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.

still pertains

Great-Grandmother's Masculine Ambitions (Wedding Photo)

Painted soap, saved candy lid (part of grandmother's estate)

Great-Grandfather's Feminine Aspirations (Army Photo ID)

Painted soap, found jewelry box, duvet buttons

complete beginner too

what remains? the  Remainder

feminine and masculine coexisting in one body

through the human figure- through this human figure

clean and dirty

grief and joy coexisting

birth and death

timelessness

Soap pieces translated into video

Dust pieces translated into sound

Ani dialogue continuing through mixed media

Collapse of perceived time

Beginning every time- all time, no end

with Ani

It's ironic that it is Ani who is teaching me how to carve smiles.

Hers and Vaclav Havel's are the first positive expression I have carved.

Thank you and missing you, love!

For Anitra

complete beginner

two aspects of the same thing in the same space. 

human figure 

perceived dualities of:

above and the below

clean and dirty

conscious and unconscious

back and front

feminine and masculine

grief, anger, and stillness, as they relates to domesticity and Feminism.

beaded Morse–coded poems

Clean city streets

Air Dirty Laundry

life-long love of painting

fragility

precision

fear

attachment

discarded paper and found images

collapse of perceived time

hand held mirrors cast in porcelain to reflect the space around them

necklaces created using Morse code are beaded translations of texts that convert sound into form.

Figure paintings

Why is it agonizingly difficult for me to articulate what I do through the written word?

I feel like a complete beginner. Every. Time.

studio thoughts

re viewing (the sticky but loose leafed) notes from JFC

I think she became very light in the end and I think she didn't have anything physical to attach to anymore. I think it seemed so much better for her to go, float away than to stay in her reality, limited to her mind. (Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is helpful to read right now.)

Also, as we talked about time collapsing and the ever present, I found my scattered notes from JFC and they are so very pertinent to what is happening. (I was dealing with the death of my grandfather with whom I sat through his process of dying a year and a half ago.) All thoughts on the following pages are so relevant and applicable, I had to sort through them and post them for my own clarification.

Let's talk soon,

 existing without sticking, suspending

 My grandmother forever wrapped (wraps) her knees for the pain, 

blaming grandfather (not any more)

Grandmother made the whip

I didn't find the ends

Allow for the gap.

 in the cup

(the cup exercise: focusing on an object, seeing its infinite manifestations)

                      polishing the floor, with cup in mind                               rear: process

 not holding on, not fixing in place, flowing

sound of feet slipping and sliding on studio floor

(word exercise; I chose maybe. Focus on the word, see its infinite manifestations)

Ali energy, present and not yet material.

Allowing 'mistakes' to be, exist in 

the space outside

allowing that space where the gap can happen

May be masculine and feminine

May be communist and democrat and...

May be old and young

May be an other

maybe

maybe cup is grandpa

maybe there is no birth and death

maybe clean and dirty

clean is a condition of dirty

maybe solid and liquid

what else?

Alenka drawing gecko on rear of the previous sheet.

change expression to +

infinite impressions remain

a journey through personal history

two sides of me (of joy)

(layered on top of) two side of me (my brain) that didn't get along

between feminine and masculine

 change expression to +

(here I think of ANi's smile in all photos, how such a positively expressive soul, can hold such darkness and sadness.)

murky (unsettled)

-clay at bottom of cup in water

added water reshuffles particles

drawing and cleaning

no difference.

 may be possible

melting the cup

grandmother's china lost (buried) and substitutes for a pebbled road

 Grandma's beads                                                                          who is cup?

organized by the cup                                                                       what am I?

clusters of beads organized by relative size of the cup                      who thought up cup?

grandma's china                                                                             (Grandma liked [s] little cups)

      soiled (painted) cups                                                               cultural, social implications

     (painted with clay)                                                                   CZ ceremony around drinking from a cup

                                                                                                    always with a saucer
                                                                                                    status with a cup

                                                                                                    flipping cup and saucer
                                                                                                    on his head

 playing cup

bodily interaction with cup                                 

stacked cup spine (reminds me of Haley M. painting in 4B)

me moving around the cup                                                       -moving with the cup/puc
      colors of the cup                                                                       sitting still with

clay- dropping cup into clay, seeing the impressions                    fading    impressions of a cup in clay
      suspended in water/sprinkle with water                                                    side to side
                                                                                                                      top and bottom
sound of the movement
      -sound of beads dropping and rolling in the cup
      -sound of cup running along a guitar string

 remains

Grandpa remains

(notes from his death bed)

video water spilling over cup, carrying his remains (impression remains) 

(reverse of the known)

drinking remains

cleaning the studio 

with the shape 

of the cup

cleaning tools 2

cleaning tools 1

(painting with clay and leftovers

(Artists workshop: Hands-on sacred geometry and theory for a visual artist)

-architecture (sivine geometry durrounds

-geometry around the heads of people

-painting with the ground

(and whatever sticks)

Imprints

infinite impressions

top/bottom handle                                                                                                       the handle

(imprints in combination with grandma's cloths- [crochet])

the most I could do is sit there and hold his hand

Impressions-

sitting with death, sitting with communism

memories?      on        (communism)

             non-aiming(?)

mixing my play with grandparent's objects

and watching and listening for other things to come in

-sitting death- with/communism

do memories create one?

how do the memories function in the present

-hold something from the past is to hold them?

                                                           buried branch? in grandma box