The Best Birthday!

Let’s face it, it seems like 75% of the human population has a birthday in September. I put it down to too many people celebrating Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Out of curiosity, I tracked my own creation myth back to the major news story around that day, the Tet Offensive.

Since the pandemic, things have seemed incredibly unsettled and off kilter. I have learned that prolonged isolation is incredibly detrimental to someone with PTSD and moving during a pandemic is incredibly hard. I am also approaching my birthday, which I’ve never been a fan of.

Fortunately, I feel like I am starting to find my feet here, after nearly a year of being in Oregon. Hegira took a first place at the Oregon State Fair and I will be bringing her over to the Lincoln City Cultural Center to hang in their fiber art studio until she has a next date somewhere else. I’ve also begun recruiting fiber folx for The Community Coral Reef Project and have started to hear back from yarn stores in the PNW and elsewhere who will be sponsoring donation points for reef makers. Additionally, I will be providing a virtual presentation on October 9th to the Salem Fiber Arts Guild about my art and The Community Coral Reef Project.

Another positive note? Deception Pass will finally be able to fill her mission of going to an auction to support marine research. Right before the pandemic, I had connected with an Orca non-profit and we were trying to work out an auction for the piece with proceeds going to the organization. It was difficult since they didn’t have a history of doing auctions and then Covid hit. I hadn’t given up on the idea of donation and then I found the Marine Education Society. I have been following them on social media for some time and appreciate their engagement and research. They also have a robust online auction and funds go to keep their three person staff in working order. I will definitely be shouting out about their auction in spring of next year as the time approaches.

Finally, I am taking a long birthday weekend to explore the southern Oregon and northern California coast. I have some whale watching planned, a visit to the Washed Ashore gallery (Seriously, watch their movie. It is incredible!) and some wandering among the Redwoods and beaches. When I get back, I will be moving from my tiny apartment upstairs to a “less tiny” apartment. It will have an extra room that I can use as a studio and I will be able to start addressing this sketch that I made of the next crazy project I have rolling around in my head:

Watch This Space

For the past few years, I have been wanting to create an undersea exhibition. My vision has been of a walk through installation where the viewer will be immersed in a fiber art marine environment. The Institute for Figuring’s Crochet Coral Reef Project has been hugely inspirational for me and I definitely see the installation as moving from healthy reefs to bleached reefs and parts of the exhibition should be made out of plastics and perhaps recovered and recycled marine materials. I started creating larger corals two or three years ago with this project in mind and quickly realized that one person doing it alone would never finish before they died of old age.

The difference between my vision and what is created through the satellite crochet coral reefs around the world is the immersive experience of actually being in the ocean and seeing not only the coral reefs but also the critters living among the coral reefs. Thankfully, I went to a fiber art retreat a few weeks ago and met someone with similar inclinations and connections in the local Oregon fiber art scene.

As we begin to formulate our plan for a location for this installation and the myriad of details that come along with getting the word out and encouraging community participation, all I can say at this time is WATCH THIS SPACE!

Of Maidens, Art and Solitude

I just got back yesterday from a three day trip to my beloved stomping grounds in Washington State. My Deception Pass canvas had been displayed at the Schack Art Center for their 22nd Biennial Exhibition. I visited on the last day of the exhibition to see it in situ and then went back the next day to pick it up. I must say, the thrill of seeing your art in the wild never gets old.

I also took a purposeful trip to see the Maiden of Deception Pass. I became aware of this statue at Rosario Beach on Fidalgo Island a few months ago, long before getting accepted into the art show at Schack. It felt important to me to seek her out and so I made a visit early on Sunday morning.

I didn’t know the story of The Maiden before visiting but I am always interested in the stories and myths of women across cultures.

The statue is a beautiful piece of art in the most amazing setting. Perhaps it was the gift of early morning solitude when the noisy and indifferent crowds have yet to arrive but reading her story and seeing her as a guardian to the land all around her made me tear up. The statue depicts her two forms and her water form is carved with shells and fish and her lower body has a sense of a fish or a mermaid. She has given her mortal existence to protect those that she loves and eventually she learns that this sacrifice means she can never return to them.

Waiting for Normal

Moving during a pandemic has been intensely weird. I realized the other day that I don’t know what the majority of my coworkers look like because I haven’t seen them without their masks. I have also been working primarily from home so if you required me to line up all of my de-masked coworkers and tell you what their names are, I would probably fail.

As I write this, my county in Oregon has been moved back into an extreme risk category for Covid. Two steps forward, one step back, or is it three steps back? Due to the job that I do in my “real” life, I have been fully vaccinated for a few months now but that just means I have been in a weird limbo with every other fully vaccinated person.

But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been dreaming of what life might look like when things begin to open up. My whale is complete and I am just waiting to gather up some money to have it framed. I have also begun to lean into the idea of coordinating a fiber art coral reef.

If there is one thing I excel at, it is coordinating a large project. I LOVE to come up with ideas and then work my butt off to bring them to fruition. I haven’t done it for many years and when I think about rallying PNW fiber artists around creating coral pieces for a community coral reef, I get VERY excited. Can you imagine, as the world begins to open up, traveling up and down Washington, Oregon and maybe Northern California or Southern BC to yarn stores and talking about freeform and hyperbolic crochet and knitting and getting people interested in creating pieces for donation? It would be CRAZY! And who knows, as we are all proficient Zoomers, it would be relatively easy to reach out to anyone anywhere.

This morning, as I was driving along the Oregon Coast, I thought of creating a ghost net installation with knitted or crocheted nets and felted weights or buoys. If you combine it with pieces of healthy corals, bleached corals, and perhaps some corals made of recovered “trash”, it could be both educational and artistic.

All that to say, wear your mask, get vaccinated if you can and keep holding on. Tomorrow is coming!

Thar She Blows!

I am almost done with my whale.

Social media has been reminding me of where I was last year, just starting out in mid-January 2020, full of hope and expectation. It wasn’t long before my cleverly lined up plans for auctioning off my Deception Pass canvas and applying for a residency at a lighthouse, came to a screeching halt with the pandemic. As I moved to working from home in my paid job and things felt ever so wrong, I puttered away on my whale. Somewhere in there, I packed up my life and moved across country to take a new job near the Oregon Coast.

I had estimated that it would take about 18 months, as that has consistently been my timeline for my other canvases. Knowing that this one was three times bigger than anything that I had ever done before but with a lot less coral detail, I had hoped it might go quicker.

I haven’t officially sewn down the last pieces but they are done. Now, it’s just a matter of getting it framed. That will be a bit pricey!

So, now I have started to pay more attention to my bleached reef and I have begun thinking about another big project. I would still love to do an actual coral reef installation with fiber artists from around the world donating pieces. I am hoping to connect with aquariums or colleges or science centers to see if this might be a possibility.

Watch this space!

On The Move

There hasn’t been a lot of work going on with my whale over the past month or two as I have been dealing with some life decisions. The house that I have been renting is being sold and I had to make the decision whether I wanted to find another rental which would tie me down in Wisconsin for the next year or if I wanted to take this opportunity to look for a job in a geographic location that would make me much happier.

Can I just say that looking for a job and planning a move across country is stressful enough in ordinary times but doing it during a pandemic is just weird. At least the jobs I interviewed for didn’t demand that I fly across country for a thirty minute face to face interview (I have done that twice in my life. Not fun!). Interestingly enough, I received two job offers on the same day, within about thirty minutes of each other. One would have had me an hour from the Atlantic Ocean, the other an hour from the Pacific Ocean. I really loved the idea of both of them but the job out in the PNW was just calling my name.

All that to say…I AM COMING BACK TO THE PNW!!!

Three years ago, at about this same time, I moved away and I have felt like my spiritual self has been withering away. It has been great to meet my wonderful coworkers here and to reconnect with family but the part that makes ME tick has been gone.

So I have packed up my artwork and I will be driving my life out to Oregon in the very near future. I have done this enough to feel like I have things under control (kinda) but this pandemic has played with my head enough that perhaps a good three day road trip and some salt air will get some of the cobwebs out.

Talk to you on the other side!