up for me, as my companion and mute expression as well as a guide. 

Detail of Star Map, 2017

Wind

Lots of weather here today, power outages across the region. I’m thankful for the wood stove and light by oil lamp and candles. These kinds of nights were a major part of my growing up years, and even without loss of electricity we were sisters who made fires in the wood stove after school, loaded wood on the weekends, and chopped our own wood. This is a relationship borne of necessity.

fire with good wood, 2017

Behind

I’m behind.  

DEI Creative, Don’t Want None, 2017

Special

There’s a deep human need to be seen and cared about, to be singled out and brought to life with some form of love. 

I’m grappling with another piece of this equation, the part that asks us to reach inward and stand in our own self-love first/always/simultaneously. These networks sure seem to need to be tied together to make sure they are working. 

Metaphor, 2017

Gather

Running stitches, done by hand, look simple. This is deceiving. 

Afield

I drove to Port Angeles for a school visit yesterday and was reminded that it’s much more than geography that separates people. Talking with my son later, the topic of lecture he had heard attributed many aspects of millennial ennui to disconnections from going through a range of emotions and experiences in real life. We need to have the chance to engage, to feel sadness or isolation and to bump up against others who might also be there, to be broken hearted and find inner strength to recover, to be open to joy. 

artist unknown, Claremont Graduate Institute, 2017

Lump

This word sickens me with the dread of something lurking beneath the surface. It is heavy with emotion to an exponential degree greater than gravitational pull. It is unshakable, a reckoning. 

So I’m going to try and take back that word, make a place or use for it in a small way that turns it, even a few degrees, in another direction.  

Creative Advantage Summer Educator Institute, 2017