Open Studio Residency at Haystack

Recently I applied and was accepted to Haystack's Open Studio Residency. Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is an international craft school located on the Atlantic Ocean in Deer Isle, Maine. The school offers intensive studio-based workshops in a variety of craft media. The Open Studio Residency, now in its second year,  provides two weeks of uninterrupted time to work in six studios (ceramics, fiber, graphics, iron, jewelry, and wood) to develop ideas and experiment in various media.  The program accommodates approximately fifty participants from a variety of creative disciplines. Participants can choose to work in one particular studio or move among studios depending on the nature of their work.  All of the studios will be staffed by technicians who can assist with projects. Haystack's fab lab will also be open, providing an opportunity for experimentation with digital fabrication as a way to augment and complement  creative practices. This new artist studio, established in 2011 in collaboration with MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, offers another way of looking at craft in a broader context. I will travel to Maine for the residency that runs from  May 25th through  June 6th.  While there I intend to continue my exploration of "cutting" as theme and process as it relates to material and form. I intend to rotate among studios, observing and collecting sensory data from each of the crafts.   My question is how I can translate this data into new ways of seeing, using the new media in the fab lab. I don't pretend to know the possibilities but am curious to  explore other ways of finding forms that are referential to its making.

Post Script: postcards

Following the closing of Cuttings, postcards began to appear, one by one, in my mailbox.  Although signed, numbered and dated, I couldn't decipher the signature of the sender.  However, clues suggest that he lives in Sebastopol.  

Post Script:  Does anyone out there know who sent these? 

Cuts Make You

I have returned yet my thoughts are still traveling as if I was there. They are blowing around in a way that Icelanders might refer to as blasdur. Blowing and windy.  Nothing like a deadline to determine a tack for a way through my mind.

RiskPress Gallery:

Cuttings  October 4th - 27th

 

Winds are here! And more to come.

During the duration of the exhibit, we (I and those who come to view the exhibit) will make a book. I am currently working on its  design and matrix using letterpress at Iota and digital in my studio.  I enjoy this back and forth way of working which seem  to be feeding on each other.

Letterpress (at Iota Press):

Digital (at Holve studio):

"Weather Reports You"

Roni Horn's ongoing project: a collection of stories about the weather in Iceland from Icelandic people. I am interested in how other artists think about weather in their work.  Since my travels to New Zealand in '06 and '07, one of their coldest and windiest springs and summers in 60 years, I began to reflect on wind as a metaphor for conditions of change and also started to collect their weather maps.  Since then I have continued to collect maps  from places I visited (Iceland examples below).   And last  year I also  started a list of Icelandic words that qualify the differing conditions of wind.  This year I added a few to the list.

vindur- wind

stormur - heavy wind

rok - hard wind

moldrok - strong wind with earth

sandrok - strong wind with sand

fárviðri - crazy wind, tempest, typhoon

gola - breeze

gjóla - medium breeze

hvassviðri - strong breeze

logn - no wind

andvari - breath

kaldi - a cold chilly breeze

stinningskaldi - ice cold wind

fellibylur - hurricane

hnúkaÞeyr - warm mountain wind flowing from south to north

norðangarri - cold north to south wind

sunnanblær - southern breeze

gustur - gust of wind

austankaldir - east cold wind

hvasst - medium strong wind

strekkingur - medium wind

blástur - blast  "It is blowing/windy."

hvirfilvindur - tornado

sviptivindur - sudden strong winds, common around steep mountains

staðvindur - trade winds common to a region

skafrenningur - wind that blows loose snow; piles of snow result

snjostormur - wind storm with snow

The weather maps above recorded the changing weather conditions every three hours on July 27th,  the last day of our trip.  I love the simplicity of the design -- the way that the arrows describe the weather patterns and express the tensions of change.  Something to consider.  How might I use arrows to  express changing tensions of shaping, making, unmaking? I've been wanting to make a book on this topic - maybe one with only arrows?

A  Wind Report from Iceland: (From a  conversation taken from facebook  this morning, Aug 5)

22 miles per hour winds. The residency windows are rattling. It is also making a deep base sound on the northern side of the building.

Watch a horror movie.

Fall approaches.

Did you see the auroras?

No.

No way.

I saw them around 2 and called the farm.  Of course they were up and out to look.

But I'm not at the farm anymore!

Can't be everywhere!

But I can watch weather reports from anywhere!

A Library or Museum of Water?

The image above is a detail of the floor from American artist, Roni Horn's Library of Water.  "Heidur" is an adjective that describes weather that is bright, clear and cloudless. As a noun it means "honor".

I returned to Roni Horn's Library of Water in the town of Stykkisholmer on the north coast of the Snaefellsness peninsula.  (Refer to my July 31, 2012 entry on first visit).  The former library contains  24 floor-to-ceiling clear glass columns of water collected as ice from some of the major"jokulls" of Iceland,  formed many millennia ago and now are rapidly receding.  I was told that one of the glaciers represented in the installation has melted. Rebecca Solnit in her most recent book, The Faraway Nearby, referred to the library as an homage to the primordial forces of the glaciers.  Is it too soon to rename the library to  "Museum of Water" as an homage to once was?

Nonetheless, it's a striking homage as the glass columns refract and reflect light onto a vulcanised rubber floor embedded with single words in Icelandic and English: ill, cruel, slaemt, bad, stillt, tranquil, svalur, cool, hressandi, bracing, lygnt, still, glettid, frisky, vitlaust, crazy, napur, piercing cold, blautt, wet, heidur, quiet. The isolated words are adjectives that describe weather.  Roni Horn wrote "Weather is a metaphor for the atmosphere of the  world, for the atmosphere of one's life; weather is a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social, and moral energy of a person and a place."

blár, blue, bla, blah

 Blue travels throughout Iceland.  

blár

Many shades of blue in Iceland.  Traveled and saw blue, blar, and bla!  More on next post.

A Noticeable Void

A noticeable void in blog posts recently; yet a few things brewing in absentia: IOTA PRESS

Since my last contact I have become a coop member at Iota Press, a letterpress studio in Sebastopol whose proprietor is Eric Johnson.   An artist residency ( of sorts) in that I hope to experiment with the medium  and make discoveries along the way.  I am  drawn to this old  printing technology and particularly the "dents" that the presses make.  More to come as work progresses.

A RETURN TO ICELAND

I return to Iceland on the 13th,  only a  jaunt  for two weeks.  This time I will circumnavigate the island by car, taking in new sites as well a visiting some favorites from last year's adventure.  More to come on the blog as I will post images from the trip as well as work inspired from this unique landscape.

ART EXHIBIT AT RISK PRESS GALLERY

And finally I ask you to mark your calendar for Cuttings, an exhibit of  mixed media constructions, artist books, and recent work inspired by my travels to Iceland.  I will be installing the show in October at Risk Press Gallery in Sebastopol.

Dates:  October 4 - 27 Opening: Saturday, October 5th   5 - 8 Closing:  Saturday,  October 26th  5 - 6:30

Revisiting Iceland with Elizabeth Sher

Last summer I spent a month at the Gullkistan artist residency  in Iceland.  I shared the experience with artist and filmmaker, Elizabeth Sher.   She currently is showing work from that experience in her exhibit, Evolutionary Processes, at the Sebastopol Center For the Arts from April 4th through May 10th.  On April 27th, 4:30 - 6, we will talk about our shared experiences, her work and stories that inspired it.  Come hear more! Sebastopol Center for the Arts

282 S. High Street Sebastopol, CA

Hours: Tu - Fri 10 - 4,  Sat 1 -4

707- 829-4797

the residents & a few artists we met along the way

  2013 opens with "The Residency Show" at the  Gatewood Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG) on January 14th through February 1st.  The show features work of faculty and other artists who participated in artist residencies recently.  I sent work inspired by my experiences at the Gullkistan Artist Residency in Iceland last summer.

About the work:

I walk a lot when I travel. Walking allows me to wander wherever I wish, and not be limited to "auto driven" roads. I can choose a way, a pace, and I often see more. I love how walking shifts me from an accelerated frenetic state of mind to a contemplative one.  And slowing down has a way of opening up space.  The artist, Richard Long, once wrote that "a walk expresses space and freedom and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone, and that is another space too."

And I found that space in Iceland last summer at the Gullkistan Artist Residency;  not only because  "eg' gekk mikið!", but also because I discovered that Iceland is a land with panoramic views and horizontal ribbons of sky, land, and sea.  My response was elemental and primordial and it took me back to a place of "beginning"—an invigorating feeling that I want to experience again.

I went to Gullkistan with the intent of incorporating the act of walking into my artistic process. Before I left, I purchased a Garmin GPSmap 62, a device that records tracks of walks.  In Iceland, I used it to collect the shapes and lines of my walks while exploring the new terrain.  I accumulated many tracks.  In the studio, I printed them out and displayed them on the wall.  These "visual walks" were a beginning.  However, I wasn't clear on how I would use their shapes and lines in a body of work.

I had heard of Iceland's "geologic wonders".  I was interested in how this geology related to its constantly shifting landscape. I saw this in lava beds, glaciers, craggy scree slopes, black sand beaches, glacial carved rocks and basaltic columns. These materials create a myriad of contours and textures. I have started to explore how this topography might influence my work so that it reflects the natural tensions of the land.

The work in the exhibit is a beginning of an investigation that combines both line cuts (sections from the tracks) from a walk and the contours of the landscape. The work comes from one of six walks that I tracked in Iceland; the one here is the trek up to the summit of Mt. Laugarvatn, a mountain behind the town of the residency with views of it and beyond. The track provides evidence of a step-by-step process, like walking, and is broken into 23 sections to suggest that.  The constructions, mtlaugwalkcut1, mtlaugwalkcut2, and mtlaugwalkcut3 are the result of an investigation of line and form taken from the walks.

Artwork:

mtlaugwalkcut1, 2, & 3 are mixed media constructions made from book covers, cloth & board on a birch panel. Each are 9.13 x 8.66 x 3.25 inches  ©2012