Walking on Broken Glass

Part One: An Introduction

There is a quote from Somerset Maugham that I read in Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art: “Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. ‘I write only when inspiration strikes,’ he replied. ‘Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.'” (Pressfield, 2002)

There is a beautiful myth around art making that you go into your studio and spend unstructured time in some magical space of divine creation. It’s a nice story, but it doesn’t work for most people. Even God had a deadline.

The last couple of years have been difficult art production years for me. It has been a monumentally rough go. My husband had a scary brush with cancer. Then my father died. Then my country lost its mind. Then my friend took his own life just steps from my front door. Then I shattered my ankle in a life-changing accident.

On one side, there are people who say that it is okay for my production to be a little bit low through all of that. On the other I seem to find people who are surprised that my production was low given all of these feelings that I have to take into the studio. I think both of those groups are wrong. Production is work, and we have to ensure that our muse shows up from 9 to 5. And, trauma does not lead to quality work. Working can lead to healing trauma, but that sort of work tends to lead one farther down a personal path, not an artistic one.

For the next few weeks I’m going to sort out some of these thoughts about production and pain in my studio notes. I am currently sitting on my couch with ice on my splinted ankle, recovering from surgery. It has been ten days since surgery, and I have been productive for seven of those. It helps me to not sink into pity. It has required a lot of naps. I think of it like walking on broken glass. It isn’t hard if you know what you are doing, choose the right materials, prepare, and go carefully.

While I was preparing for my convalescing time, my therapist asked me “Is being an artist directly tied to your output as an artist?” I immediately answered yes, but when I examined my feelings about artists in my community and about artists who have walked away from art, I changed my answer to no.

Especially in an academic setting, the quantity of work is very important because you have to have a lot of your own work to reflect on in order to progress down the path. This is also true in the studio, to a point. In order to move forward, you have to be making work that feeds more work. However, there are productive ways to sit with the work that you already have. You can take time to read and to look at the work of other people — and, what a privilege it is to be temporarily disengaged from your work enough to see it through a lens other than the lens of your art practice! You can flip through old sketchbooks and find forgotten ideas. You can restructure your practice to better serve the you that is waiting on the other side of your healing.

Which is to say, if you are hurting right now, and the art is not coming, you are still an artist. Your art does not stem solely from your production. It stems from all the adjustments that have gone on in your brain and your being that happened during all the production you have already done. Stay in communication with yourself as an artist. Your artist self may not serve you well while you are healing from grief and pain, but you should still stay in touch with them. Much like I have to do work to keep my unused muscles fed with blood, keep a flow moving through your practice, simply by reminding yourself that it is still there.

If we tie our self as artist to our production, then the moments when production is stymied will stall our artistic progress. Instead, take the time to know the non-producing artist in you to keep that flow going.

Be gentle with yourselves. Be diligent with your practice. Let’s talk more next week.

Because My Heart is Already Broken

A hand over sand holding a ceramic egg streaked with black and gray and redA pit fired egg that was burnished and bisqued and fired in non-hostile territory.

Art Project – Burning Man 2017
Because My Heart Is Already Broken

In pre-historic hearths, archeologists have found small ceramic figures and many broken pieces of ceramic. These are not early kilns where these people fired ceramics to carry grain and clean water — just hearths for keeping warm.

Clay, even when it is dry, holds molecular water. As it is fired in a kiln, it goes through a chemical process that allows it to release that water, changing it from a mixture of alumina, silica, and water to a matrix of alumina and silica. Getting this molecular water out is not without risk. Often it releases too violently, and the clay form cracks or explodes under the pressure. This is why clay is fired in careful slow conditions rather than just blasted with heat.

The theory is that these prehistoric people sat around their heaths and made figures with their hands that were wishes or prayers. They tossed them into the fire and waited. Sometimes they heard the pop of the clay breaking apart and sometimes they discovered a fired ceramic figure in the ashes the next day. I suppose that the broken clay could have sent the wish to the gods, or that the surviving figure could have been an omen for a wish to be granted. Either way, it was thought and labor put into a crafted object that was then sent into fire to be transformed in some way.

This year, life has hurt me in new and interesting ways. I am returning to Black Rock City as a different person than the one who was last there. I am thinking of the way that Burning Man used to transform me by breaking me a little – like clay to ceramic to clay to ceramic to clay.

In the middle of this crazy transformative desert is the craziest of fires, my home hearth, the Car-B-Que. Over the years, it has been host to… all kinds of inadvisable things. I honestly cannot think of a less hospitable place to put clay.

But, my heart is already broken. And despite that, I get up and make wishes every day. I keep building hopes and dreams, even though I expect that they will just blow away in short order. Because my heart is already broken, I can dream without fear.

This year, I will carry a box of clay with me to Burning Man, and I will make some small figures to dry in the playa sunlight. You’re welcome to make some too, if you’re brave enough to let them go. We’ll write messages on them, wrap them in rags soaked in salt and with copper wires, and then nestle them into the most hostile fire I know of. Most likely, we will just pull back shards of wishes that got sent to the gods by a green log. Maybe we’ll pull back an omen, though — a wish for the future, and a reminder that not all dreams blow away.

Falling to Heaven, 2015

“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” – Milan Kundara, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

fallingtoheaveninstall01

Falling to Heaven, from above

Bird handbuilt from ceramic, surfaced with flocking and graphite, hung with leather cord.
Bird handbuilt from ceramic, surfaced with flocking and graphite, hung with leather cord.

Falling to Heaven Close-up

Cooley Residency: Building New Space

I’m finally getting settled in at my post-CCA studio.  At the end of the spring, at the advice of Nathan Lynch, I met with Lisa Cooley to talk about my being the first artist in residence on her property on the southern rural edge of Petaluma.  We discovered over lunch that we had some pretty compatible ideas about art and life.  Then I drove to her property to visit the studio.

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This is the barn that sits outside of one of the windows of the studio.

Tucked back into the hills near Olompali State Park, her home is a wonderland of nature.  When I first came to the studio, I startled the two spotted fawns that were sleeping next to the back door.  On my walks, I have seen eagles, hawks, coyote, deer, and the elusive tail of a fox, not to mention field mice and rats and song birds and a hundred thousand lizards.

cows in a field
Cows that move into the field for grazing in the late spring

Having such a quiet rural place to visit just a quick drive from my urban home has led me to think more about the context of the animal — human and otherwise.  To see a rat in the city means to call and inspector and exterminator.  To see one in the country is to put out a trap, maybe, and let it go.  I carefully shoo any and all moths and flies from my house, while I feel totally comfortable working around the frogs on the internet router in my studio.

If you know how much I love duality, you will see that this is probably going somewhere.  More on that in the coming months, I am sure.

studio view
My shelves and images are up in the studio!

Meanwhile, I have covered the tables with new canvas and tested the kiln to make sure it goes to ^6.  I’ve got a sketch book full of ideas, and feet that are longing to carry me over the trails and through the trees and into conversations with turkey vultures and wandering cows.

I am deeply grateful to Nathan for making this connection for me and to Lissa for offering up this studio to me.  It’s going to be an amazing summer.  Stay tuned on my instagram for photos as the work progresses!

 

 

My Genuine Rhinestone

Flyer for The Genuine Rhinestone
Flyer for The Genuine Rhinestone

In Air Guitar, Dave Hickey wrote an essay about truth and beauty and Liberace in which he asks the reader to decide if they prefer “the genuine rhinestone or the imitation pearl.” He writes, “Most prominently, Liberace was, without doubt and in his every facet, a genuine rhinestone, a heart without malice, whose only flaw was a penchant for imitation pearls—a certifiable neon icon, a light unto his people, with an inexplicable proclivity for phony sunsets. Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is residue of someone else’s privilege – and Liberace cultivated them both in equal parts and often to disastrous effects.”

A Genuine Rhinestone, 2015
A Genuine Rhinestone, 2015

My life in the San Francisco Bay Area has been blessed with showers of genuine rhinestones – the subcultures and undergrounds where the rules of abundance and affluence are rewritten. Lush fake furs worn with pride and rhinestones carefully glued on for glitz as if to show the wealth of our own created fantasy world. I have found more joy with genuine rhinestones than diamonds could ever provide.

The work I make is a tribute to those stories, of the traps and pitfalls, of the peace and beauty, and, of course, of the cost. So many of these stories go untold because their nuances get lost in trying to pin them down with words. As Jon Berger wrote in his book Why Look at Animals?, our language is born from the symbolic animal. In studying this idea and Derrida’s ideas about the abyss created between man and animal by language, I have found that many of these non-verbal truths lie still trapped in that abyss.

My Life is an Embarrassment of Riches, 2015
My Life is an Embarrassment of Riches, 2015

The animal forms I use are chosen carefully. The fables the sculptures tell come first from the study of the behavior and history of the animal itself. The giraffe becomes a story about how we have to adapt to our adaptations. The giraffe has a complex circulatory system dedicated just to its bending its head down to drink water. In the same way, those of us who adapt to these underworlds have to readapt our adaptations to fit into daily life. By starting with the animal, I use the animal as a indexical symbol, pointing directly back to the validity of the animal, rather than as a cipher that strips the animal of its meaning. Moving back and forth between the animal and the human, my sculptural animals tell the viewer the nuanced stories that might otherwise hide behind the weight of language.

Humans are drawn to gaze at the symbolic animal. Using this attraction with glitz and glitter, I try to include a wide range of viewers. However, while keeping my art accessible, I remain committed to a critically engaged conversation. In this way, my art creates a gateway for the casual viewer into the often-exclusionary conversations being had in the art world.

View into the show
View into the show

Moving forward from the work shown here, I am currently creating a body of work at a residency in Northern Marin. While I am still basking in the ideas of the spectacle, I’m also looking at the lines we draw between domestic and wild, useful and pest. The same animal in a different context has a completely different meaning – tells a completely different story. While exploring the visual of that, I’m reading and thinking about the way that we humans become defined in our lives – both as how we define ourselves and how we define others. Is this choice between the genuine rhinestone and the imitation pearl just a casual illusion or a necessary evil truth?

Thank you! Recap of The Show

Thank you so much to the amazing rhinestones that came out to make my show at the College Avenue Galleries a success.  I loved seeing everyone dressed up.  We will start an empire of people who dress fancy for gallery openings.

Below are some pictures that I shamelessly stole from Facebook in order to share with the world here.

Motifs decorating the Cave Flower space
Motifs decorating the Cave Flower space

Reception table
Reception table

Gallery view
Gallery view

Sharing is caring!
Sharing is caring!

My process and thank you to Penland.
My process and thank you to Penland.

Gallery View
Gallery View

The cave flower projet.
The cave flower projet.

detail of My Life is and Embarrassment of Riches.
detail of My Life is and Embarrassment of Riches.

View into the show
View into the show

A Genuine Rhinestone opens February 24th!

The Genuine Rhinestone This show is both the culminating show of my work at California College of the Arts and a love letter to so many of the people who helped me get here.

In Air Guitar, Dave Hickey wrote an essay about truth and beauty and Liberace in which he asks the reader to decide if they prefer “the genuine rhinestone or the imitation pearl.” He writes, “Most prominently, Liberace was, without doubt and in his every facet, a genuine rhinestone, a heart without malice, whose only flaw was a penchant for imitation pearls—a certifiable neon icon, a light unto his people, with an inexplicable proclivity for phony sunsets. Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is theflyer back residue of someone else’s privilege – and Liberace cultivated them both in equal parts and often to disastrous effects.”

I am blessed with showers of genuine rhinestones – the subcultures and undergrounds where the rules of abundance and affluence are rewritten. Lush fake furs worn with pride and rhinestones carefully glued on for glitz as if to show the wealth of our own created fantasy world. I have found more joy with genuine rhinestones than diamonds could ever provide.

The work in this show is a tribute to those stories, of the traps and pitfalls, of the peace and beauty, and, of course, of the cost.

The show will be up from Monday, February 23rd through Friday, February 27th at the College Avenue Galleries, 5241 College Avenue, Oakland, California.

Please join me for an opening celebration on February 25th from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.  Please come as your fabulous self and celebrate the time I have spent at CCA(C), the emergence of this new body of work, and the Genuine Rhinestones in your own life.  For up to date information, or to RSVP, please see the facebook event listing.

Family Honor: Lucretia

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This drawing was begun in The Legion of Honor in San Francisco and was based on Lucretia by Voos Van Cleve.  The background was done with photocopy xylol transfers.  The words were harvested from answers to a question I posed on the internet: “What are the family phrases that weigh you down?”

Lucretia killed herself after being raped in order to spur the men in her family into the actions that ended the Kingdom of Rome and brought forth The Republic.  In my mind, her image is also tied into the life of Lucrezia Borgia, who was named for her.  As the two stories of powerful Italian women and their family interactions came together in my mind, the original painting became about the weight of familial obligation and entanglement in the life of women.

From those thoughts came my question, “What are the family phrases that weigh you down?”  And if those phrases are still echoing around in our heads, are they just the knives we push into our own hearts.

 

Salem Identity Mask Project

I worked with the residents at Salem Lutheran Home, an Eden Alternative Care property in Oakland, on a project about identity and community. For the first stage of the project I made mask forms out of clay in conversation with the residents, and then I made plaster molds from those forms. I cast a several of each style of mask.

In the second stage, we did workshops in which residents chose a mask and then used underglaze and transfer decals to illustrate their exterior and interior identities on the mask forms.

In the final creation stage, we had a conversation in which each resident chose some themes that defined their lives: leadership, spirit, family, adventure, etc.

I installed the masks in a tree on the property. All the adventure masks were joined by an adventure ribbon, the spirit by a spirit ribbon, etc. Finally, all the masks were joined by one long ribbon for the community at Salem.

The piece was unveiled at an afternoon community celebration of art and jazz open to both Salem residents and their surrounding community.

Installed Masks at Salem Lutheran Home, Oakland
Installed Masks at Salem Lutheran Home, Oakland

Installed Masks at Salem Lutheran Home, Oakland
Installed Masks at Salem Lutheran Home, Oakland

Setting up for the Art and Jazz celebration at Salem Lutheran Home
Setting up for the Art and Jazz celebration at Salem Lutheran Home

Djinnaya at the Salem Mask Installation

 

The experience was intense and rewarding. As the guide for the project, I became intensely aware of the fragility of our identities and stories.  Just like these masks, they have to be held gently; but also just like these masks, they have to risk a little damage in order to be seen in all their glory.

I am very grateful to the Center for Art and Public Life for the Kinetic Grant that funded the project.  I also owe endless thanks to Erin Partridge for her expert guidance and support.  I could not have done it without her assistance and encouragement.  Finally, I cannot send enough thanks to the residents of Salem Lutheran Home who trusted me with their stories and their images.  You enriched my life and my work every day we got to work together.

Pit Firing – Ocean Beach

Pit Fire Forms
Title: Pit Fired Forms (Set of Three)
Sizes: 5″ x 3″, 5 “x 4″, 5″ x 3.5”

 

5735988824_0ea4241741_bThese forms were fired in an open pit fire on Ocean Beach with Tom Decker and the Fort Mason Ceramics Guild.

 

 

The fire pits were created by metal artists in San Francisco to preserve the tradition of fires on Ocean Beach.  Because this firing was done in a raised pit instead of a sunken pit, the firing goes much faster and has greater thermal shock.

 

The pieces are set on a cushion of saw dust and copper and iron for coloring.  Then everything is covered with wood and set aflame.  As the fire burns down, the pit fired pieces emerge from the fire.5735448221_afc2757a62_b

5735453225_bd06a11f39_bIt is an exciting and communal way to finish thrown ware.