The saying “sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me” has always struck me as hopeful but distinctly improbable these days, and I wanted to investigate the intimate relationship people have with descriptive words that are thrown their way.  For the past year, I have been thinking about creating an interactive installation that invites participants to play with words, but didn’t quite know how to jump into such a different medium. 

Fortunately, Washington DC has a wonderful, occasional, festival called Artomatic, which occupies a building (usually soon to be demolished) and fills it with an unjuried frenzy of visual and performance art – the perfect place for someone like me to try out a new idea.  This year, Artomatic is in Crystal City, VA (1851 S. Bell Street, about a block from the Crystal City metro stop and only a short drive out of DC). It runs from May 18 through June 23.

I nabbed a corner spot in a big room on the 3rd floor and turned it into a short of short-hand school space, with a black board (classroom), a seesaw (playground), mirrors with shelves (bathroom), and dish-sorting bins (cafeteria).  I had compiled a list of about 700 words that people use to describe themselves and others (all adjectives and nouns; positive and negative; antiquated, common, and slang). Then I covered stones (about 1″ to 4″ in diameter – yes, about 700 of them…) with my high-shrinkage flax paper and then wrote one word on each of them and distributed them around the installation space.  Participants are invited to play with the words/stones in a variety of ways.

For more details, see the blog I have created for this installation (http://weighyourwords.wordpress.com/).  It includes the word list, invites people to suggest new words (I know I have left out some crucial words), asks for stories about how people use words with each other (bullying, terms of endearment, etc.), offers an opportunity to post poems using the words from the list or self-portraits of visitors with self-describing words on the shelves in front of the mirrors.

If you are reading this while the show is still up – please come down and see it for yourself!

She has a section on her blog called “No-Waffles” and I am pleased to say that she has listed my jewelry in that category.  Thanks Molly!  Glad you like my stuff.

Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

I really enjoyed making this piece.  It is a wall hanging with an element of movement and shadow.  Depending on how you light it, the material can look more or less translucent, focusing on the surface qualities or on the space around and behind the piece.

Joss paper detail

This piece is about many of the “green” issues plaguing us these days.  It is made from fused plastic shopping bags.  The tree trunks are Whole Foods bags (highlighting the irony of buying organic fruits and veggies and taking them home in plastic bags).  The colored plastic is a combination of heavyweight fancy boutique bags with layers of flimsier clear veggie bags to fuse the layers, with acrylic paint incorporated to add a metallic accent.  The fluttering leaf/squares are inspired by joss paper, squares of often gold-leafed paper that are burned for good luck (e.g., hoping for a prosperous New Year) and to venerate one’s ancestors.  By adding leaf outlines to the joss paper, I hoped to show the “free” leaves as being “money to burn.”

The frame is made from copper tubing left in my basement by the previous owners of my house, so I got to reuse almost everything in the sculpture.

I am not really a fan of hearts, just as I don’t wear  pink or pastels much.  But somehow, when I work with the flax over wire, I find myself making the occasional heart.  I have done a series of smaller heart pendants, simple forms with a bit of gold leaf.  And way back when I was starting to really get into this medium, I made a series of red hearts with Chinese calligraphy for Chinese New Year’s – this one says “peace.”

I like this seaweed-infused open heart because it is dark and complicated, but somehow cheerful.  The gold leaf in the interior lights it up and I like the way it balances on the coil through the middle.   I hope you like it too.

Hope you can make it!  Or, if you are visiting the site after the show is closed, see what we are up to now….  Or go to Gallery 555 and see what Jodi has installed at the time.  Always worth a look-see.

So, I am starting a series of pollen/virus paper vessels.  The first one has dried nicely, so now I will risk the time and effort to make some more complicated forms, based more closely on the mathematical structures (dodecahedrons and icosahedrons) of many viruses.  I love to build with triangles, and viruses do too.

Here’s an image of the first non-functional half-virus bowl almost dry and accommodating my love of dramatic lighting.

Enjoy.

Technique: The apron stands on its front edge and balances on the bottom curl of the bow.  As with most of my paper work, I was able to make the armature over time.  Wire can sit and wait for you to decide what to do next and you can change your mind, cut elements out, rebend bits, add new bits on.  However, when it comes time to cover the piece, I’ve got to do it all in one go.  The wet paper only sticks to other wet paper, and you only find out once it’s dried whether or not you overlapped sheets adequately.  The color changes as it dries and some of the tiny textural effects don’t turn up until the piece is entirely dry and waxed.  Basically, it’s a calculated crapshoot.

Fortunately, most things worked out just as I’d planned.  I handcarved linoleum blocks with “help” and “please” to print in silver and gold along the lower portion of the apron.  I had been looking for an excuse to handcarve my printing blocks, so I finally seized the opportunity.  I am very happy with the way the solid apron front interacts with the openwork waistband and curving big bow.

Meaning/Subtext: Meanwhile, while I knew I was making an apron, I hadn’t really settled on whose apron and why I was making it.  Sure, it’s fine to just make an object, but this particular object was whispering to me, and I couldn’t quite hear it.  As I built the armature and thought about the form, I realized that an apron is a disguise.  Apron-wearers are often anonymous.  When we see someone wearing an apron, that piece of clothing often tells us that the wearer will help you/serve you.  We are given permission, sometimes, to ignore all but their function.  So the words “help” and “please” have many meanings.  An apron-wearer helps and pleases us by serving/cleaning/cooking.  But the words also represent unspoken requests.  A person wearing an apron is unlikely to ask for your help.  Sometimes apron-wearers would love for someone to help them, for a change.  And “please” is the golden word – one the apron-wearer (whether a mother or a waitress or a maid) would love to hear.  The relationship between the two words is complex.  I was glad to muse on it over the month I was making the piece.

Two summers ago, at a blissful two-week stint at Haystack in Maine, I got to use some of the seaweed paper that the paper class was playing with.  Last summer I saved some seaweed from the Maine coast (another blissful two-week stint, this time vacation with my family).  I dried out the seaweed and left it in a container in the basement, thinking I’d get around to working with it eventually.  In February, I finally boiled up the seaweed and put it in the blender, then added some of my new flax pulp.

While I was boiling things up, I also cooked some daylily leaves that I have been squirreling away for the past three years.  It didn’t grind up quite as finely as the seaweed, but it is still a wonderful texture – a bit like particle board, but softer.

So, for the past week or so, I have been making seaweed and daylily paper and I am very happy with the result.

Here is an image of two vessels I made.  The one on the left is made with seaweed in flax pulp, the one on the right has daylily leaves in flax pulp.  I made these vessels for 100 Tea Bowls, part of the Art League/Torpedo Factory Ikebana show in early March.  I was glad for the opportunity to be a part of this show, even though my work is neither ceramic nor functional.

The tea bowl form is new for me, and I learned some important lessons about even shrinkage and how to make a vessel sit sturdily.  As a result, I am naming this new series Cup Half Full/Cup Half Empty.  The empty ones are the “seconds” which still look quite good, but (and?) wobble and tilt (my cup runneth over).  In the image above, Cup Half Full is the daylily bowl (right) and Cup Half Empty is the seaweed bowl (left).