Nourish

Roasting hazelnuts in preparation for a large batch of granola is such a sensory pleasure. Between the smell, the warmth of the oven, the satisfaction of rubbing the papery skins off the golden meat and the flavor that entwines memories of France, Oregon and Italy, I'm lost to these nuts.

Here's my recipe, adapted from Nekisia Davis':

3+ c. gluten free quick-cook oats

1 c. each sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, sesame seeds (pre-toasted), hazelnuts, almonds (both nuts coarsely chopped), coconut (I prefer the big pieces)

OR approximately 10 cups dry ingredients of your choosing

1/2 c. each olive oil and brown sugar

3/4 c. maple syrup

salt (sea or kosher)

Mix all ingredients except for salt in a large bowl until well incorporated. Spread between two half-sheet cookie sheets with rims (I line mine with parchment paper first). Bake at 325 degrees, stirring occasionally, for about 45 minutes or until golden brown and fragrant. Remove from oven and salt to taste. Let cool before putting in jars. Keeps about a week unrefrigerated, longer in the freezer.

Inquiry

So many pieces of my creative pursuits are embedded in a push-pull to translate something I've witnessed in the natural world and the suspicion that it will always fall far from the truth embedded in my firsthand experience. Today my eye is drawn toward this kind of image: wild couplings, wrinkled sheets, dissimilar and related bodies both at rest and betraying themselves with evidence of some prior mad entanglement.

Beach walk, 2017

Storytelling

I just rediscovered Joan Jonas’ work via this photo of her piece, Reanimation, on view at MoMA. It is surprising and reaffirming to be reminded of people whose minds and hands tell stories that make sense to us, that might create footholds or openings for us to slip inside.

Joan Jonas, Reanimation, 2010/2012/2013

Unlocking

"if your work lives in a locked room with a tiny door, with only a few keys out in circulation to open it, few people will know. Few people will care. It doesn't matter how powerful the experience is inside the room if most people cannot or choose not to enter."

Nina Simon, The Art of Relevance

detail of work in progress: Having Time to Revel in this Time, 2017

Responsibility

"Significant objects have their place in the art world. It remains to be seen if they still have a place in land art. There is a point where artists too must take some responsibility for the things and places they love, a point at which the colonization of magnificent scenery gives way to a more painfully focused vision of a fragile landscape and its bewildered inhabitants. The land is not separate from the often harsh realities of lives lived upon and around it. A land art in the New West could acknowledge the rough edges as well as the romance. It could be integrated into a cultural landscape, which is  forever changing production featuring vegetation, wildlife, water, and human agency. A vernacular land art might include commemoration that looks to the smaller scale, land-based notions of nature, remembering small farms and common lands, the disappearing histories of places and ecosystems."

Lucy Lippard, Undermining

Richard Turner, Memory's Vault , 1988

Circles

Dumb chunk of muscle with its claws out
Throwing its oars out the dinghy in the middle of a gale
Making whirlpools the way I chase my tail

I go round in circles
Not graceful, not like dancers
Not neatly, not like compass and pencil
More like a dog on a lead, going mental

-lyrics by Kate Tempest, from Circles

Fort Worden, Port Townsend, WA, 2017

Hampered

What one might have built with one arm and some lazy time a few months back. This inverse of getting stuck -- working within a set of imposed limitations -- brought some much-needed play, humor and freedom from attachment to outcome. Looking for ways to bring bits of that back on a regular basis by simplifying my choices and keeping my eyes open.

Light

As a person who looks down -- for agates on the beach, scat on a trail, and coins in the parking lot -- this kind of offhand gesture is meaningful and deep.

City of Literature, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2012

Drama

Some good action and a happy resolution, third grade style, from the hall at Chimacum Elementary School today.  

Collection

When I was in high school, clipping files were still used as visual resources for art classes. I remember the ones that we had in our art room file cabinet, manila folders with labels like “people”, “trees” or “food”, stuffed full of ephemera and pages from National Geographic magazines. I carted my own collection of images around with me from Minnesota to Rhode Island and back to the West Coast, resolving a couple of years ago to cut them up and use them.

This photo, taken around 1925 of an unidentified woman by an unidentified photographer in front of the Glacier Park Hotel, is an image similar to many I saved. The regard of this apparently calm, happy, independent person is something I’m drawn to.