spring news/letter

Last night the moon woke me up perhaps as a reminder that tonight is a full moon, the flower moon. Moon cycles have long played an important role as a time to reflect on my cosmology and take stock. Increasingly, my life is organized by the seasons and spring is my season to get busy in the studio making. It’s been a great season for it so far with a few exciting projects in the works and beautiful sunny days with the studio doors wide open as I make a complete mess and immerse myself joyfully in the busyness of making new work. I’ll share more about projects soon!

Today also happens to be Mother’s Day-  and feels like a good time to write my first news/letter!

Recent comments by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the “devastating effects of autism” hit like a gut punch. It’s the kind of cheap shot that lands hard, especially when I’m already using every ounce of energy to show up as the healthiest version of myself—for my kids, and especially for my son with autism. Red flags are waving, alarm bells ringing. This kind of rhetoric is dangerously dehumanizing. My nervous system is exhausted from bracing against the blows. Claiming to ‘solve autism’ by September paired with the creation of a database listing people with autism is beyond scary. 

I’m posting photos of work I made with my son almost 10 years ago during my undergrad as it resonates with how I feel in this moment. It was before we received an ASD diagnosis and were struggling to find a school that could support his needs. He had discovered some peace in the piano and often we’d sit playing notes together allowing the vibrations to wash thru us. The steel knot encased with sausage-stitched nude coloured pantyhose dancing before its ghost image burnt into a steel frame expresses my heartbreak and hopes. The void carved with arcing light thru steel allows the music to emit from embedded speakers, the black velvet framed sub structure acting as a sink for both light and sound. The dancing form lives outside now and I take great pleasure in witnessing it unravel and transform what I so tightly bound, the seasons shaping and sculpting with far finer beauty than I could manage. 

It’s a bit of a rant but I hope that my visual language says things better than my words. 

with accompanying piano piece made with my son when he was 10. (now 19!)

Recently I discovered the work of Paul Thek and the following quote hit a chord within, “We accept our thing-ness intellectually but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.” from “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries: The Life and Art of Paul Thek”. 

This confirms my impulse in this moment.. to inhabit any and all acts of  ‘dehumanizing’ and turn what is negative into a rebel cry, to claim it first as I learn to care for myself better and my family. 

It also leads me to think of another favourite passage that has been with me in the studio..

“When I find again the actual world such as it is, under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body, I find much more than an object: a Being of which my vision is a part, a visibility older than my operations or my acts. But this does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things.” 

The Visible and the Invisible,  Maurice Merleau-Ponty