Canvas to the Imagination

I finished the last book in the Forgotten Knowledge series last Friday morning and felt a mix of relief, satisfaction and sadness at finally getting them all done. I arranged them on the dinning room table in a circle to take a look at them for the first time as a set. They look amazing.

While there are about a million ways for these to be displayed, for the purposes of the Container Art space they will be hung on the wall fully open. I hope you can drop by the PNE and visit the show. More photos to come once this work is installed.

I attended the opening of Eco Madness at Gallery Gachet on Friday evening and I must say, the experience really put me into a tailspin about where I’m going and what I should be doing with my work in future. I put a lot of effort into writing up a proposal to submit for the show and also running around to get the work printed and framed. It didn’t feel worth it once I took a look at the rest of the show, not because the rest of the work wasn’t good, but because there was such a wide range of styles and mediums that it didn’t really work together. It was especially disappointing to discover the positioning of my work on a wall that is in a hidden corner and hard to view.

I had a crisis later in the evening wondering what the hell I am doing, why I’m doing it, and should I even keep bothering. The answer to the last question is YES YES YES because this is something I love to do and I’m doing it because it makes me happy. Maybe I’ll just avoid group shows in future because too often I don’t get enough out of them other than something to put on my resume, and I already have enough of those.

Below is part of the submission I put together for Eco Madness. I had proposed four of the Imaginary Girl nature themed portraits and two were accepted into the show. At the very least it was an interesting exercise in writing down thoughts I’ve had around some of these portraits. The image below is a mock up of how I wanted to hang the grouping of four images.

Artist Statement:
My nature themed photos are a small grouping of images within a larger portrait series of women titled, “Imaginary Girl”. My intent when using natural settings is to convey a strong connection between the human subject and the environment. It is as if they are woodland creatures peering between the leaves that frame them. The women are fully integrated into the natural setting rather than merely using it as a backdrop. The idea is that nature is a place of nurture for human beings as it is for every other living creature. It is a place to slow down and clear one’s head, to recharge and become centered, and to take shelter.

I know I am made from this earth,
as my mother’s hands were made from this earth,
as her dream came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth…
and I long to tell you,
you who are earth too,
and listen as we speak to each other of what we know:
the light is in us.

~ Susan Griffin

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a proposal to do a large scale project of altered books. I’ve never done something like this before so it’s been quite a challenge to figure out the best way to approach working with multiple books in a series. Normally I make my altered books as one-of-a-kind pieces and can spend as much as ten hours on each one. For this project I’ve had to simplify how I work with them, come up with a common theme, and develop a process I can apply to making each one.

My plan is to take twenty-five volumes of a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias and insert natural objects into a niche custom cut from the pages of each book. The book pictured here is the second one I’ve completed, and as you can see the shape I had to cut was fairly complicated. The objects I chose to work with in this piece are two seal vertebrae scavenged for me from Pebbly Beach, Bowen Island, by Anne. The bones are very beautiful and I like their odd shapes protruding from the pages like two gargoyle faces.

I was over on Bowen last weekend and spent most of a walk along the beach and forest collecting things to use for this project. I was a little worried I wouldn’t be able to come up with twenty-five different items but I came home with piles of stuff to work with.

Pictured here are crab bits, drift wood, oyster mushrooms, a pine cone, lichen, seaweed, and bones from a deer. (I had to scrounge through decaying remains to collect those, which is not for everyone).

I’ll reveal more about this project in coming weeks. For now I’m counting down as I work my way through the twenty-five volumes. As of today there are twenty-two more to go.