Sliding glass door scroll

looking at my work with Ani from a new perspective

Baking bread and raking leaves

Being present

Looking forward

Today the leaves were falling

Remembering the past 

and finally learning from it.

I baked bread and swept the studio floor.

The baby finally slept during nap time.

I found these images from an archive, and see them differently than I did before.

I understand them. I wish I still had the actual pieces, but they only exist in their documentation.

There is something here about finding a way to heal, how to deal with suturing life experiences and continuing on. 

holding but not grasping

image of a coin in the palm of your hand- leaving the hand outstretched you must clench it from falling out-

but holding your hand outstretched facing the sky, you can both hold the dear object and at the same time

let it go

(need to do a series on the sky

with precious objects in hand

practicing non-attachment)

fragile fairy-tale

the everlasting eggs

Mother of Seven, Absent

Broken, Mother (front and rear)

Great, Grandfather (no relation)

Cracked Vanity, Grandmother

Work Description: I have been drawing on eggs since childhood, a rich, feminine tradition especially around Easter in my native Czech Republic. As a child I was greatly aware of the egg shell’s frailty as my clumsy hands worked the surface, breaking dozens in the process. In my art making, the egg is a metaphor for the fragility of human life as I represent the portraits of my ancestors. 

Our Notebook (in review)

The text on the tape reads:

"Good morning! This is God

I will be handling All of you Problems today!

I will not need Your help,

so have a miraculous day."

Ani added the wings.

I continue to be baffled by the double meaning of our correspondence and how everything has this double meaning that I did not see then and is so clear now. The notebook is full of discussions centered around death and life. 

The text is about birth and death. It reads:

"I remember a wise friend saying, 

'when you can't take it anymore,

there is nothing to take!'

Ani's image of a tied up tree.

under the tree it reads:

"The greatest pain in my life, when I finally decided to go there, swept me, my ego, aside and rushed through me, delivering my daughter into this world, and passed, Like all things, it subsided, a little death. I would like another just to feel that strength again.

It is a dark, (scary) place where you are most vulnerable, most true and most alive."

Below is my artist statement for the Millay Colony:

At the Millay Colony, I intend to create an installation using objects, text and images from mine and a fellow artist’s, decade long collaboration. I want to reconnect with Anitra Haendel who was a very close friend, collaborator and fellow artist, and who unfortunately took her life, this year on July 23^rd . I want to redefine death, seeing it not as an end, but a point in a continuum. The reason I specifically chose the Millay Colony was because Ani and I planned on attending together, having read and been inspired by, “Savage Beauty,” less than three years ago. I hope to fulfill that promise and continue our over decade long collaboration.

I question time, its linearity, and work with materials that are malleable in order to express transfiguration. Be it postcards, clay, canvas, egg shells, paper, dust on contact paper, salvaged bars of soap, or my grandmother’s bandages that she wraps around her knees daily for her aches and pains cursing my grandfather for making her ride on his motorcycle in the cold Czech winters.  Each item carries a history that I rework and then rewrite.  I erase, sand, paint, reveal, melt of one substance into another, stick, melt again, and perhaps evaporate. In What Remains?,  I paint my grandfather’s portrait in clay on a porcelain cup, fill the cup with water and let it spill, washing my grandfather’s face nearly off. (images 6 &7)  Another example is Mutual Cleanse, where I rub an Oil of Olay bar with a portrait of my great-grandmother on it on my pregnant belly nearly fading her image. (image 10)

I’ve been working with the dead since my cousin’s passing (I never asked how) twenty years ago. Her untimely death in her mid-thirties, was a shock that I could slowly cope with through working with her image, her letters, and her drawings. The small scraps left over.  But the theme of loss comes from much earlier in childhood, as we emigrated from the Czech Republic and left everyone behind not being able to return for 5 years. To an 8 year old, five years equals a lifetime. First it was the objects, the precious mail sent between my grandparents and I. Little remnants of ‘home.’ Upon my return to CZ in my teens and every two years thereafter, I had to acknowledge the continuum, not only my own, but also that of my native land.  Things don’t disappear. They change.

The theme of a continuum past death and now as a parent of before and after birth is what motivates the bulk of my work. I question our physicality. The investigation gets more and more subtle and the material becomes more and more immaterial in its final form.

Thank You

Thank you for posting your recent work. I love that we have this communication between us. It helps me get through the lulls of daily life. 

I think of Anitra often, especially when I post here, because I remember that she was one of the only people who followed of our blog once she knew it existed. I miss her, and had her in my thoughts today as the bright yellow leaves kept on falling and falling and falling off the maple trees in my front yard. How is it to work with her in your studio practice? 

I'm striking one show on Friday, and going to an opening reception for another on Saturday. New work, and older work from Mixed Media in 2006 that has been un-earthed in recent months. I'm working on my artist statement too. Here's a sample of the first paragraph..what do you think?

My work reveals common threads between meditative practice and everyday actions.  Through painting, performance, and object making, I weave together notions of time, memory, and human experiences in the material world.

Commonplace routines of daily life have always inspired me. So, too, have concepts of interconnection, intuitive healing, and multi-dimensionality. How can a performance of sweeping the streets be communicated and understood as an aspect of meditation? When I work, I try to approach everything I do with the same reverence, and remind myself that there is no separation between art and life. Routines shift into becoming rituals; the ordinary becomes extraordinary. 

I'll try to post photos soon..in the meanwhile here are some images and a brief description of the work from my upcoming show Don't/Not Enough opening in Kingston this Saturday xo

Don't/ Not Enough is a collection of photographs taken from advertisements for health and beauty products found in vintage Italian magazines. They are assembled out of their original context to create visual analogies that exist outside of language. I use these images to depict how we attempt to heal ourselves, how we try to mend, what we use to suture our scars.

This series is directly inspired by Annette Messager's Voluntary Tortures, whose images depict women submitting to cosmetic procedures in order to maintain a socially defined standard of beauty.

I take a slightly different approach, As a woman creating this series, Feminism of course plays a role in the images I selected, but as an artist with my own wounds to heal, my aim is to speak to this larger issue.