NYC etc.

I returned late last night from a great extra long weekend in New York. Due to the incredibly warm weather the first couple days and the sheer amount of activities jammed into a short amount of time, it felt like very long vacation. I completely forgot that I live in Vermont and was delightfully exhausted upon my return. The highlights were margaritas in Soho, a bad performance in Chelsea, MoMA bookstore, 65 degree weather in Central Park, arm wrestling in Tribeca, George Condo and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and make-your-own bloody Marys in Greenpoint. I even allowed myself the rare sleep in this morning, after sleeping through the night for the first time in months.

As for studio, my show is only 2 weeks away so I’m diving right in to resolving some pieces so I can start planning the install and placement of everything. Remember that tree tank from back in December? I finally pulled it out and am working on how it will work as an object–here’s what it looks like right now:

sugared tree, ready to be integrated into a sculpture

detail of sugar crystals on dead baby pine tree

I also added a few completed images of the raw wool objects to my website, so be sure to check those out:

the series is named sessilia, after an order of barnacles

Week 44 of 48

Wow, I can’t believe there are only two weeks left to my year here (in residency time that is). Back at the beginning of this, I thought it would never end and of course it has flown by soooo fast. Time here is incomprehensible… it’s funny to me that I tried to blog every week to help keep the time, but it still feels equally ungraspable. Something about the way the residency schedule works and my odd relationship to it as a staff member makes time especially bizarre. It seems all the more appropriate that I do time-based work. As if by working with time as a medium, I could force it into compliance with my objectives, but of course in the end it doesn’t actually make a difference. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to take a more personal direction with the work—something that reflects the transience and instability of my own life and time here. Since I will be wrapping up the suit of armor before I leave for the holidays, I will try to set up the beginnings of the next piece so it can grow while I am away. This means that I have to decide what the next piece is! So, in between working through the difficult task of assembling the armor, I am trying to make some decisions about how to move forward after it’s done. I’m actually not happy with the suit of armor itself. I have to finish it since I already invested three months worth of energy and sugar into growing it, but I realize now that it really isn’t the right application for the rock candy. I don’t regret making it—I needed something concrete to get started and figure out what the candy can really do—but now that I’ve learned everything that I can from the process of making it, I am ready to step back and rethink my approach. Lately I have been more excited by thinking about what is next then with finishing the damn thing in front of me! But I guess that’s often how it goes…

Anyways, enough chit chat. Here are some pics of a few new experiments growing crystals on raw wool, fresh off the sheep.

just a wad of wool, half dipped in solution, growing crystals

these blue ones also served as a test of making solution with fabric dye instead of food coloring

I needle felted these a bit first so the fibers are a little more dense and purposefully shaped

these were also needle felted but grown in a tank of regular solution instead of fabric dye solution