Back in January when I started the @HOME Residency, I was in that rare time (for me) of putting the final touches on an art show, finishing up what had been conceptualized long before. I was in full production mode.
In this tenth week of the @HOME Residency, my studio life is returning to the snail’s pace speed that I typically live, each day slowly unfolding into the next.
It’s been a month since the show opened and it will be up for six more weeks. I appreciate this long run because the experience has had time to settle. Life has been happening all throughout – my mom started feeling better so after six weeks she moved out of my house and back to her apartment. I’m still caregiving every day but now it takes up less of my time. Emotionally, it’s an ever present hum.
In my empty studio, as I start slowly building new work, I go back to the starting point of my cycle of creation where I gather and sift, experiment and search. This isn’t laser focused, far from it. it’s like a waterfall of ideas, notes, thoughts, scraps.
In Rebecca Lindenberg’s poem “Love, An Index”, here in the section called “Fragment” is the perfect description of the ways in which amassing a pile of ephemera can lead to something whole.
I wish I could use these few lines as my artist statement.
Some fragments from this week:
a few drawings in my sketchbook . . .
and a piece of wall paper that has been my stash for years – I want to make a painting with this palette.
After my friend Bonnie’s funeral last week (see previous post), I thought once again about this illustrated conversation between Terri Gross and Maurice Sendak that I regularly revisit, especially when I need to be reminded that the foundation of my studio is “live your life, live your life live your life”: