monday i’ll say goodbye to my temporary home. here are some images of work i made while here.
the second piece actually goes on the wall. with a white backround it seemed to be floating, but here are some “installation” shots with a small drawing on the studio wall.
mollusk/dilators and mouth series
i recently aquired these images from my bfa exhibition. i have minimal documentation, at best, from this show, mostly in the form of black and white images taken and hand developed by my brother. so i was happy when g.m. found these on his comp and copied them to my thumb drive. a mix of low fire glazed work and hand built gas fired raw porcelain. some things change and some things stay the same.
mouth series
dead birds
coconut crop circle
mouth
mouth
mollusk
this work was completed in 2003. most of it was made in the semester leading up to my exhibition. up until that point i was making a lot of figurative work with little cubbies and found objects (i’ll have to post some of that work one day) so it represented a new vein of work which was far less representational.
hmmm, funny.
lancaster, pa skirt steak. one of my first attempts at responsible meat purchasing.
i have really fond memories of going to local farms with my family and picking tons of tomatoes and eggplants. eating them fresh for weeks and freezing or pickling (pickled eggplant!) what we couldn’t finish. of course growing up in florida, you can’t really help but eat local, with the mass amounts of oranges, lemons, mangos, avacados and grapefruits literally falling of trees into your hands. i’ve stopped at a strangers house to ask if i could pick their tangerines, and they grab the grocery sacks, press them into your hands and and say “yes, please, there are too many for us to eat.” at my parents place i grew up plucking loquats, mulberries, prickly pears and papayas off the plant and sticking them in my mouth (ok, ok, not the prickly pears. they require use of a special picking tool and complex cleaning to avoid cactus needles in your face).
despite this, markets are full of seasonless imports and most of us have gotten into the habit of expecting anything anytime, i know i have.
but a few weeks ago i went to a workshop on sustainability and education. hearing about so many awesome ideas and projects really got me fired up. my favorite lecture of the day was about economics (a class which i fully slept through in high school and have never revisited) and the local foods movement and it illuminated SO MUCH for me. all of the attendees got a copy of barbara kingsolver’s “animal, vegetable, miracle” which (like her fiction, which i’m a big fan of) was an amazing and engrossing story.
and now, like so many others (thankfully) i am getting amped to go local.
i think the local foods movement should just be called being awesome! i mean, you give your money to actual real people in your community who work really hard doing something they love. and then, you casually get to eat fruits, vegetables and meat that actually taste like fruits, vegetables and meat.
so i’m gradually trying to educate myself on what comes from where here in pennsylvania and starting to research what i can expect to find once i move to gainesville, fl. incidentally i’ve gotten a renewed sense of excitement about cooking and baking.
being back on familiar ground will be nice, things falling of trees will be nice and getting to know the more agricultural central florida will be awesome. yay exciting!
once again i’ll em bark on the turtle life. pack up all my stuff into my little house on my back and roll on to the next stop. my next destination is gainesville, florida where i’ll be enrolled in the post-baccalaureate program at UF.
it has been a very interesting, challenging and often amazing 6 months in the city of brotherly love. i am always lucky to meet friends wherever i go and in this short amount of time i’m delighted to have met and connected with so many awesome people, my roommate and neighbors in west philly, inspiring artists and teachers of the philadelphia art scene and my friends and coworkers at pp.
every step you take in one direction means not taking other steps in other directions and i always kind of struggle with that. i want to do everything! but i feel confident that as i bumble along, on my own path, i’ll figure out the right way to go. this crazy turtle life has taken my a lot of places and on many adventures. i guess this is the most wild adventure of all. bringing it all together and making dreams come true.
while i was pounding out a slab on my table, this piece took a tumble.
back to the slop bucket...
salad days in the garden outside the studio prompted potlucks…
but you can’t bring homemade biscuits all the way out to the suburbs without a way to heat them up…
