My Hair

Printy Gallery

Check out the Printy Gallery.

I began making these cards last year when my good friend lavanya introduced me to what I now call "printy-ing". I use a my trustee Printy 4953 to make these cards which I sometimes send out and give away, but mostly stash around the city.

The Spinning Notebook

I just bought a scanner and now I am in the process of scanning notebooks and other 2d stuff. The first of which is my spinning notebook, which I will be posting here soon. Check back soon to view the whole thing!

Bristol Balloon Fiesta 2006 Brunel Stunt Ian Ashpole

flock

birds of a feather flock together

Reno Balloon Race 2006

Isn't life bizarre and fantastic. This looks like so much fun. Humanity is weird, this makes me laugh and us.

Flocking Starlings

I almost can't believe that this is real. The school of fish animation is starting to look more like this than fish. I am truly amazed.

Bird That Uses Cars as a Nut Cracker

I love crows, they are so smart. If they are truly teaching each other how to do this, I would argue it is a sign of culture among Japanese crows.

Proposal

I have decided to try to do some work a little more spontaneously. I have lots of ideas for work, and sometimes it is easy to overanalyse and plan things, when really the idea should be followed through in order to move further in questioning. Experiments are necessary. I am working on something like this right now.

This work involves my installtion class, not because I HAVE to do it for them, but because I really find the group pretty fascinating.

I am writing an intimate letter to each of them, even though I barely know most of them. In each of these letters I will say how I feel towards and percieve them, as well as write anything I would like to say to them, but will more than likely never say. Then I will cut them into individual words and send out the letters to each of them. It is up to them what they do with them, they may or may not try to piece it together. Even if they try they should never be able to put it back to it's original state and read the message in its entirety, but they may decode some of it,and some of it may not be anything like what I had written. A sort of puzzle.

Isolated words lose their context, without this they revert back to triggers for memory and signs. For example, if I see the word pumpkin I think of what I, personally, would usually think of / associate with the word pumpkin. It reverts back to how it relates as a sign and trigger to my consciousness, not how it relates when placed in a sequence. Our own assumptions colour our idea of what we imagine the context to be and makes it more difficult to determine the context in which they were used in the letter.

This piece is about the inadequecies of language, and how interpretable our subjective experience is, especially in terms of communication. This will be written in the spirit of honesty, curiosity and passion, but recognizes (and dialogues with) the existing social filters that prevent us persuing communication this open in person. I will keep a copy of each.

(Also, check out the Mail Art List)

Art Slides

Check out Carsten Hollers Giant Slides!
These slides measure 55.5 meters and drop 26.5m. Holler believes that our lives would be transformed if we used slides as a mode of transportation from point a to b, even if only once a day. He has also said that the play ground experience is underrated. I have to agree.
I would love to see this piece, and of course slide in it.

The idea of a pleasant fear, which is really what a thrill is, is fascinating to me. We're not talking scary movie kind of thing, but something real and felt with intensity. I would definitely agree would make me feel like a stronger individual, mentally at least. I really dig art that inspires strength, there is quiet a bit around right now that leaves you feeling weak.
What would you rather have a hand in?

(photo care of Ananova)

Sorting and Preparing Lichens

Separating the lichens from debris:


So far I am not entirely sure what some of the lichens I've collected are. I have managed to identify one, Parmelia Sulcata, which is common here in Nova Scotia. I am still on the hunt for the names of the others. Last night I separated the lichen from any other debris. In the case of the Parmelia it involved scraping off as much attached bark as possible (bark will darken or "sadden" the colour of the dye). The others mostly involved removing twigs and leaves.

Specimens:

The next step will be to prepare the lichens (that I have enough of) for the fermentation process and hope for good results in about three weeks time.

dye plants

Dan and I went on yet another gathering trip today, we collected some milk vetch, butter and eggs, goldenrod etc. Just enough to try dyeing some samples. I realized today my spinning is not keeping up with my gathering, so I am going to have to make a better plan for this project. If anyone has any information, or knows a great site on historical Irish and Scottish Dyes, please let me know. It will help me with my research. I haven't been able to find sufficient information or historical recipes. Yet, anyway.

Large scared stones between the tennis courts and appartment parking lots.

Bowl of Wool

Vessels; a gathering space

This is just one of the felted vessels I have been working on over the past few days. I have been thinking a lot about space and emptiness thanks to my architecture and Craft class. I wanted to make some small gathering spaces that could also be held. Contact with craft objects is important. They are not meant to just look at, they are functional, sensual, active objects that are meant to be used in some way. This is what keeps craft objects alive. The act of holding a vessel like this is grounding, its a sensual link to the physical world. I like to think that they encourage contemplation, a gathering together of thoughts to peer into; to question and gain insight.

As I make a vessel I focus on someone I know, hopeing they may make their way to that person and be accepted. While I made this vessel I was thinking of a friend from school who I think is a lovely person and I have learned from. The fleeced used was unbleached wool, a blend of wool and silk, and a bit of flame coloured sliver.


The card above is stamped with my craft "logo", I guess you could say, a cross section of an apple. Which is an important symbol for me personally. This same shape comes up in nature again and again. The core shape as I like to call it, can be seen in the magnetosphere, oort clouds, and other things even closer to home.



Oort cloud and Magnetosphere

Turtles Brazil Scuba Diving

A scuba diving video with sea turtles, beautiful. Posted by someone called Videosub on Youtube. (If lame guitar music irritates you just turn down the volume at the start.)

The Little Girl Giant



This was a show put on by the Royal De Luxe puppeteers in London called The Sultan's Elephant. This performance lasted over several days. The marionettes are amazing, compelling and HUGE. Check out their website http://www.thesultanselephant.com .

Mapping out our surroundings

Todays harvest was slim, we left late since I had been feeling sick earlier and spent a long while navigating the woods behind Mount Saint Vincent. There were so many fallen trees it was hard to move forward towards the campus without having to climb over or under a thick trunk every few minutes. A little St.johns Wort was about all we managed to pick up.
We did see some really neat orange mushrooms, but we don't know if ther are poisonous and its not best to experiment with something that could be noxious or a potential skin irritant.















We also found a long dirt road, which we followed for a while despite the "no tresspassing" and "private property" signs. We discovered a pond filled with waterlilies, but it was getting really dark and we didn't know where we going so we decided to head back. We went back through the woods behind the mormon church and went to run some grocery errands.

I'm glad that we are mapping out the areas near where we live. We are so often channeled through by signage, architecture, city planning, etc. We become unfarmiliar with our true surroundings. Never seeing some areas very close to us, deemed commercially useless they become "dead zones". Some are great greenspaces, others are manufactured, or a slow struggle between both. I feel it's nescessary for me to be able to visualize my surroundings. Not just the inside of my house, but outside and down the street. What does the land look like where I live? How can I get from point A to point B? What else lives here? Where am I anyway?

Lichen Hunting

Weeks are starting to blend together and it finally feels like the crunch is on when it comes to deadlines and things. It was cold when I woke up this morning and the leaves are rapidly changing colour behind the house.
I won't have much more time to harvest dyestuffs before it starts to get cold so I am really focusing on that now. Dan and I know a super secret spot near the house where there are beautiful colonies of lichen, some I've never even seen before. It is only accesible through a narrow spot that is blocked off by huge trees that fell during the hurricane. The other sides are blocked off my steep cliffs and high piles off rock. There are a lot of fallen trees, stones, and a dense carpet of pine needles and fallen leaves. The wood is punctuated with large boulders just covered in curly, hyperbolic green lichen. It's our very own rotten secret garden.

Lichens are so fascinating, they are actually two organisms involves in a symbiotic relationship! They are a combination of a fungus and a green alga or a cyanobacterium. The green alga produces food both for itself and the fungus by transforming energy from the sun into nutrients, this is photosynthesis. The body of the lichen is much different from what either organism would resemble on its own, the fungus supports and surrounds alga cells (to a point). The alga receives minerals that the fungus absorbs through the rock. To learn more check out the wikipedia article on Lichen.

It was easy to get quite a bit of lichen and still be eco-friendly. We only collected bits of lichen that had fallen off onto the forest floor. It was easy to spot since the lichen was so green yesterday due to the mist and rain (this particular kind is usually grey and crisp if it is sunny, dry day). I know it is a foliose lichen, but I am still trying to identify it.

This fruiticose stuff (below) reminds me so much of coral. I took the tinsiest sample and left the slugs dozeing. I think this must be a choice spot for slugs.


This also ties in to the work I am doing now about the colony/the entity. When does a group of living things become an enity or a being? What if they are made out of different kinds of living things, like this lichen for example? Well, I will admit it sounds like a pretty solid argument that the fungus and the alga are two seperate life forms. Sometimes it's not so clear though. What about a portugese man o'war? If you are familiar with them you're probably thinking about something lika a dangerous jellyfish, right? Well it turns out they aren't a jellyfish at all, a portugese man o'war is a colony of assorted polyps that create a gas filled float and pack a painful and dangerous sting. The gas filled float works like a sail above water and the stingers, with poisoned filled nematocysts paralyze prey. Another polyp, called a gastrozooids surround and digest prey. It's all very Sci-fi and alien isn't it. This is what they looks like.

Life is strange and amazing.