Weaving!
Costumed dance party!
And reading!
More pics soon--just bought a Canon DSLR for my birthday :)
Going Deeper
I can only describe the first few weeks of this semester as deep, heavy, and frightening. I feel like I'm on a deep-sea dive, going down further and further into whatever it is I think I know.
I've been riding BART a lot from San Francisco to Oakland and back, and the more time I spend in the tunnel under the bay the more the noise gets distorted for me. You know how repeating a word can make it sound meaningless? I feel the same way about the electrical whining and mechanical grinding noises that the train makes as it flies through the transbay tube. One day I closed my eyes for the duration and I started to imagine myself in space, more specifically as the astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey as he travels through space and time at the end of the film, bright colors flashing on his glass helmet as he writhes in terror.
The BART sounds became the eery choir singing during the film as well, the dissonant chord that emerges whenever the monolith appears. I started to record the BART sounds--I've never worked with sound before, so I really have no idea what I'm doing. But listening to the recording in my studio, distorted by my iPhone's shitty speakers, it's oddly fitting. The sound evokes a careening, chaotic journey, a frantic energy, this mechanical cacophony. It was quite interesting when placed in the same space as all my woven, knitted, cozy objects. One of my peers commented that it felt like a "cottage industry at the end of the world."
My studio recently
It's a good step forward, I think, working with sound now. It changes things from this illustration of really bad stuff to this emotional place, which is what I've been striving for all along. One of my peers said it reminded her of 1,000 sewing machines, a factory, sweatshops, and her mother's job sewing at home until 2AM, scraping to get by. I just about cried. This isn't new territory--many people have criticized modernity before, many MANY people, Stanley Kubrick included. What happens when our machines run amok? What does it feel like? Where do we fit in? How do we live? What do we become? What HAVE we become?
My next projects include weaving with hand spun yarn and making dresses inspired by the what workers wore in factories in the 1940s, in addition to refining my BART sound recording.
Happy February!
Winter Break is the Greatest
End of semester 1 and time to sort through the hurricane of the last few months. The holidays were restful and full of baking and eating, and now that it's the new year I have time to reflect and hopefully get some things made by the beginning of Semester 2. Though I've been largely absent from my studio the last few weeks, I haven't stopped researching...turns out my obsession with documentaries and cooking are finding their way into my work. I guess everything is connected.
To start, my brother gave me the mother of all cook books for Christmas this year:
Magnus Nilsson, the author and photographer, is crazy-inspiring. He and his world-famous restaurant Fäviken are featured in the last episode of Chef's Table, and I HIGHLY recommend checking it out. He uses ancient cooking techniques, collecting ingredients from the extremely limited flora and fauna of Northern Sweden. Plus his restaurant dining room looks like a VIKING HUNTING LODGE and who doesn't love that (I love that). I think I'm most inspired by the limiting factors that he embraces with his work: nothing grows in Northern Sweden for about 6 months out of the year, and yet he uses only local ingredients. The Nordic Cookbook is a manual of home-cooking recipes that show that kind of limitation on a massive scale. I had no idea my ancestors ate 8-10 meals a day in the summer and only 3-4 in the winter. The climate had an enormous impact on everyone's lives before electricity and modern architecture. This connection to nature is something I'm interested in exploring, especially in light of climate change.
And speaking of climate change, I read this incredible graphic novel:
It's gut-wrenching and incredibly scary, and it was written in 2010. Philippe Squarzoni interviews climate scientists and then illustrates their statistics, but shows his own emotions along the way. He has a knack for evoking the blankness we feel when faced with these issues. He talks about the steps he tries to take personally, such as choosing not to fly because of the emissions caused by airplanes. In the end, he sort of leaves things in a hopeful place, but mainly he seems resigned to our fate as if it's already too late.
I've also begun reading the Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. I've only made it through the first chapter or so, all about disappearing frogs, and I've almost had enough. It's a beautiful book and I'll finish it, but I'm starting to feel a wave of rage in my gut. I watched the Ai Weiwei documentary Never Sorry, and I admire his ability to face the horrific problems in our world. His piece about the school that collapsed in China due to shoddy construction, a wall of 9,000 backpacks that spell out "For seven years she lived happily on this earth," just destroyed me. From there I went on to watch The Propaganda Game, a rare documentary about North Korea, and then a Vice TV episode about Russia/US relations, speculating a second Cold War. It's been a somewhat dark time, I have to say! And to top it off, I watched the amazing Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, just fully embracing the anger I feel about the world and feeling thankful that Kurt got his out into some incredible songs before ending his life.
So, how to move forward? Shit is real fucked up in this world, and I feel a responsibility as an artist to wade out into the swamp of sadness and show people what I find. The light that guides me, the tiny bit of beauty that helps me get through this, is the thought of humanity surviving in the harshest of places. The land of my ancestors, Sweden, as much as I've romanticized it over the years as a utopian paradise, is the harsh place in my blood. Magnus Nilsson's cookbook helped me remember that over the holidays as I brewed Glögg and made WAY TOO MUCH pepparkakor. I traveled to Sweden for the month of December 5 years ago, a month when most people would avoid it, and found the desolate snowy landscape to be profoundly healing. My life was upside-down at the time, and as I trudged through the snow from Lund to Stockholm to Uppsala to Gothenberg and back to Lund, riding the ice-encrusted trains and almost getting frostbite on the bottoms of my feet, I felt like I could handle pretty much anything.
Climate change, Cold Wars, Propaganda, and a tenuous connection to past ways of life. I have no idea where this is all going, but the only way to find out is to make.
Happy New Year!
Grad School Wormhole
I've been in school now for 2.5 months! My brain has changed so much from the end of August until now, I feel like this website probably needs a big ol' overhaul. But for now, for those of you who are interested, I'm just going to dump some images here of what i've been working on to give you an idea of where my head is at these days.
Pillows on Ocean Beach, SF. Container ship visible in background.
Impossible shipping arrangement.
clouds, blobs, piles.
Container ship musings.
Wool from one sheep to be made into one sweater, for me to wear.
I'm interested in a lot of stuff right now, mostly centering around the garment and textile industry and how that contrasts or negates traditional textile-making techniques, and the environmental repercussions thereof. Shipping containers, factories, machines, craft, labor, and waste are all swirling around in my head. I'm applying to a container ship residency today, so wish me luck.
More again soon.
Tidying
This book is no joke, and it's shedding new light on my art practice.
I've been a borderline hoarder for much of my adult life, at times gathering more stuff than I could possibly store, and it made me deeply unhappy. It got worse when other parts of my life were getting out of control, too--relationships, stress at work, feeling lost--and this just snowballed into more unhappiness as my collections of cameras, table linens, and wooden clogs grew. Stuff seems to function as a temporary buffer between myself and reality--if I'm surrounded by stuff, I don't have to acknowledge that anything is wrong. I made a lot of art about that for a while, arguably my best work, much of which I still find interesting today.
But throwing stuff away, OH BOY DOES IT FEEL GREAT. And it seems so obvious that having less stuff should feel good. I find this very interesting, though--is the tidying up making me happy, or am I happier and thus ABLE to tidy up? Which one causes the other? And how is this going to affect what I do in my art practice...or has it starting affecting it already?
I think it's started already; I'm leaning toward minimalism in the photos I like best, and shying away from busy patterns and bright, harsh colors. Subtleness is beautiful, I've always thought so; I just think maybe, in the past, I was afraid to embrace it. I think it gets boiled down to this, and I've thought about it a lot: when you don't have the best quality thing, you can make a lot of that thing to distract from its imperfection. You can make the flaw seem intentional by supporting it with other flaws of a similar kind. Ten broken vacuums are more interesting than one--the repetition holds some kind of information. Wearing 4 thrift store shirts, one on top of the other like I used to do, is more interesting than wearing just one--none look that good, but together they make something new entirely. My mind has always worked this way, wanting to work with the imperfection that's already there instead of starting over fresh. I think that's why I like sourcing materials that are used, expired, or broken. The stakes are lower when something is already kind of shitty. And I think there's beauty in trash.
Well, I don't know where this line of thinking will lead me artistically, clearly I still think multitudes are interesting even as I am throwing away 5 full garbage bags of stuff. Perhaps I just have a clearer view of what exactly I find interesting about all this. Maybe it's because I'm not trying to peek out from under a mountain of stuff anymore. Maybe I don't have to actually live a hoarding lifestyle in order to have a lot to say about it.
In any case, I recommend The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. It's pretty incredible.