Teaching

Aggregation of simple ideas into a complex whole motivates my teaching.

Today I had the unexpected gift of working with a group of adults who came to learn about the inquiry based method we use in the gallery to introduce art to students. This group came from diverse backgrounds and areas of interest -- retired judges, social workers, prospective docents, board members, and office volunteers -- to learn more about how we encourage people to look at art and talk about what they see. I get excited every time I have the opportunity to share this work, but today was special: the range of questions and observations that came up in our session made me realize that this is a positive force with potential impact in many different contexts. I'm eager to dive in to research on other methods that might inform and support critical thinking and inclusion.

photo courtesy of Anna Scott, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2017

Tools

Day off from the museum, visiting the museum. Good to see what we came for, but these works were what blew me away. Everyday Poetics occupies an easy-to-miss gallery on the second floor of the museum typically reserved for new work or what are sometimes referred to as underrepresented artists. This is not painting, representational work, the product of being taught, tidy or easy work. It is visceral, cobbled, scrounged and gritty, carefully considered, weighty and entirely authentic. "Through clever alterations and suggestive titles, the artists offer evocative commentaries on history, society, the environment, labor, and human nature," the show's press release confirms.

I love everything about this, from the evocative title of the show to the range of pieces featured, which, carefully collected over years, reveal as much about the people who have come to care for these works as they do about the makers. I feel like I should probably step back a bit from my gushing to better understand my own draw to these pieces, but for now it is enough just to share them out. Artists names and information about the work cited below the last image.

Moris (Israel Meza Moreno), Mexican, b. 1978, Semana 1 (Week 1), 2012, mixed media on wood, 42 x 59 in.

Tonico Lemos Auaí, Brazilian, b. 1968, Small Fires, 2012, scratched tin cans in 85 parts, dimensions variable

Marilá Dardot, Brazilian, b. 1972, Código desconhecido (Unknown Code) #5, 2015, book spines, MDF, mounted with velcro, approx. 9 x 84 in.

Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto), Brazilian, b. 1970, Untitled, from the series Linha da Borda (Border Line), metal, 33 7/8 x 26 x 7 1/16 in.

Action

Today's excitement came from activating a space with open minds, busy hands, and a bag full of collected items. I am reassured every time I see a person step in to the process of making, and at the same time so curious about where we fail to give ourselves permission to play. Who in your past told you something you created from your heart wasn't right or good enough? What position of authority did that person occupy that allowed them to access that primal, precious part of you? How can we find pathways to retrieve and nurture our own and others' spark? 

Soccer Field (purple cows vs. black flies), 2017

Tenderness

More than once during travel I’ve witnessed profound gestures of kindness and caring. I liken what happens passing through space and time to a soft version of going through a traumatic experience and coming out bonded with others: falling asleep with your head on the lap of a trusted someone, sharing an unlikely conversation with a stranger, bringing your vulnerable, lost self to ask someone for help. 

“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”

from Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Influence

Words have always held great weight for me, from early formation of letters to reading in backyard sheet forts and learning languages. Looking through nearly 30 years of sketchbooks confirms the influence of language on my work, or at least the ideas behind the passages and quotes and observations I recorded. I see that I've relied on words to confirm what I suspect visually.  

We've entered an unreliable time for language, where statements are made and opinions voiced, words are manipulated. I'm campaigning for a resurgence of kind comments, words of encouragement, and a language of solidarity. How can our dialogue become subversive in its ability to help create space for people to be who they are without fear, or for difficult truths to be spoken and held tenderly? 

Be the Light, 2017

Coat

This coat bears a striking resemblance to a handmade one that my grandmother recently gifted my daughter. This woman has an eye for classic lines: of clothing, furniture, food, a skill I feel fortunate to have as an influence. I appreciate that she takes the long view, looking for the solid investment that will serve for years to come.

And there are other facets to her story.  As a 17 year old high school graduate, she moved from near the Stillaguamish River to Seattle with an express desire to live in the city, to be independent and to work. She chose adventure, from flagship flights to Mexico on Western Airlines, travel to Spain, Iceland, Australia and many times over to Hawaii, no place for a wool coat.

Aspiring to be equal parts solid and fluid, honoring the complexity of this woman who baked bread every week for her family and worked full time.

Thuja window, Port Townsend, 2017

Taxonomy

I was brought here by my experience with Rosamond Wolff Purcell's previous book, Owl's Head, in which she lovingly illuminates and documents a hoarder's lair.  Her partnership with Stephen Jay Gould is interesting for similar and other reasons: conversation is at the core of her practice and these partnerings, yet here there is a conscious pairing, balancing and mirroring between  practitioners of two disciplines that have connected and repelled over centuries. You can see it here, as Purcell observes Gould using her photographs as "semaphores, signifying not just the physical reality of appearance of an object, but a wealth of underlying meanings -- natural, cultural, and visual."

This candid dualism expands to Gould's own reasoning. "The much maligned practice of taxonomy, the ordering and classification of organisms, takes a culturally imposed backseat to the more interventionist and generalizing style of experimentation and quantification in science. But taxonomy should be viewed as one of the most fundamental, and most noble, of scientific pursuits -- for what can be more basic than the parsing of nature's rich and confusing complexity? Our categories, moreover, record our modes of thought, and taxonomy therefore teaches us as much about our mental functioning as about nature's variety."

As someone who has primarily approached science through the access points of art and personal experience, I'm encouraged by this kind of work, hopeful about the role of each discipline as a buoy to the other.

Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet

from Taxonomic Notes, by R. Wright Barker, 1960

Seeds

The mythology surrounding the creative process is tangled and dense. Even in a time when it is common to publicly share self-generated narratives, the highly curated stories that we see till make it tempting to imagine that art emerges from strokes of inspiration or by way of special gifts or fully formed ideas. The truth is that there are times when this feels like it could be true, a sense of rightness and flow when the hand and mind and heart align. But much of the time, at least in my experience, what is happening is a parallel to what happens in life: we make attempts, we move forward, we stumble and fail, we reevaluate and collect ourselves for the next attempt. Putting physical evidence of fits and starts out for others to see is always an exercise in vulnerability and an invitation for self-critique. But this time I've resolved to stand back enough to see things more gently, to see the importance of words in all of this, and to let it compost for future work.

Trees

"We’re all — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship.

Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.

We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.

Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.

David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

Render

Thinking about drawing, and discovering old sketches as I looked for something else. After that, drawing again.

Blueberry, crowberry, blueberry, Iceland, 2012