EARTH effects Exhibition Opening

 

My work is included in this five person, international exhibit opening Thursday at the Nave Gallery in Somerville, MA. In addition to a clay installation called Earth Tones, pictured below, I have elected to show the first digital prints from 8 years of documenting the eroding dunes at the edge of earth and sea in the Cape Cod National Seashore in Wellfleet. For me this is about the persistence and constancy of change. Geologic morphology occurs on a time scale that makes it generally imperceptible to us, but here, at Newcomb Hollow, where the water and wind and tides undermine the fragile cliffs of clay and sand and stone, we can see it happen. It reminds me that we are but a grain of sand in time and space, waiting for a breath of wind to blow us to the next landing.

Fractal mystery comes of turning the image

January Calm/Low Tide

Sand Fall

Approach

  

Earth Tones, ceramic installation

Chinesepod

I have been listening to Chinese podcasts.
I am keeping my ear up if nothing else.

I listen at ChinesePod, a language learning site based in Shanghai. The company, Praxis Language, has newer parallel sites in Spanish, Italian and French.
The level of professionalism, linguistic interest, cultural insight, and pedagogy is quite high.
The lessons and discussions are free. There are membership levels up to someone calling you everyday to tutor you. I listen to the lessons, read some of the discussion, use my dictionaries to absorb character uses. I find myself absorbed in it for an hour or two each time.
The visual language was what first attracted me to study Chinese. Now I find myself wanting to get to the depth of the culture through the language. I want to study again. I would like to learn the language like a child is taught in school. Writing and reciting from classics while practicing the colloquial language every day.

Fluvial Processes

Project:

Fluvial Processes

For more on this: Project::Erosion Blog
Sand flows from the dune cliff onto the growing pile at the foot. The banner above is the same...one grain at a time.
The undermined clay outcropping above will likely have fallen after the next storm.

For four+ years I have been documenting the changes in the Newcomb Hollow cliffs of Wellfleet. Clay, sand, water, weather, tides, and gravity in a choreography of change.
Last fall I cast moments of the geomorphology in plaster.
I will next work with these castings on the scanner.
So much to do.
In late January a 19th Century schooner freed itself from the bottom of the sea and rolled ashore just south of the cliffs that have been my studio. The shipwreck made the news. In April a man killed himself just north of these cliffs. This too made the news. These cliffs are a force. Steady as she goes.The sand and clay continues its journey. And I continue mine.
Perhaps our lives are not that different from the life of a grain of sand. We finally work ourselves to the surface and then we hang on until the winds of life loosen us. Gravity, water, or weather takes hold and we are off to the next landing. It doesn't feel like gravity when we are walking or careening through our days, but it is or we would all be flying, no doubt.
-"It's not the letting go that is hard, it's the holding on"- Buddhist wisdom

from Robert Genn

"Start anywhere.
Accept "nearly right" to get going.
Forgo early accuracy and precision.
Let early strokes determine later ones.
Assume a solution and try working backwards.
Of two solutions, choose the simplest.
Move forward on incomplete information.
Think smart rather than laborious.
Use intuition and go directly to the outcome.
Trust your instincts."

More:
"Curiosity as a way of thinking
Suspicion of authority and conventional wisdom
Respect for intelligently filtered history
Aspiration to higher levels of achievement
Vision for renewed potential in all things
Tendency to invent private systems
Reinvention and perfection of former skills
Accepting the challenge of the difficult"

To subscribe to Genn's newsletter

titles and ideas

In/fluence
Forbidden words
Tick of the Heart
Paper bridge
Hard stones of thought
Temporal Stillness
Like Eroding Dunes
Tumbling Righting Wandering & Stilling
Imaginal Disks
Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology
Like a Grain of Sand clings to the the cliff of time, life, motion
In Geologic time

A new start

I retitled this blog instead of making a new one and then took out posts thinking there was a place where I had preserved them, but no luck, they are lost. Oh well, I have lost sketchbooks before. Mom always said if the idea a forgot was important it would come back. Gotta trust that wisdom.
Anyway, the new blogspot in which I am working out a project about erosion is:
projecterosion.blogspot.com
I am going there now to work.