studio siblings

My brother and I are studiomates. We work in an old, dusty, leaky warehouse we affectionately call Orange Blossom Studios. The building was once upon a time a Coke-a-Cola bottling factory, and then a dry cleaners and perhaps even a machine shop, but has held artists now for over two-and-half decades, if not longer. In fact, until recently, it housed the work of my sculpture professor from my bachelor program, still houses one of my other sculpture teachers, and now houses Cindy, my recent showmate, along with a couple other sculptors and ceramicists. 

For years I worked out of a tiny -and the only- bedroom in our apartment. When the opportunity to move in with another artist in January of 2011, I felt I could finally breathe. Suddenly I had multiple workstations and could move nearly seamlessly between them to accommodate different series and stages of work. A space to hang up work and live with it a little while could happen and significantly I was away from the seductive glow of my computer. It gave me a sense of freedom and renewed purpose. Much of my productivity over the last year is thanks to it.  

Part of the benefit was having the company of a few other artists, even if our only interaction during the week was the call across the echoing space to say hello, or seeing the ever shifting landscapes of each other's desks. This sustained me somehow. Knowing others were Here.At.Work.Producing.Art meant I was pushed, or more accurately inspired, to stretch my hours even when the work wasn't coming easily or involved mind-numbingly boring sanding. Even the dusty materials and sculptural skeletons of my prior teachers held in storage seemed like they were were there as reminders of where I was headed. 

Later, there was a brief time where I was the only other working artist there and my pace seemed to slow, the space felt not only dusty, but somehow stale.

When Colin expressed interest in sharing my studio (and splitting rent), I jumped. He moved in shortly after and it's been a natural transition for both of us. His work seemed to almost immediately take on a particular focus and I find myself energized by the company of his work. Sharing a studio with him is lovely in a way my childhood-self wouldn't have appreciated, but it warms me to have my brother working there so much even when our studio schedules don't often synchronize.

one of the rare occasions we've ended up working at the same time

He's been working two series of work I'm rather excited about, Unmind and a long term series of Portraits of his friend Nic Bravo which he introduces here.

Colin Curry. Nic #3. oil on canvas. 16"x20". 2011

In a rather sweet turn of events, we were both accepted into a show this month, Below the Belt, presented by a new arts organization here in Gainesville. It's Colin's first serious exhibition and the work he made for it is ambitious. I couldn't be more pleased.

Colin Curry. Suspension. oil on panel. 72"x80". 2011

silk seeds

Projects abound in my studio and life right now, but an extra special one I've been thinking about since last fall has begun to manifest.

200 silk seeds arrived in the mail yesterday.

Don't they look a bit like something you'd sprinkle on bread? They are silkworm eggs and will probably hatch in the next week or so as long as they are kept between 78-88°F. At the moment the pilot light of the range in my kitchen proves to be the source for an effective, if untraditional incubator.

I picked up a book to help illustrate the tiny scale of these dots glued to a petri dish and, unexpectedly, the page I opened to says this:

That's also to say that usually -but not always- the piece you produce tomorrow will be shaped, purely and simply, by the tools you hold in your hand today. In that sense the history of art is also the history of technology. The frescos of pre-Renaissance Italy, the tempera paints of Flanders, the plein aire oils of Southern France, the acrylics of New York City -each successive technology imparted a characteristic color and saturation, brushstroke and texture, sensuality or formality to the art piece. Simply put, certain tools make certain results possible.

Your tools do more than just influence the appearance of the resulting art -they basically set limits upon what you can say with an art piece.

-Bayles & Orland, Art & Fear, pg. 58, 1993

This concept is central to my fascination with materials and one of the reasons I decided to raise silkworms from egg to silk in the first place. It feels very much a natural evolution from my other spun work where I spin thread by hand to hand-raising a creature that spins its own thread. Beyond simply reeling the silk at the end, I hope the process of raising them will prove a few of my hypotheses true while revealing unexpected possibilities. I'm hoping as well for luck at being a good cat(erpillar) shepherdess.

My local friends, please keep an eye out for mulberry trees and let me know where you see them. I'm beginning a map and they'll be hungry when they wake and hungrier still by the end of a month.

tangleblot

Another form of disorder -mirrored- becomes unexpected structure.

Tangleblot 1 (our vessels). ink and graphite on paper. 6"x6". 2011. private collection.

Tangleblot 2 (their bones). ink and graphite on paper. 6"x6". 2011. private collection.

Abstract symmetries crept into my work during last spring and summer. This method presents an intriguing way to generate unusual forms, suggestive and yet not derivative.

They appeared, too, during my Plying Thoughts collaboration with Kalina Winska.

note: I'm reaching into the past to bring some of these now older projects to light, so I'm postdating them closer to the time they were made to avoid too much overlap with current projects. Your blogreader might make this confusing.

ghost tangle

One of the unexpected and beautiful moments in making these objects has been the discovery of ghost tangles.

here

Hot, muggy mornings are often relieved by the rains which usher in ever muggier afternoons. If we were less substantial beings, we might swim through the air along our streets as we travelled between the bubbled cold of buildings. We'd sink as we entered the threshold and rise again as we left. The crickets accompany us with their lament in the meanwhile; long, slow songs that buzz in our ears as we sit in the heat of the afternoon, our eyes closed in the pretense of sweaty sleep.

There is relief to be found in the bodies of water where we gather. Here we float in the profound blue and enjoy the fruits of summer.

pool, niecessprings

yes that blueCamera lust officially satiated.

waver

Cedar Key, FL

This past weekend we visited the coast with some family. While archeological evidence suggests human occupation of Cedar Key as far back as 500 B.C, between hurricanes and isolation, it seems to hover between here and gone. This ghost house sat abandoned to the currents just outside the one we stayed in onshore. We fished facing it, a constant reminder of our tidal presence here.

Queen Anne's Lace

In an effort to recover, at least momentarily, from sweet camera lust, I've been combing through images made with my trusty point and shoot. These were taken while hiking in North Carolina last August.

Seeing grasses again, this time in strange light, otherworldly and dark.

decay

Eternal preoccupation, my eyes follow them block after block, searching out irregularities and interesting intersections, taking mental note of location and waiting for right weather to return with my camera.
Some of the most compelling are lines in various stages of decay. The inorganic resembles the organic as it disintegrates, sagging lines vine around taut ones for support. The small towns circling my small city tend to have the most of these, repairs left for more fortunate times.

9-20-08

chair

Because sometimes between one mess and another I remember to catch the light.

10

02

08

procession

I lay looking up and once again I am looking at the barest lines of civilization sway.
Sown,
sewn,
lines of power.

cicada emergence

They dug themselves out of the mountain ground by the hundreds, climbed high and split wide. Red-eyed crawled out of their own backs, soft, vulnerable and white, wings crumpled, to sit and darken and harden their final form black. Flew away to hum in a chorus of a hundred million tiny wooden bells chatter clacking love. Ground riddled with perfect holes, cast off skins and black bodies. Dogs and birds grew fat, as will the trees this and every seventeenth ring.

Cotton

Driving up through the state of Georgia last November was to experience a different kind of economy. In western Georgia industrial agriculture holds royal court and Cotton is king. November is the end of cotton season, and between towns and patches of forest the fields are white. Tractors tear through them at high speed, leaving a wake of naked stalks. Mysteriously this process ends with cotton bales the size of freight cars patiently awaiting pick up. They prissily wear plastic cover proclaiming farmers names, while leaking their essence at the corners. White fluff litters both sides the highway all through the state. A small sliver of unharvested stalks beckon at the edge of the road, and I jump out to pluck bolls from them and fill my shirt. They have the smell of green pecan hulls, acrid and slightly sweet.

My dad used to pronouce "Oh lordy pick a bale of cotton" after a hard day landscaping another client's yard, and it's not till I get home with my meager cotton pickings that I look up the song sung by slaves and then by Leadbelly in 1945. ( I watched that video at least four times, with my mouth hanging open, it's beautiful: the video's color, his singing, playing a twelve string guitar, his educational spoken bit right at the beginning, there's joy and desperation and sadness and family running all through it.)The bolls sat for weeks in a corner of my studio, the husks turning brown and exploding in white puffs on the floor. Pick them up and mining for seeds is the game. Each boll has three or four sections similar to an orange made up of tightly packed fibers huddled around as many as eight or more seeds. There are three parts used from the cotton plant: the inch long fibers that pull away from the seed fairly easily are used for spinning into cloth, the short fibers still attached to the seed are called linters, which are used for making paper and the seed itself is pressed for oil. Many cotton handspinners insist you must pick out the seeds and vegetable matter and card them on very fine carders (cat combs work well) lay little sections side by side and roll them around a pencil to make cotton punis. A few drop spindle users spin off the seed itself. The former method seems a little tedious and so I have been following the latter using a supported spindle I made from a wooden toy wheel and a dowel. Though this method is hard to get a perfectly even or thicker thread, the feel of the cotton pulling in tiny pop pop from the seed under my fingers is satisfying. Five of the seeds I have spun in this way are the ones growing in my garden now, the first bloomed yesterday a small cream hibiscus flower that today closed and blushed a shade of purple while tiny skeins of cotton thread await the next transformation.

home(outsideof)town

The first two are from just outside the town I grew up in.

These next are from the cowfields I spent my childhood. Visiting makes me wish a camera was in my child hands. How would I have captured this place then?

Behind me here I found the nearly intact skeleton of a cow who died birthing her calf with tiny tiny split feet, her pale ribs and spine still arched above the ground picked clean by coyotes and the sweet white curve of her little one's ribs scattered across the forest floor. Hawks left behind tail feathers as a tribute to their meal. A persimmon tree nearby, laden with astringent orange fruit, attested the bitter view.
At the marsh below, I'd sing to the frogs and crickets when there were more, our voices rising and falling in the afternoon, nonsense and mostly out of tune, bovine bones and turtle shells dug from the black muck adorned a chickee fort.

A red hide dried tight across the skull pulled back thinned lips and once chased me away, the opened jaw in a haunted bellow followed me home and to school, until the idea to tan the skin pulled me back. Mud sucked at my shoes as the dried skin cracked from its bones, the stiff thing clattered behind on the way home. Soaked soft in a bucket with oak leaves and forgotten, until putrid and foaming it produced retching in those too close, the poured out the liquid tainted the ground and attracted the dogs until the next thunderstorm washed it down.

When the water rose changing the marsh to a pond, bits of logs were lashed together as an ineffectual raft, the patch of cattails promising tasty treats stayed forever just out of my reach.

Another day a calf lay quietly alone in the shade hidden in foliage, concern flooded my chest when it didn't rise at my approach. As my hands ran over it looking for an injury, my eyes watched for its mother. Its red coat ever so soft rose and fell under my hands and thrilled me. Its eyes still unconcerned, I sat a little longer and left it.This past week found the pond field closed to cows, overgrown with dogfennel, and the shade of the oaks tilled by feral pig snouts. Most critters tend to ignore dogfennel because of the poison harbored it harbors, but orange wooly caterpillars munched without reservation.

The pond's adjacent field held the first crop I've ever seen planted there; a white pipe at least a half mile long snaked across another field to irrigate the watermelon vines, cows congregated along its path grazing the grass made greener by its leaks. Curious groups of calves watched us pass by before bolting away heels kicking gleefully in the air.

black swallowtail larvae

The blur has been sighted here before.