Possibility of Multitudes

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.              

Following is the introduction to the Artist’s Talk I gave about this body of work on November 14, 2019.

A few months back when I came in to talk to gallery owners Ross Martens and Darren O’berto about what my upcoming show was about, I couldn’t quite articulate my intentions.  There were too many layers, too many stories crossing over themselves, diving down and gasping for breath.  My last project, Voices of Resistance, had a message to shout, clear, and layered with history.  This show for me is much more of an emotional journey of being, a collection of whispers and side stories, it is indirect and circuitous, but suffused with a sense of the glory of being, a sense of connection to creatures great and small and stories past, present and future.  It is a quieter meditation, a search for an internal stillness amidst the chaos.  I was recently listening to Oprah interview Pema Chodron and I was intrigued to hear of Chodron’s 100 day silent retreats, a turning inwards, a quieting, but in this quieting she talks about how we are all always putting energy out into the world, carving and shaping pathways by what we extend and this felt interesting to me, this idea of our impact in the very act of being.  For me, stillness and quiet are essential, but they alone are not enough.  I have a need to gather threads and find intrinsic similarities, spaces of resonance with strangers, with birds, with trees.  This feels important, our intertwining.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So a few foundational stories, I was in Alley Gallery a few years back talking to Ross about an idea for a Still Life, the theme Yellow, Bees and colony collapse.  Ross offered that he had a goldfinch in his freezer that once he had intended to taxidermy, but that had not come to pass and if I might like it, it was mine to use.  And so the Still Life, Goldfinch and the Colony that Collapsed came to be.  Then I saw Darren’s incredible cyanotype with a gathering of bird bodies flecking the surface.  I wondered at where he had found so many birds and learned of Allison Sloan’s project collecting birds that collided with newly built Northwestern University surfaces, a consequence of our development that does not take into consideration so many things about the natural world including flight patterns and visibility or how the bird’s eye sees.  Many of Allison’s gathered birds are in these images. Over the years birds and flight have become, unconsciously, recurring themes for me and ones that have connected me to others.  If you asked me what super power I’d like to have flight or invisibility, I would always choose flight.  My grandparents were avid birders and so as a child, an attention to birds was paid.  Growing up in New York City it was mainly pigeons with their purple-blue iridescent wings, shimmers of green, the rats of the bird world that captivated me, but it was my grandparents sharing with us their hours of footage of nesting Piping Plovers on remote and desolate beaches where they would spend their summers scoping the shift of bird populations and gathering shells, turning their footage into documentaries that struck and stuck somehow.  And I guess I’ve always had a fascination with the murmurations of starlings, how they flock and fly and flip in these formations each of them a part of the whole.  When 1 bird shifts, they all do.  There is a sort of group think, a collective body.  Then there is the hummingbird, in many ways the opposite of the starling, migrating 500 miles in a solo flight, intensely territorial. I think there is something in bird behavior that might reflect our own or better yet might teach us something about ourselves.

In some ways I imagine this body of work as a love letter to the planet, there are threads of story, an emotional bonding, a certain intensity between a girl and a bird, a girl and a flock of birds, another bird, another bird—each one she cherishes, each one she wants to catch and hold, unlocking the songs they have sung, the life that fluttered, the birds changing as she does.  In this time of increasingly radical climate events, January temperatures in November, drifting arctic winds settling upon us climate anxiety, our unpredictable future, is elevated world-wide as we have begun to see climate refugees such as the Biloxi Chitimacha Choctaw of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, and the forced relocation of this tribe because of human caused climate change, uprooting them from their land, heritage and history, shifting the stories of future generations in the loss of familiar land because the sea is claiming this land as its own. And there are the rampant fires in California and Australia, whole towns engulfed and consumed like Paradise, floods and droughts destroying crops, I could go on, but I’ll leave that to the Naomi Klein’s of the world.  In this time of climate anxiety, our hope feels essential.  Our ability to find wonder in the magical world where narwhals and rhinoceros and morpho butterflies exist, where we as humans exist in so many different forms and yet despite our extreme differences we are still able to find mirrors and bridges in those around us.  This our ability to have reverence for the life that has been lived and hope for the life that will be lived, that feels essential.  As John Muir insists, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  And in this coupling with the universe, perhaps we are a little uncoupled from our ego based selves, allowed to open to something greater, something beyond us, a sense of deep time.  Maybe that’s what this is about, connecting to that sense of deep time finding the reflections that reverberate and recur.  Yonis Salk asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”  And this is the question as we gaze so deep into the depths of past and future being, all the astonishing glory of this here comes with immense responsibility, the resonate impact of our being, of our legacy, I look at what we have inherited, what has been brought forward and what has been lost, for good and bad and I want to name it for the purposes of remembering beyond our botanies of destruction and excavate it for the purposes of understanding all the links the stitch time together.  

And so this is what I came up with.  I think the best way to go about sharing this all with you, or at least a little bit of my inner-workings, is to start from what I think of as the beginning.  I’ll go around the room and speak about each piece, share with you a bit of backstory and read some of the poems tucked into these envelopes, then if there are any questions or comments we can talk more… And then I talked and people asked questions and a sort of unfolding release occurred.

Unfortunately this talk was not recorded, but if you have any specific questions about a piece in the show please feel free to ask. The full body of work, minus the 14 accompanying poems, can be seen here.

In the meantime Eco-Parent Magazine has just published a feature article in their Winter 2019 issue on The Alchemy of Hope by Manda Aufoches Gillespie. This article includes a bit about my bird collecting and is accompanied by images from Possibility of Multitudes. The magazine will hit newstands in the US and Canada on December 5th, following is the language of the article:

THE ALCHEMY OF HOPE

In the Era of Loneliness

by manda aufochs gillespie

“The dark is rising,” I say to my friend, Vanessa, a photographer who has called to tell me how a bird fell out of the sky and landed at her feet, dead, during her morning walk. She is obsessed with birds. She has hundreds of them in her freezer. Songbirds collected and given a second life captured in chilling, beautiful tableaus where they appear piled and presented like a cake, falling lifeless around the figure of a woman, or held in hand, the colours persistent, their forms perfect, even in death. “The birds are dying. They will continue to die. Like the canaries in the mines,” my friend says. 

As I write this the CBC is on in the background reporting on the “overlooked biodiversity crisis” represent by the 2.9 billion birds lost in North America alone over the last 50 years. When miners took canaries into the coal mines with them, the birds were to act as warning indicators: the presence of methane or carbon monoxide levels rising would kill the canaries giving the miners enough time to escape before they too succumbed to the toxic air. Here we are, watching the birds die, a warning of things to come, and yet we can’t seem to find our way out. 

TWELVE MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT

We live in what geologists are calling the Anthropocene epoch, anthropo meaning “human” and cene meaning “new or recent”. And as humans, we’ve been granted the role of chief architect of this new epoch, yet we are just a blip, a singular event in  the grand scale of time. The earth is around 4.6 billion years old, and humans a mere 200,000. To put it into perspective, if we were to squeeze the history of the earth into one calendar year, with earth being formed on January 1, the first life—algae—didn’t appear until March and the first fish didn’t appear until November. Dinosaurs appeared for ten days around Christmas, and Homo sapiens showed up 12 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Human’s may have arrived late to the party, but we have not arrived quietly. Instead, we have been responsible for atrocities, mass extinctions, and deforestation that arguably mark the end of the 12,000 year Holocene—an age characterized by climate stability and the rise of civilization—and usher in the Anthropocene (literally meaning “the age of humans”). The Anthropocene has not yet been dated with unanimity because to be defined as an epoch in geologic terms the remnants of the era must be literally set in stone and observable across the entire planet. Candidates to mark this advent cluster around 1945 (the date of the first detonation of a nuclear device), and include the radioactive signatures left by the atom bomb, permanent traces of lead from gasoline and its byproducts, and one day, could also include our fossilized remains that will bear the unique carbon isotopes of burning fossil fuels.

Yes, we have ignored those canaries and have invited the sixth great extinction into the earth’s history. The natural rate of extinction has been one to five species per year. Our reality, however, is the epic daily loss of dozens of species—99 percent of which is caused by human influence as a result of habitat loss, climate destabilization, and toxic pollution. Scientists estimate that 50 percent of all the species we once shared the planet with may be extinct by mid-century. Nearly every single bird that hits the forest floor or the sidewalk at our feet: our fault. 

THE AGE OF LONELINESS

Vanessa refers to our era as the Eremocine—The Age of Loneliness—a term coined by environmental hero and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist, E.O. Wilson, who envisions an earth that will have little left other than humans and domesticated plants and animals along with fungi, microbes, and jellyfish. I think about the eerie landscapes of Vanessa’s photos: places not quite real, but nevertheless familiar. Places often haunting in their loneliness. Will we miss—truly miss in our deepest souls—the birds and beasts and flora we never really knew? Wilson says we will, and indeed, already do. The International Psychoanalytical Association recognizes climate change as “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” with nature deficit disorder, climate grief, and eco-anxiety becoming realities for many people.

I have a sense that as a people we’ve forgotten something essential to survival. Maybe it boils down to not knowing how to live with this irony: to thrive knowing we will not survive, to live life even when its losses shatter us. How will we know ourselves and the deep, dark, unfathomable spaces without the otherness of the natural world? A world without wildness is a world without nature writers, without the E.O. Wilsons, Mary Olivers, Annie Dillards, and Wendell Berrys. Gone will be the guides to show us the deepest longings of our souls by taking us for a walk through an ant kingdom, into Blackwater Woods, along Tinker Creek, or onto a cherished Kentucky farm. Where will we go to learn to reach into those dark places inside and feel the glory of the light streaming in?

A friend recently came for dinner. She texted me in advance: “I can’t talk about climate change. I just spent two weeks uncontrollably crying.” She’d been reading Jem Bendell. A quick synopsis of the 36-page paper by the prominent academic basically amounts to this: It's too late to stop global warming. The apocalyptic times are already upon us. Even the privileged sitting in expensive homes in North America with plenty of food and water will be feeling the pain and experiencing the loss of societal collapse within the next ten years. “How do we parent through this?” is what my friend both wanted—and didn’t want—to discuss that night at dinner. 

Rex Weyler, parent, author, and co-founder of Greenpeace, agrees that the human population has significantly overshot the threshold by which the earth can sustain us. “A year ago, I polled two dozen of the most advanced, educated, active, working ecologists and scientists I knew and asked them: What do you estimate would be a sustainable human population?”  He included caveats: people had to still be able to live reasonably comfortable lives, eat good food every day, have access to some transport options, and wild ecosystems had to increase, not continue to shrink. The answers were estimates that ranged from 50 million to 2 billion.

In this lies the crux: will we, or will we not, live to see the sixth great extinction grow to include humans? Some say that we can still stop it if we reduce our greenhouse gasses, and consciously shrink human consumption and our populations quickly and dramatically. And there are others, like Jem Bendell, who suggest it is already underway. And while we may be able to lessen the impact, we must prepare for this extinction to personally and dramatically affect all human populations. To prepare, he says, means to identify the truly essential norms and behaviours we wish to preserve and work like hell to protect them as we prepare to relinquish all else.

AN EDUCATION IN REBELLION

This year, I took the train across Canada with my children and met Vanessa and hers in Montreal where we took part in an Extinction Rebellion event. “XR,” as it’s referred to, is a movement that uses civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to protest climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and the risks of social and ecological collapse. The activists performed a staged reenactment of the five previous extinctions in front of a very packed queue of ticketholders waiting to get into the Grand Prix. The reenactment portrayed the extinctions as groups of people running a slow-motion race, from the very beginning, to dinosaurs, and finally to humans. When they reached the point in the race that represented the current day, they all fell down as if dead. A group that included my children then ran up and outlined all the bodies in chalk while the rest of us chanted, “Extinc-tion Rebel-lion…Extinc-tion Rebel-lion.” The activists rose from the dead and the earnest troupe of perhaps a hundred stood incongruently facing thousands of car racing enthusiasts. Afterwards, the kids pulled out a pack of candy cigarettes they had been saving for a special occasion and pretended to smoke. The irony of it made me want to laugh and cry. None of us gets out alive.

BUT HOPE FLOATS

There is an alchemy that must happen in this place of uncertainty that is not unlike the alchemy that happens when one strives to consciously parent: the belief that our intentions can transform matter. If we can't save the world, perhaps with a little effort we can save ourselves and with an extra touch of magic, we can save our children. 

Environmentalist Karen Mahon, founder of Climate Hope, got married this year. She also became an ordained monk. Mahon is intimately aware of just how vulnerable the human species is to joining the sixth great extinction and yet she still studied for ordination, and still chose to marry—for the first time, despite their kids being fully grown— and invite her entire community to join in the celebration. The monk who presided over the ceremony said it was an act of glorification: to reveal the glory of the heavens through our actions on earth. I can’t get enough of this idea of glorification. That we may believe in the power and the magic of a perfect day, of 11 homemade wedding cakes and 200 hand-made blintzes, and the significance of committing to another, not out of legal or social obligation but because it represents profound hope. Not ironically then, it would only make sense that Mahon’s organization defines hope as the refusal to give up on love.

NEVERTHELESS, SHE PERSISTED

Perhaps it is glorification at play as my friend collects hundreds of beautiful dead birds and gives them a second life in her art. Perhaps it is hope that allowed me to choose to have children despite what I knew about environmental toxins and their impacts on their small, developing bodies. Did my friends reverence of the fallen birds save even one live bird from death? Or did my knowledge save my children from the impact of toxins, keep their brains whole and unblemished, or make me a perfect parent-protector? It did not. My mistakes are many. I have fed my kids chemical-laden foods in a pinch, I did not wash the stinky chemicals off the new sheets I wrapped my newborn in, and I was chastised at my child’s fifth birthday party for feeding the whole gang a non-organic ice cream cake dyed the brightest, coal-tar-and-benzene-assisted-blue imaginable. Furthermore, my climate impact has not been the minimal impact of my friends in Guatemala where my children and I once lived for a short time. We fly, we drive a gas-guzzler, and we heat with wood. 

What if the great destructive forces of the world, whatever one may believe them to be—capitalism, overpopulation, climate collapse—had been set into motion hundreds, or even thousands, of years before I chose whether to fly on that airplane or eat that non-pasture-raised hamburger or whether to have one child or two? For millennia we have alternately brutally destroyed and then ingeniously rebuilt the world more than once: World Wars, numerous genocides, the Spanish Flu, the Black Death, and Small Pox. We have had the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution. The world—or at least our time in it—is going to end, again, one day. 

And I will keep choosing the hard act of getting up in the dark to have time to write these few words before sneaking out to the chicken coop to gather eggs to make breakfast. I’ll do it so there is time to walk the kilometre down and up, and up some more to meet the school bus, then back down and up to homeschool the other child, and squeeze in time to arrange a semester of speakers for a community organization I started. Hopefully in there I will get a chance to call my friend with her pile of dead birds that she has gathered to make art to remind us that despite it all there are so many moments of beauty, of connection, of light to experience while we are here. And when I call her I will tell her, “The light called the dark,” because I may not know how things will end this time, but what I do know is that because we are human, we will fail. Yet every time we fail, we get to choose to get up and try again, and that’s what it means to choose hope.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

--Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

Voices of Resistance Show

This post is my effort to chronicle my recent show, Voices of Resistance, which was featured at Perspective Gallery during February 2019. The show featured work from my Voices of Resistance and #MeToo series and my residency at the Francis Willard Museum. During the show apart from my artist statements the walls were void of titles and descriptions, this information was compiled in a booklet for visitors to read at their leisure. I have been asked by a number of people if they might be able to revisit the content of the booklet, compiled here is much of that content. To begin is a brief personal and project background from my artist talk, and following are descriptions of some of the pieces. For information on the work made during my residency at the Frances Willard House please see the following post and for information on the abortion pieces which were the first images made for this show, please see my post of February 2017.

On February 21, 2019 Perspective Gallery hosted a conversation with the artist where I presented this project. After the talk, where many of the audience members shared their interpretations and responses, it felt as if this was the beginning of a conversation, one that revealed the deep pain we carry in our bones with the weight of the past, one where healing might occur as we wrestle and reckon with who we are collectively. It is an emotional journey to make work from a place deep within and have so many people relate to it on a meaningful level. One of the questions asked repeatedly throughout the run of the show was where will this be shown next? And I would love to share this show far and wide, but I’m not quite sure how to make such a thing a reality. So for those who weren’t able to come to the show in person, I hope this gives you a glimpse into the experience.

Personal and Project Background

Like so many I went to bed on the night of Nov 8, 2016 in disbelief, allowing myself to sleep only because I still had hope that the outcome of our presidential election would be different than it seemed to be. And until the electoral college confirmed our collective fears, I continued to hold on to the possibility of a different outcome. When reality was confirmed, as it has been so many mornings since November 9th, 2016 I continued to hope that it was only a matter of time until something shifted faster than the course of a presidential term. There was a collective sadness, a collective outrage, a collective disbelief and there still is. My coping mechanism in the face of challenge and turmoil is to make or do something tangible, physical, from what we can not touch or hold or immediately control.

As a college student my reaction to learning about the injustice of the world was to become actively involved in the causes that moved me most. I remember learning about the Puerto Rican Political Prisoners and the movement for Puerto Rican independence, a resistance movement against colonialism that began in the days of Spanish imperialism in Puerto Rico in 1898 and later about the case of Mumia Abu Jamal and writing letters and marching and holding rallies. I quickly found myself on the frontlines of the battle for human rights working to address the intersecting issues of poverty, race, education, healthcare and incarceration in the United States. I spent a summer working with Angela Davis, formerly of the Black Panther Party, on the Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex conference, and during my later college years working with Civil Rights attorneys Staughton and Alice Lynd on conditions of confinement cases in Supermaximum security prisons in Youngstown, OH. Later I worked for the Southern Center for Human Rights on class action lawsuits addressing human rights violations in prisons and jails in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. Having spent my formative years working with people who lived the best example of a passionate life, fully devoting themselves to using the skills and education they were privileged to have to doing their best to change the world for the better, when the shock of the 2016 election settled I felt a necessity to address the blatant disruption and undermining of the nation we hold dear through the medium that I hold dear. There were letters and phone calls to members of congress and marches of resistance in solidarity with my fellow progressives, but it all felt intangible. And so, Voices of Resistance was born to grapple with and make, in some way, tangible the effort to salvage and reconstruct our social fabric of decency and democracy as many of us envision it.

I have looked to the past for inspiration in this project because history has such a wealth of knowledge to share, because there there is hope for transformation, because there there is insight to the long game of dogged commitment and slow change. I have looked to history to understand the struggles, gallant efforts and endurance of the unsung women who came before us, to find inspiration in the work they did to lay the cornerstones of who we are today; to build a bridge of conversation between then and now in order to connect more deeply to those who were ignored and devalued in the past, so that we might imagine a more inclusive future for generations to come.

Although we are confronted daily with what seems impossible, with the nepotism of an unstable tyrant, with lies and contradictions and inconsistencies, there is hope in the steady convictions and sentencing of those close to the President through the Mueller Investigation, there is hope in the growing pool of democrats running for President in 2020 and hope in the new class of democratic congress women who were recently sworn in. Just as there is a tremendous amount of work to be done now to ensure transformation, we are hopeful as were those engaged in the long-game of socio-political transformation in the past.

This show consists of a number of interlinked projects each reflecting fears and inspiration of the past two years. Immediately after the elections I found myself thinking about upcoming supreme court appointments and the conservative justices who were sure to be sworn in and the impending potential for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, then there was the women’s march and reflecting back on women’s organizing through out history, and an incredible never before seen image of Harriet Tubman and mass shootings and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo campaigns, outgrowths of so many prior movements for social change, but with possibly greater platforms. Each of these moments and movements captured my imagination and compelled the making of images. Through slow steady stitching of costumes and props, painting of backdrops and researching my family tree for a personal history of immigration to visiting prop houses and the Lyric Opera to borrow costumes, this has been a journey of making and gathering. But most importantly it has been a journey of connection and community. In a time when people feel increasingly isolated and disillusioned, I felt the need to connect in person and make something in the spirit of togetherness that might reflect the weight of history and the possibility of change.

A Song For A Woman Who More Than Mattered (Above photo & letterpress piece)

This is an homage to all the black women throughout history cut down before their time, silenced and subjugated. This image speaks to the courage and solemnity of movements for Black freedom in the United States. Throughout U.S. history from Abolition to the Anti-Lynching Movement to the Civil Rights Era to the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter campaign people have banded together to stand and fight for the rights of Black people because we continue to live in nation and a world where all people are not treated equally. Women have been the backbone of these movements.

Letterpress prints made in collaboration with Ben Blount, http://benblount.com/

Above are thumbnail images of my work from the Francis Willard house and the polyglot petition made for the Francis E Willard and Ida B Wells image. The scroll is hand stenciled and sewn and is about 35 feet in length.

In the Willard and Wells image, thumbnail second from the right, I imagine a conversation between Willard and Wells, although they are not known to have met in private in real life, only in limited public engagements. Wells is explaining her perspective to Willard, describing her observations of lynching in the American South, the grave impact on the moral and social fabric of our nation. Willard has listened deeply and felt the necessity of Wells anti-lynching movement. She is reflecting on her past comments and doing penance for her prior public words. By writing Black Lives Matter over and over and over again she is both absorbing the impact of her own previous slanderous actions and aligning herself with the movement. She is in a new found position of humility and advocacy for racial parity and justice. The scroll that Willard is composing is inspired by the Polyglot petitions that the WCTU is known for utilizing to gather signatures on a specific issue and then present before congress to demonstrate the number of supporters for a specific political issue they hope to change. In this image, Wells is both in a position of power, standing over Willard, but also one of offering advice and information. It is imagined that they are able to peel back the weight and emotion of the history of their interaction and allow themselves to be vulnerable and honest to work together toward change. By utilizing Black Lives Matter, a photo from the frontlines of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington and the Wells-Willard exchange we see the bridge of history of how deeply racism is institutionalized in the fabric of our nation and how much work we still have to do.

12th Generation Immigrant Image

A colonial settler child gives voice to her descendants support for immigration in a sampler. This image is inspired by the long history of immigration to the United States. The first person in my family to immigrate to the "new world" arrived as an indentured servant on the Mayflower in 1620. He came seeking a better life, new opportunity. Of course the resulting actions of many early colonialist are incredibly problematic, but here I’m hoping to address the imagined potential a new beginning in a new place offers, obviously in the case of the formation of the United States it came at great expense, on the backs of slaughtered Native Americans and enslaved African peoples. But still, the United States has served as a beacon of hope for many people around the world, a place where perhaps a new life is possible. Although it is questionable whether the “American Dream” is actually attainable for all people, it is an enduring concept. The current president has sought to severely curtail the number of migrants entering the country from Muslim nations to anybody crossing our southern border, these actions have brought our nation to a stand still, but those opposing him holdfast to the idea that this land should be a place of refuge and a beacon of hope and opportunity for those who have been persecuted and seek a new beginning. This image imagines a child descendent from immigrants reflecting back on her family history, embracing the path her family has trod and believing it should remain a path for others seeking similar new beginnings.

Image: Harriet’s Commitment.

This image takes inspiration from the determination of U.S. abolitionist Harriet Tubman and her heroic commitment to leading enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad. For 10 years, as a fugitive slave with a bounty on her head, she returned to the South and lead enslaved people to freedom. Her laser focused commitment, her persistence despite the danger, inspires so many today to work for what they believe in. In February of 2017 an image of a young Tubman surfaced that was not previously publicly known. This newly uncovered image of her moved me deeply as we are used to seeing her in her old age, worn by the years, but this image shows her in the prime of her life during the period she was living in Auburn, NY caring for fugitive slaves in their old age.

The photograph is overlaid on prints of famous Tubman quotes that have been adapted due to space constraints. Prints were made by Ben Blount, http://benblount.com

Image: In Preparation for Revolution.

This image imagines a woman in preparation for revolution; she is engaged in handiwork, a craft historically seen as the realm of women, but is using this skill as a source of power, to create a hat to symbolize her resistance, similar to the hats worn during the Women’s Marches of 2017 and 2018. Instead of Betsy Ross creating a flag for a new nation, a contemporary Latina woman revisits her ancestral grand-mother, finding inspiration and drawing strength from her roots. Behind her the canton of the flag is extracted and expanded, with infinite stars/states, and painted red to depict the blood spilled in the creation of our nation. She is conjuring a time for change.

Image: #Never Again, #Enough is Enough.

This image reflects on the distress our nation endures each time a mass shooting occurs due to our inability to implement better gun control laws. We do not have to accept mass shootings as an inevitability that may one day take our children from this earth, but rather we have the capacity to legislate against such an eventuality. I was compelled to make this image, not out of a need for shock value, but from a deep space of dread and fear of what is to come if we fail to implement better background checks, ban high capacity magazines and prohibit assault-style weapons. In the words of Senator Cory Booker, “To not act is to be complicit in the continued violence.”

Cross-stitched placards worn by the women and girls featured in these photographs.

Image: Future Leaders.

These images are a love letter to all the women through out history who stood up for what they believed in and worked tirelessly despite the odds. They were once school aged girls who defied the naysayers to embrace a path of possibility so that greater opportunity might be afforded to future generations. Here’s to inspiring the future leaders and the potential they boldly embody. The seeds have been planted and they are flourishing.

With an eye to the past: it was in 1917 the first woman was elected to Congress. In 1964 the first woman of color was elected to Congress. In 1968 the first black woman was elected to Congress. In 1992 the first black woman was elected to the Senate. In 1872 the first woman ran for U.S. President. In 2016 the first woman nominated by a major political party ran for U.S. President. Today, thus far, four Democratic women are running for President.

In the 243 years that the United States has existed as a country we have been slow to include the great diversity of voices that constitute "We the People", power being held and maintained by a narrow set of privileged white men, but the hands of time are ticking around an expanding clock and the dominate paradigm is shifting. The 116th Congress includes 131 women, including the first Native American and Muslim Women. And we are amidst a painful power struggle of divisiveness and factionalism, but there is a bright glimmer of possibility on the horizon.

Images from the Keep Abortion Legal series.

Making these images became essential for me shortly after the inauguration. They are about preserving a woman's right to choose. The intention was to depict a woman driven to give herself an abortion at home, the results are unknown, is she hemorrhaging, in excruciating pain, resting after the exertion of performing surgery on herself, deceased? In this, she is alone, pushed into the darkness and at that moment of rest she is discovered by her daughter, or maybe visited by the ghost of another daughter. She is in a fetal position, perhaps a rebirth of herself. The hanger images are entitled Not A Surgical Instrument, in reference to the history of women who have performed their own abortions using wire hangers. And the close up on the placenta and gynecological tools is entitled Never Again, never again shall we be forced back in time to a moment when we might be put in a position where we would consider performing our own abortions. The placenta and the majority of the blood used in these images are real. They are mine.

For more information please refer to my article: Let’s Talk About Abortion contained in a blog post from February 2017.

Image: Installation shot of complete #MeToo series.

#MeToo Statement

The Women’s March of January 2017 marked a new wave of resistance bringing millions of people together with a sense of common cause. This mobilization shepherded ignored voices to the fore; provoked by the trauma of a man being elected who flaunts his ability to objectify and molest women. From the greek myth of Cassandra and Apollo to Anita Hill women have not been believed when they speak out against their transgressors. The #MeToo movement of today feels like one of the ways our culture is shifting to acknowledge the experiences of many women. Each woman has a distinct personal and ancestral experience of sexual assault from the brutality of slavery, the rape and massacre of Native women, the violence and aggression that comes with colonization to stories of isolated individual incidents of rape, assault and molestation. By banding together and supporting the diverse voices of women who have been violated and abused, the abuse becomes a visible part of our culture, one we must confront. It is my hope that together we are stronger. That we as 21st century individuals are galvanized by both singular and collective histories of violence against women; that we desire to know deeply the experiences of others, to hold them up to the light in order to speak truth to a power that for centuries has gone unchallenged. Today we stand for change, for our foremothers, the struggles they endured and the work they did to lay the cornerstones of who we are today, to the bright future we imagine for our daughter’s and our daughter’s daughters.

#MeToo is a fine art photography series depicting women young and old giving voice to stories of sexual assault and abuse past and present. It includes twenty women from a diversity of backgrounds all clad in victorian style mourning dresses, a dress worn by European women during the period to connote the loss of a loved one. In this instance it is not the loss of a physical being, but the negation of the voice of women throughout history across the globe whom have been subjected to sexual violence that is referenced by the European style dress, the dress of one of the greatest colonizers in history. The seed of inspiration for this series was planted on the night of the Golden Globes when Hollywood women wore black as a collective voice of protest against the culture of sexual harassment. The #MeToo placard is a sort of reverse scarlet letter, in the case of Hester Pryne, she was made to wear the letter A and stand before a crowd, shamed for the act of adultery, here the collective impact of so many women who have a #MeToo experience is meant to bring awareness, it is a shameful history of unrepentant perpetration that we should no longer be willing to quietly endure. By depicting women of today in a dress code of the past it is my intention to demonstrate the sense of time that women have been subject to sexual abuse in hopes that we can create a cultural shift so that the experience is not perpetuated in future generations.

Installation image from ArtPrize in September of 2018. Hopefully this gives a Perspective of what the installation looks like in a larger space. Each image is 20”x30”.

As an outgrowth of this project I hosted an in gallery photoshoot asking people to show up as their version of a Resistor, however they might interpret this concept. Over a four hour period we made images of eight separate groups and individuals. From the embodiment of Gabriel Silang, the Filipina revolutionary leader who lead the fight for independence from Spain in the 1760’s to a family of four who are active protestors and brought their beautiful signs, this was an incredible way to expand the project from the past to the present.

Thank you for taking the time to explore this project a bit more deeply! Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have further questions about the work. It is my hope that if this project is able to travel, with each installation I would create more contemporary resistor images from self-selecting audience members who imagine themselves as such.

A Woman's Place is in the Revolution: A Residency at the Frances Willard House.

Historic Image of Frances Willard and her assistant Anna Gordon

The Willard house, built by Willard’s father and continually occupied by the WCTU, has been mostly restored and captures a sense of what life might have been like within it’s walls when Willard resided there, all abustle with fervent women researching, writing, planning and distributing information.  Unusually, there are a number of photographs of the interior of the house in its heyday capturing life in action, so the translation from organizing hub to house museum and back again was not so difficult to imagine. The rooms are small and the light limited which pushed my creativity and technical skills as a photographer.  After making initial survey images of the house I went home and examined the images, meditated on them, and conjured my own version of the activities that might have gone on within this hive and how they relate to present day organizing. I then mapped out what I envisioned for each room of the house, making costumes and props and calling on friends to become actors in vignettes.  At each shoot I told a story of the characters in the vignette and the particulars of what they were doing and why. I asked each woman  to imagine that they were existing as a woman of the past, present and future, a bridge anchored in history.  Although they wore the clothing of the past, they bore the wisdom and insight of today.

Ramibi Circle.

In 1887 Pandita Ramibi, India’s first prominent feminist, came to the United States to spread the word and garner support for her work with child widows in India.  After the birth of her daughter she resolved to spend her life attempting to better the status of women in India.  She spoke out in support of female education and against the practice of child marriage and the resulting constraints of child widows. She founded a school/mission for widowed child brides which still exists today and serves a wider gamut of needy people including widows, orphans and the blind. In July of 1887 she met Willard over dinner inspiring Willard to organize Ramibi Circles in which individual members of the WCTU made a pledge to support Ramibi’s work by donating a dollar a year for a decade to support Ramibi’s work and school.  The results of these efforts contributed to the empowerment and education of young Indian women toward self-sufficiency and socio-political participation.

This image depicts a dinner with Ramibi and Willard flanked by fellow members of the WCTU and a younger generation of girls, perhaps activists in training, girls being educated and empowered with the skills to advocate for themselves and others in the decades to come. On the table are documents old and new, including the books I am Malala and The Pink Sari Revolution, both current Indian female lead efforts aimed at educating and exacting justice for girls and women.  This is a teachable moment, possibly their is a discussion of the sexual exploitation of girls and young women throughout history happening, a discussion of what these young girls can do to protect and advocate for other girls and women.

Historic Image of Rebecca Krikorian and Frances Elizabeth Willard.

A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution (See first image in this post)

Willard and her mother Mary were incredibly close and lived together in Rest Cottage until the end of Mary’s life.  Mary was Frances’ earliest teacher and although Mary took classes at Oberlin College in Ohio, she did not complete a college degree.  It is likely that Frances was inspired to pursue a life outside of domesticity after witnessing her mother’s life under the yoke of it.  Willard attended North Western College for Ladies and later briefly became the dean of the Women’s College of Northwestern.  After resigning from this post she focused her energies on the WCTU which she became President of in 1879 and remained so until her death in 1898.  Using the WCTU platform to advocate for social change she averaged 400 lectures a year to audiences around the world. This image imagines that there are so many women of the past and present whose mother’s inspire their journey to pursue a life of greater impact.  In Mary’s bedroom a woman embodying the spirit of the potential before her takes the possibility of a mother’s regrets and looks out toward a world of actions, imagines the possibilities of revolution, imagines how she might contribute to the world and what changes she might make to improve the lives of those to come.  During the women march of 2017 I captured many images of women inspired to work toward change today, to fight with a dogged commitment for what they believe in.  The A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution image in the window frame is one of them, turned diaphanous to transcend time.

Power to the Polls.

Power to the Polls depicts Frances Harper, an African-American abolitionist, suffragist, poet and author who was head of her local WCTU chapter in Philidelphia and Catherine Waugh McCullloh a lawyer, suffragist and member of the WCTU who was one of 100 female attorneys in the country in the 1890’s  and would go on to become the first female Justice of the Peace in Illinois and first female presidential elector. Both women committed much of their lives to the cause of women’s suffrage and were instrumental in achieving the vote for women.  This image imagines a moment of both confidence and power, where Harper and McCulloch are partnered in their pursuit of strategizing over the next steps in the fight to obtain the right for women to vote. The image is also a celebration and encouragement for us today to embrace our right and responsibility to vote, and speaks to the history of the power of voting. The present day Women’s March platform kicked off a Power to the Polls campaign in January 2018 to register voters, engage impacted communities and harness the collective energy to advocate for policies and candidates that reflect our values and the election of more women and progressive candidates to office.  Similarly the women of the WCTU worked tirelessly to have their voices represented and to push congress toward more progressive legislation despite not  initially having the vote. On the wall to the left of Harper is a map of the US in 1911 marking the states that had suffrage and those that were on the brink of suffrage.  In 1913 Illinois gained suffrage for women and in 1920 women’s suffrage was officially adopted by the nation, although discrimination and denial of the right to vote persists in insidious ways even after the success of the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.  Layered into the image as well is one of the posters Shepherd Fairey designed for the Women’s March of 2017 that has a tag line, not shown, We The People Protect Each Other.  Underlying this image is an image from the August 26, 1970 Women’s Equality March where 50,000 people marched in the streets of New York city to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the nineteenth amendment. The many parts of this image are combined to create a historical narrative of the past reaching toward the future. (It is noteworthy to mention that the woman depicting Catherine Waugh McCulloch is actually her grand-daughter, so a very direct descendent from this particular moment in history and that national and international meeting of the WCTU were not segregated, but that local chapters of the WCTU often met in and through their churches and were segregated. Harper visited the national WCTU headquarters at Rest Cottage and would have met and worked with other black and white women who were in the house at the time.)

Historic image of women at work in the office where the Power to the Polls Image was made.

A Room of One's Own.

There are several archival images of Willard surrounded by libraries worth of books, stacked and shelved about her, papers in piles and photographs tacked around her work space.  She was an avid reader, consumer of information, thinker and writer.  This image imagines a young Frances in her bedroom in a quest for knowledge about the future. She is preparing for a lifetime committed to the labor of empowering women young and old across the boundaries of race, class and nationality. Reading text after text she has settled in with Together We Rise: The Women’s March Behind the Scenes At The Protest Heard Around The World, in order to gather wisdom about what is important to women of the future so that she might better shape her efforts. Perhaps she had a certain psychic clairvoyance that allowed her to borrow pre-release texts, a sort of free library with the future.  Willard was known for reading late into the night and taking notes on her slate to inform her later writing.  

Historic image of Willard at work in her office.

Willard & Wells.

Although Willard worked on many issues to transform the social fabric of her time, her politics around race were complicated.  Her parents were abolitionists and provided safe-haven on the underground railroad while the family lived in Oberlin, OH and she ensured that the meetings of the national and international WCTU were integrated and worked closely with women of various races both nationally and internationally. But individual state local chapters of the WCTU were segregated.  This is likely because meeting were often held in churches and other segregated gathering places and were thus segregated by the nature of where and why and how people gathered in that day.  When Willard was at the height of her work around suffrage, she placed a certain emphasis on encouraging white WCTU chapters in the South to mobilize for the vote as white women of the WCTU from the South during that time were less inclined to organize for suffrage, thereby not placing an equal emphasis and value on the black southern chapters of the WCTU.  There is also a chronicled historic tension between the journalist, educator and early civil rights advocate, Ida B Wells and Frances E Willard.  Wells traveled the country and parts of Europe speaking out against the violence and prejudice against black people rampant in the US in the 1890s. She documented how lynching was used in the South as a way to control or punish black people rather than being based on criminal acts by black people, and lead the efforts in the Anti-Lynching Movement.  Willard did not immediately speak out in support of the Anti-Lynching Movement and Wells called her out for failing to use her political sway as a voice of resistance in this movement, a case of silence perpetuating violence.  Wells also pointed to an interview of Willard during her tour of the American South in which she had blamed black behavior for the defeat of temperance legislation. "The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt," she had said, and "the grog shop is its center of power.... The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities."  Wells felt strongly that Willard's attitude inflamed the crimes against African Americans in the US and that as a woman with such great power she had a responsibility to speak out against the unfounded abuse of black americans.  

Willard did later sign on in support of the Anti-Lynching Movement and in her 1894 Presidential Address to the WCTU stated:

It is inconceivable that the W.C.T.U. will ever condone lynching, no matter what the provocation, and no matter whether its barbarous spectacle is to be seen in the North or South, in home or foreign countries. Any people that defends itself by shooting, burning, or otherwise torturing and killing any human being, for no matter what offence, works a greater retribution upon itself by the blunting of moral perception and fine feeling than it can possibly work upon any poor debased wretch or monster that it thus torments into another world. Concerning the stirring up of the lynching question in Great Britain, I have thought that its reaction might have a wholesome tendency, and for this reason urge the following resolution, which was offered by Lady Henry Somerset at the last annual meeting of the British Woman's Temperance Association, and unanimously adopted, and which has been adopted by many of our State unions:

Resolved, That we are opposed to lynching as a method of punishment, no matter what the crime, and irrespective of the race by which the crime is committed, believing that every human being is entitled to be tried by a jury of his peers.

The interactions between Wells and Willard are a noteworthy and teachable moment.  It seems that Willard, who harbored judgments about black men under the influence of alcohol, as she harbored judgements about all men under the influence of alcohol, was able to truly listen to and hear Wells' message about the barbarity of white lynch mob behavior.  Through this controversy, she became an upstander, an individual who sees injustice and acts, no longer a bystander. The image I created in Willard's office is an effort to encompass this journey of transformation and active participation in a movement that was not one of Willard's initial causes.  In this moment I imagine a conversation between Willard and Wells, although they are not known to have met in private in real life, only in limited public engagements.  Wells is explaining her perspective to Willard, describing her observations of lynching in the American South, the grave impact on the moral and social fabric of our nation.  Willard has listened deeply and felt the necessity of Wells anti-lynching movement.  She is reflecting on her past comments and doing penance for her prior public words.  By writing Black Lives Matter over and over and over again she is both absorbing the impact of her own previous slanderous actions and aligning herself with the movement.  She is in a new found position of humility and advocacy for racial parity and justice.  The scroll that Willard is composing is inspired by the Polyglot petitions that the WCTU is known for utilizing to gather signatures on a specific issue and then present before congress to demonstrate the number of supporters for a specific political issue they hope to change.  In this image, Wells is both in a position of power, standing over Willard, but also one of offering advice and information.  It is imagined that they are able to peel back the weight and emotion of the history of their interaction and allow themselves to be vulnerable and honest to work together toward change.  By utilizing Black Lives Matter, a photo from the frontlines of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington and the Wells-Willard exchange we see the bridge of history of how deeply racism is institutionalized in the fabric of our nation and how much work we still have to do.

Historic Image of the Polyglot Petitions gathered by the WCTU.

Dear Sisters.

This image speaks to the long history of sexual abuse and collective efforts of women working to protect the mental and physical welfare of other women.  In 1886 members of the WCTU began working to increase the age of consent.  In most states at the time the age of consent was between seven and ten years old.  In the following decades members of WCTU gathered fifteen thousand signatures on a polyglot petition on behalf of increasing the age of consent.  Despite the signers not having the vote, they presented these signatures before congress and shortly most states increased the age of consent to between 14 and 18 years old.  Today sexual predilections and violations are not so openly accepted,  we have laws to protect our youngest, but there are no guarantees against sexual assault and it persists in families, on the street and in the work place. #Times Up is the legal arm that has grown out of the #MeToo movement to support the prosecutorial efforts of victims of sexual assault.  In the founding days of this campaign there was a public exchange of letters that began Dear Sisters between the 700,00 members of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and the over one thousand member Hollywood based #TimesUp legal organization.  In these letters a commitment to support and uplift the voices of victims of sex crimes across race, class and occupation was made.  This image hopes to capture the lengthy history of diverse women working together to protect each other from sexual abuse.  I have included the official portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her career efforts to protect the rights of women and work toward empowering the voices of the under recognized and underserved. 

Historic Image of WCTU workers.

Futurist.

Willard is often pictured wearing a Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war, cameo pin.  British suffragists wore her likeness on their cameo brooches as a sign of their commitment to the struggle and movement for suffrage.  It was a dogwhistle of sorts, similar to the coded messages in Victorian flower arrangements like the tussie-mussie, more than a beautiful adornment it was a way for fellow suffragists to recognize one another.  This image imagines a young woman of the 1890’s, perhaps a suffragist, looking toward an afro-futuristic strong woman for inspiration.  She is looking to the future for strength rather than the past, gathering her courage from the women who have come before her, but grasping for the future on her unknown path, standing for all those who have been silenced, she wields the wisdom of Minerva but forges forward for what is to come.  Perhaps others who wear the future woman symbol will recognize her as they pass, will join her on this road to societal transformation.

Historic portrait of Willard with Minerva cameo pin.

Thank you to Lisa D who had the intuition to connect me with the Willard House, to Lori Osborne  the director of the Willard House for sharing her insight into Willard’s history and supporting my vision, and to the Evanston Arts Council for believing in the project enough to provide a funding grant.

A Nursery Rhyme for You.

This morning I took down my solo show, A Nursery Rhyme for You, salvaging the work from near destruction after a pipe leak at the gallery.  It came down a day early so there is a slight chance that you hoped to go to the gallery but were thwarted by an unexpected closure, or perhaps you live far away and weren't able to telepathically commute for the show.  And so, I'm going to attempt to create a little bit of a virtual sense of the show here.  I've included installation shots and each of the images from the show.  The prints are 20"x30" and were framed in white wood without a mat or glass so they feel a bit like tangible objects one might enter into.  A Nursery Rhyme for You is an umbrella project that encompasses several sub-sets of story threads, many of which have multiple images and stand alone with a more specific theme.  This is an edited version of what someday will be a larger book project...ooo there I said it...someday a book project!

During the duration of the show I gave an artist talk that I sheepishly mentioned to no one, hoping nobody would show up so I wouldn't have to speak.  But in the end about ten people came and we had a lovely and lengthy conversation about the involved stories behind many of the images.  Following is my intro to that conversation:

In childhood we are both susceptible to the world around us and more easily able to delve into our imaginations, sometimes unable to differentiate the two or more often using our imagination to help us make sense of what is real. As adults we retreat into a world of fantasy to see more deeply into the human condition, but also to escape the horrors of it or at least make it more palatable.  Story and narrative are an essential part of our ability to relate to one another, we seek refuge in story or share a story to explain something.  It is the power of imagination and story that I am most captivated by and eager to delve into.  As an adult I reflect back on my own childhood imagination and how it enabled me to piece together an understanding of the world, how it made mundane experiences enjoyable.  I long for that space of existing on the cusp of imagination and reality.  The raw sense of aliveness that it provides.

I feel as if having children has given me a second chance at accessing the childhood imagination.  And perhaps as an adult I romanticize what it was to wander aimlessly through fields imagining myself as Laura Ingles Wilder or those hours spent sitting huddled with my sister in my great-grandmother’s attic oggling her padlocked steamer trunks, fantasizing about the possible ballgowns within or all those trips to The Met, Cooper-Hewitt and Guggenheim where I’d pretend the museum was my home.  I wished so hard for each of these threads of imagination to be real and now in some ways, I bring that same sense of hopeful possibility into my making today.  I want for these moments to be real. And it is my fear that children today are so overstimulated and busy that there isn’t room for the expansive space needed to unleash the imagination to its fullest capacity.

This series, A Nursery Rhyme for You, started from my knee jerk luddite response to contemporary culture and certain parenting choices. I am heartbroken by how often young children are handed a device or screen to keep them busy.  I was raised in a household without a television.  As a child of the 70’s and 80’s I could not converse with my peers about much of popular culture, but I created a world for myself to substitute for the world of television.  It lacked a certain social currency that I continue to struggle with today when it comes to making conversation, but in this denial I found myself.  Today it is not that I shun all access to technology for my own kids, but rather I try to help guide constructive use of it and allow time and space for them to access their deepest imagination, to explore the world as they wish for it to be. 

In this era where our lives are overflowing with stimuli, keeping the brain ever engaged, I wonder if we are hindering access to our deepest creative selves.  In my experience, my ideas come when my brain is given space to mull, to turn an idea over and over until it is honed, a smooth stone shinning clearly before me. As an artist I want to create the space to connect to one’s own imagination without technology, to cultivate the possibility of a more magical existence while also attempting to impart an honest sense of the world we live in today. I want, amidst the challenges and pain of a troubled world, for children to be able to imagine themselves beyond their own existence. I want to create opportunities  for each of us to step into a story that is not our own, to empathize with another, to dig into a possible experience more deeply, to both dwell on and delete some of the darkness in any given scenario, to try on a moment or a feeling for size, to understand what it might be like to exist in that portal to another reality, to learn from it, but also leave it behind, as if in a dream.

I find inspiration in dreams, fairytales and nursery rhymes, the natural world and current events.  I am an avid reader of both fiction and non-fiction and through narrative feel a greater connection to the world around me.  It is my hope to create narrative fragments that open the possibility of expanded narratives and imagination for others, each image a stand alone snippet that can be strung together, gathering a sense of the possible stories of any given life. A Nursery Rhyme for You is my love letter to motherhood, childhood and the possibility of imagination.  

Thank you for taking the time to wander in my world for a minute.

Let's Talk About Abortion.

He said make America Great Again.  Is taking away a woman's right to choose how she uses her body great?  Is compromising the quality of a mother and child's life for values that are not those of the mother, great for her, her child, her community, her country?  Is forcing women into back-alley abortion clinics or worse putting women in the position where they may resort to performing their own abortions great?  We as a country, as women, have worked hard fighting for equality, equality in the workplace, equality in our communities, equality in our committed relationships and yet, in many instances, we have yet to  achieve full parity with our male counter-parts.  By having control over our own bodies, we have a greater chance of equality. 

As individuals we have chosen many different paths.  We have worked hard to become doctors, artists, lawyers, writers, scientists, professors.  We have worked hard in factories, in government, in schools, in homes.  We have done our best to care for our bodies, to protect our bodies.  We have stood up for the rights of ourselves and others.  We have been responsible and thoughtful in our choices.  We, as twenty-first century American women, and women living in America, from diverse race and class backgrounds believe that our bodies are our own.  We are not here to be a host to grow a future generation if we do not so choose, we are not here to be studied, a la the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and many others, without our consent.  We are here to embrace our freedom of expression, our freedom of choice and we are here to make America a more perfect union.

Making these images became essential for me shortly after the inauguration.  They are about preserving a woman's right to choose.  The intention was to depict a woman driven to give herself an abortion at home, the results are unknown, is she hemorrhaging, in excruciating pain, resting after the exertion of performing surgery on herself, deceased?  In this, she is alone, pushed into the darkness and at that moment of rest she is discovered by her daughter, or maybe visited by the ghost of another daughter.  She is in a fetal position, perhaps a rebirth of herself. The hanger images are under the working titles of Not A Surgical Instrument, in reference to the history of women who have performed their own abortions using wire hangers.  And the close up on the placenta and gynecological tools is entitled Never Again, never again shall we be forced back in time to a moment when we might be put in a position where we would consider performing our own abortions. The placenta and the majority of the blood used in these images are real.  They are mine.

Four years ago I had an abortion.  At the time my daughters were two and four.  As a child I longed to be the single mother of a hundred children, a sort of old woman in the shoe fantasy.  But by early adulthood I questioned my desire to have children at all, questioned what sort of mother I might be and whether I should commit my life to social justice causes rather than the distraction of children.  Yes, for many there is a balance and capacity to do both and more, but there is also a an expansiveness that comes with managing your own time, strictly, and not having the lives of little people, you are in charge of molding, as one of your paramount responsibilities.  But, then came the day in my early thirties when my beloved asked if we should consider changing our insurance policy to include a maternity rider.  I thought probably not yet.  Many friends of mine had begun to have children and the biological imperative, let alone an interest in children at all, were out of my grasp.  But we decided to change our insurance policy, just in case, and by the time the three months needed to prove that any pregnancy was not a pre-existing condition to signing up for the policy was up, I was counting down the days.  I had been taking cod liver oil and pre-natal vitamins daily, studied the ingredients of everything I put in and on and around my body to insure ultimate health for myself and the being I might grow inside of me.  I was ready, eager even.  And it happened.  For the first couple of weeks, before I officially knew, but I Knew, I was filled with a nearly frantic amount of energy and then it hit me like a train wreck, the hormones exploded in every part of my body and I became for all intents and purposes, an incapacitated host.  I threw up constantly. I was spinning and off-balance and nauseous every second of the day.  I could hardly lift my head up.  I wasn't able to work.  I wasn't able to think.  I could barely walk.  I would practically roll myself outside each day and curl up under a table clutching my throw-up bowl for hours.  It was awful.  I suffered every side effect known to pregnancy (well that's an exaggeration, but it felt like it at the time), my blood sugar was wacky, I had acid reflux, did I mention I was vomiting constantly.  My midwife proscribed Zofran, I was weary, but four months in decided to try it.  It didn't stop the vomiting, but eased the severity of it.  In the end I threw up for all but two weeks of the entire pregnancy.  My second pregnancy was similar, not quite as severe, but still felt for most of it, like I was barely surviving.  People, dear friends and those I hardly knew, have asked how I could have had a second child given my first pregnancy.  At the time, I was focused on building a family, making conscious choices about sibling spacing and the benefits of having a sibling versus an only child.  I was willing and able to sacrifice my functionality for the sake of future family.  I was entangled in the web of the biological imperative.  And I gave myself to it fully, I co-slept with my children and nursed them both for the first two years of their lives.  I was and still am enamored of my children.  I am thankful for the chance to be a parent, but also feel that parenthood is not my only reason for existence, I have a larger creative imperative that I am compelled to actualize.

When one day I woke up emotional, nauseous and foggy headed I thought I was sick.  I thought I was exhausted, overextended.  Because both of my prior pregnancies had been acts of intention, acts in which I was deeply in-tune with my body, I had known that I was pregnant and could prepare myself for the onslaught of what was to come.  This third time was different.  I was psychologically unprepared and of course we are unprepared for much of what happens in our lives, we can not control for all the wonder and all of the trauma, but in our most intimate spaces, that is where, in a chaotic world, we should be able to have a bit more control.  And here I was vomiting and spinning and peeing on a stick.  When that little plus sign revealed itself there was not a chance in the world that I could be the mother I am to my children to a third being.  Not only could I not co-sleep and nurse and commit the time it takes to love and nurture a small creature, I could not endure the vomiting and complete dysfunction.  How could I care for the children I already had that needed me then and there while I was splayed on a bed unable to perform basic daily acts of living?  I called Planned Parenthood, but they couldn't see me for three weeks.  I called my OBGYN who had once performed an abortion in our local university hospital and had been shunned for the act.  I called my midwife who suggested a clinic on the west side of Chicago.  They saw me the next day.  We talked, they counseled me on my options, they did an ultra-sound and we set a date.  

Surgery only happens at the clinic on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  It was snowing and cold the Thursday my husband and I showed up.  There were protestors outside the parking lot yelling at us as we drove in.  After check-in my husband went out to engage in rational conversation with the protestors, but they had departed.  I was fuming thinking about religious and personal freedom.  Wondering if the picketers believed in universal healthcare and improving the quality of our public education system.  But they were gone.  I was led into a locker room with a group of other women and given a gown, told to change into it and take a seat in the waiting room.  We were all silent and made similar by our condition and our dress.  There was some awful daytime television show on with lovers quarreling and being instigated by the host.  It felt surreal. It felt as if, by virtue of our choice, we had lost some of our humanity, our dignity.  This was not in fact the case, but when we exchanged our clothes for these gowns, we became a part of a universal story and not an individual story.  We were women who did not want to have children, at least at that time.  This was a sisterhood of a sort, but instead of feeling a sense of empowered camaraderie, the space felt shrouded by shame and anxiety.  I wanted to know the story of every single woman in there, to know what had happened in her life before today, what she dreamed would happen in the days and years to come, but nobody was feeling up to conversation and so we sat watching lovers attack each other, eager to get back to our lives as we knew them.  To get back to being a teenager, a college student, a young woman ready to embrace the opportunity of the life before her.

While we sat there I looked around at the faces of these young women, some running to the bathroom to vomit, many clearly uncomfortable, and thought about how abortion gave all of us a second chance.  A chance to be more intentional with our lives.  To give life to an unwanted child feels like a trauma unto itself, both for the mother and the child for whatever reason. And there are many reasons not to have children.  For me, given the trends of a warming climate, (it is 72 degrees today in Chicago, it is February 2017.  My children wore shorts and t-shirts to school today.) the legacy we are leaving behind for future generations will likely be one of great suffering.  We are seeing climate refugees all over the globe and this is merely a beginning of mass migrations.  We will continue to see conflicts over increasingly limited resources.  Wealthy nations, ahem, are closing their borders and devising schemes to keep out those who seek the possibility of a new life with access to clean water, food, healthcare.  I fear that this is the trend for humanity, that wealthy nations that consume the majority of the world's resources and contribute most to the warming of the planet will become these protectionist spaces, exploiters safe havens.  I do not want that for my children or my grand-children or any of the people of the world.  By having children in a first world country I am contributing to global warming, despite my efforts to counter the impact.  And so for me, one less child was a little less impact.  Some would question why I had children at all then, the reasons, perhaps, are purely selfish.

It feels entirely unnecessary for me to have to rationalize my abortion or my choices as a mother, and yet today, as we live and breath, so many voices are ignored and silenced by the hegemony of the current highest office holder and his cohort, and so it feels essential that each of us voice our stories, that each of us hear the stories of others, that we listen and understand and feel empathy, that we put ourselves in other people's shoes, see from many perspectives.  I saw those women in the waiting room with me.  I understood that each of them had life choices to make that did not involve being pregnant or raising a child at that time and I hold their choice dear.  I have worked with people who are "pro-life" around anti-death penalty legislation and I know that we can find points of agreement and see each others' humanity, but it remains inconceivable to me how people who are "pro-life" can impose their personal belief upon others who do not share it.  They will not be living with the unwanted child, paying for it's education, doctor's bills, food, clothing, shelter and even if that child becomes wanted by its birth mother, is it fair for us as a society to have changed the course of a woman's life when she may have dreamed of a different path?

As I write, I realize that I'm not even beginning to scrape the surface of this issue and that I have only talked about choice and dreams and haven't mentioned adoption, rape, birth control options and conditions, outside of hyperemesis , that might threaten the health of a mother during pregnancy, I haven't talked about so much and I want to.  I want to stand proud as a believer in choice.  Yesterday a dear friend and fellow photographer shared the Shout Your Abortion project with me, in which images of women wearing T-shirts that say Everyone Knows I Had An Abortion are being projected out of doors on huge spaces, buildings, walls, screens.  This is inspiring and I am learning more!  We are all standing up for so many issues we believe in now, if and when the next Supreme Court Justice is confirmed keep Roe v. Wade in your sites.  If Roe v. Wade is overturned, fight like hell for legal abortion in your state.

gone tomorrow.

There’s this place far from here, it’s my happy place.  It’s where I grew up spending summer, it’s where my father grew up spending summer, heck it’s a place where my great-grandmother spent her summers and is now the year round home to many of my family members. It is an island attached by a spit of sand to a larger better known island.  It is an island with large swaths of land under conservation which means extensive woods for exploring or just disappearing for a dash gazel like through the trees. And from the South-East corner of the island stretches a huge expanse of pristine publicly accessible beach.  I love this place for it’s lack of commercial businesses, for it’s quiet sandy roads, it’s craggy moss covered trees, it’s devoted year round residents.  I love this place for the slant of the sun and how it reflects off of natural and built surfaces in the Spring and Fall, for the oasis and connection to family and history it provides, for the small farm that set-up shop a few years back that now feels like an essential expression of all that is great about this place.  It is a place reminiscent of a once quieter coastal New England culture.  But, as the main island has become increasingly popular and monied over the past few decades, it has become a posh retreat of the uber-monied andinaccessible to most.  A place where crumbling summer cottages built in the 1930’s are purchased for millions of dollars to be torn down and replaced by oversized four season homes worthy of Architectural Digest.  It is a place where history is both lost and repeated.  

On a late afternoon Easter walk with my intrepid mother I found myself in the debris of a soon to be demolished home, a home once loved and lived in by the same family for generations, a home nearly ready to tumble over the edge of a cliff to the ocean below.  I entered through the sawed off kitchen wall and immediately felt a sense of walking into the past, the unpainted wooden walls, the windows rattling in their casements, the hollow space where a clawfoot tub once stood.  It all echoed with the life of a time gone by.  

My grandparents had the greatest stories of gathering family and friends on this little island.  I remember eating floating islands and Kool-Whip at my great-grandmother’s dinning table on Sunday afternoons as we watched fleets of sailboats racing in the bay and I attempted to keep up my end of the conversation with ancient men in navy blue blazers and pink pants while studying the length of their nose and ear hairs.  Oh and the family of sunrise skinny dippers two houses down who we once envied and have now become.  All of it is a treasure.  A treasure that like sand through an hourglass is fast slipping away.  When my grand-father passed away in late 2014 the extended family summer home, that my great grand-mother purchased in the 1940’s, was handed down to the next generation of five siblings all of whom have children and then some of us have children.  It has become a complicated dance as we all attempt to slot into the summer calendar our precious few weeks where we pile on top of each other and make merry in our festive traditions of mud pie competitions, clam bakes, agricultural fair attendance, road races and general summer lazing about with our noses in books.  It is a story many have told before where the cost of ownership and maintenance becomes increasingly complex and costly for the expanding generations.  For the moment we all remain deeply in love with the place and are thankful for the chance to care for and spend time here when we can.  It’s a sort of a time share with history where none of us could individually afford to purchase or maintain a place such as this, and so we are a network of caretakers connected by love and blood devoted to preserving this piece of our past.

I dream of what it would be like to spend extended periods of time here, perhaps live full time on this island, but my real life doesn’t allow for it for more than one reason.  And so my romantic emotional idealism is allowed to persist.  I can wish for the past to persist, for my children to be able to spend two weeks of their childhood summers frolicking with their cousins in a place steeped in family lore.  And I can document this sense of place while I’m here knowing that in time it will all slip from our grasp, as the past does, slowly fraying until it becomes a hazy dream replaced by something new.

* * *

An insightful friend told me recently after looking at the photos I took of my grandparents home of nearly 60 years, that I will be chasing that house, that home, for years to come.  I venture to think the rest of my days.  My grandparents were unsentimental innovators, whereas I am a deeply sentimental visual-emotional nostalgic. 

So when I was on a bike ride a few weeks ago and my wheels spun me some fifteen miles north of familiar territory and I saw signs for a demolition sale, something told me, in the town, in the neighborhood that I was in, that this would be a vintage gem and oh glorious yes it was.  

It was a space, although nearly empty, was resonant and echoing with the ghosts of life lived.  Heavily wallpapered, with matching drapes, crumbling plaster and fraying wires it heaved with breath.  Somebody had lit a fire in the fireplace and for a brief moment the hearth was filled with light, life.  I could almost hear the clinking glasses and tinkling laughter of a 1957 cocktail party, women with pearls and black hourglass dresses, children dressed in pajamas and robes laying on their bellies at the top of the stairs peering through the railing to catch a glimpse of arriving guests.

Walking through the cracks in the present into the past, even if just for a fleeting second, oh how it thrills me!  Maybe I should be wearing colonial dress and working in a reenactment museum, hmmm…maybe not.

my family and other animals...

Oh dear friends I am all a flutter with dreaming up stories, making props like dresses and geese, acquiring props like the above composition dolls from the 1930's and setting up moments.   The ideas are coming so quickly now I'm squirreling them away in a notebook and hoping that someday they'll come to be.  

Some of these recent images will be a part of my upcoming show, Elements of Mystery, opening on Thursday March 31st at Perspectives Gallery, 1310 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, Il.  There will be an artists reception on April 2nd from 5-8p.m. and an artists talk on April 21st at 7p.m.  I will be sharing the space with fellow gallery member Mark Kaufman, and guest photographers Juan Giraldo and Victor Yanez-Lazcano curated by Albi Gallery. 

I've been working on a little artist's statement about my work that reads something like this: 

As a child some weekends we visited my grandparents in a farmhouse of decaying grandeur in New Jersey and other weekends we’d stay home and traipse through the halls of great New York City museums.  I always imagined how these places could be different, how they were a portal to another time, an imagined life.  In the attic of my grandparents' home there were dust covered steamer trunks filled with ballgowns while the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered a glimpse into the interiors of early American homes.  I dreamt of wearing these ballgowns and living in a different era, but despite my dreamy nature I never got much beyond dress-up in shoddy 1970’s halloween costumes.  As the mother of two girls with fanciful imaginations in an era when unfettered childhood fantasy is interrupted or negated by an abundant access to technology I have sought to preserve and create for my daughters a little bit of the magic I longed to have brought into my childhood reality.

I find great inspiration in fairytales as well as the world around me.  Every fairytale has a dark side, the death of a parent, the loss of a power.  In an era of social and political upheaval and environmental degradation, the dreams and fantasy of a child are effected and shaped by the external forces buzzing in the world around them.  At home our conversations move from topics of migration, to an exploration of old time dance steps, to what a potential leader might do with their power, to the backstory of a historical American Girl Doll.  All of these bits and musings come into play when I am making pictures, the dreams mingled with the harshness of reality.  

So that's my shtick, perhaps you'll join me to celebrate.  I'm a bit over the moon about sharing this work with the world.

showered with love.

Hello dear friends!  I just wanted to pop-in and say howdy.  The beginning of 2016 has been whisking along with several opportunities to share and show work from Texas, to Vermont to right here in E-town with more to come over the course of the next few months.  Check out the News & Events page for upcoming shows. 

 On another note it is nearly Valentine's Day.  What say you?  Yes, Valentine's Day.  A day for me, every since a frigid and fateful 14th of February eight years ago, that is now synonymous with laboring and childbirth.  My beloved joked with me through out my pregnancy that if our daughter was born on Valentine's Day we would of course be naming her Moxie Valentina Amore Zises. So I held out an extra twenty-seven minutes for a name that was not informed by a holiday of the hallmark variety.  And here she is eight years later brimming with love and life and exuberance, yes, plenty of amore.  Okay, so the photo above might not appear to represent such a state of being, but I promise she is.  

If you are in need of a last minute Valentine head on over to DragonFly at 1309 Chicago Ave, Evanston, where some of my handmade cards are up for grabs, along with several heart garlands, dolls and an encaustic piece.   

And if you missed Artifical Turf in January, there is one last chance to see the show at 1610 Payne Street, Evanston, Il on Wednesday the 17th from 10a.m. until noon.  Coffee and treats will be served. Twelve talented women poured their hearts into this effort and it shows.  Hope to see you there!

elements of mystery.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I have a certain love of the magical, the perhaps impossible, improbable, the beauty in the unknown, the mysterious.  I love books like Midnight Circus, The Miniaturist, and The Museum of Extraordinary Things.  All trundle you back in time to a place of somewhat tormented life with a magical escape that informs life with a bit more nuanced meaning, mystery and from a readers perspective, enchanting beauty.  It ain't all wine and roses, but something about it invites you in, makes you want to peer a little closer, step into the experience, explore those moments, wander around and soak it all in.   Sooo, thus begins my next project, Elements of Mystery.  I'm hoping to create images that maybe don't tell you the whole story, maybe suggest a bit of the pain, exhaustion, wonder or possibility in any given scenario.  Maybe a young girl artist takes flight in a suitcase and lands on a beach where possibility begins or dreams of a ship carrying her family across stormy seas to a new life only to learn of it's capsize.  I'm excited for this next adventure in image making, for conjuring up the experiences and some how bringing them into being.  Here's to catching butterflies, playing to the death, woodland tea parties, merging beings with your spirit animal and oh so much more.  

Here's wishing you and yours a happy new year filled with turning over new leaves!

the one who is missing.

dinner without you.

I have a certain long time love affair with photography.  A love that has enchanted me in one way or another since I was small.  I remember as a child sifting through the images of my parents as children, young adults, getting married. It was a life before mine, yet linked.  It was as though through the portal of an image I emerged into a memory that was my own, yet wasn't.  Bits and pieces were familiar, places, unlined faces of people I only knew with the marks of time weighing upon them, the mirrors of wisdom.  There was so much kindredness in these moments that I would feel myself slip into the revery, the memory, of the pictured moment. A story would spin and I would be there and I would smell the scent of roast beef and mint jelly wafting in from the kitchen, see the cast off toys just out of frame, hear the voice of my great-grand mother chortling as she drew images of her famed wisligumps. 

what he would have read.

he loved me, he loved me not, he loved me.

i will keep you safe.

Photography seems to do this like no other medium.  It offers us the opportunity to dip into an experience, to construct all the other circumstances surrounding a moment from what we see.  It stimulates our senses and imagination.  Sure now a days we have things like the virtual reality helmet that stimulates all five sense such that we can momentarily be transported into another life, another moment.  This phenomena perhaps allows us a more tangible experience of what it would be like to be in a given place at a given time.  I read once about a Masai man's virtual reality experience of being in Mongolia at a horserace and he talked vividly about the thrill of watching the tangle of horses hurtling along, the rush of voices and clattering hooves, dust clouds, how the experience was palpable.  And perhaps we all need a larger dose of this in our lives, to step into a lifeboat full of refugees as the coast line of Greece rises into view.  But for me there is something about these moments arrested, captured and held that is everlasting.  The image of the boat from the shore, the tangle of horses in the dust cloud. A photograph allows for meditation on what is fleeting.  To hold these moments in our hands like so many grains of sand, there is something to this. Something to this space for repeated reflection.

parallel play.

a convergence of the spirit animals.

ghost of the wanted child.

to keep this house afloat.

alone in a great wood.

This fall I began a photo essay collaboration with a dear friend.  We both hold a strong creative imperative as central to our lives and share a certain aesthetic, so it made my heart skip a beat when she agreed to let me tell a piece of her story, to take a piece of her story and run it through my own mill of imagining and projection and then put it out in the world.  Five years ago she lost her beloved in a harrowing battle to ALS.  She was left with the struggle of moving forward without the father of her daughter, without the man she had imagined building home and growing old with.  Instead of an expanding family and life there was a space of loss, an imposed contraction. This photo story glimpses at the grief and emptiness of loss while hoping to reflect the deep love between a mother and a daughter.  Without fleshing out the story much more for you, I hope this takes you in for a moment.  

biding farewell to your ghost.

what she held on to.

to bury the past is not to forget.

photos & wax.

As a mother confronted with the harsher realities of our world, I struggle with how much to share with my children and how much they will understand.  We talk about war, about what life would be like if we had to leave our home and everything we know for the unstable unknown, about poverty, disease and disaster; we talk about the environment and our effect on it, about the choices we make and how they effect others both in our immediate circles and on a larger scale, but sometimes I still hold on to the potential for magic, for fairytale.  Fairytales are after all, most especially in the case of the Brother's Grimm, filled with the often unpleasant realities of life, mostly death and maltreatment.  But there is a flip side to those tales, one of mystery, of curiosity, wonderment, exploration, overcoming and sometimes empowerment that speaks to me.

These tales offer a lens, a filter through which we can see and navigate the world; to understand that we can hold on to the joy and wonderment and curiosity that is not always right in front of us.  It is with this idea in mind that I set out to capture various moments of my girls' childhood, to preserve them and possibly reveal an underlying story.  There are conflicts and struggles and resistances in our everyday life, but there is also magic and oh do i love that magic.  It comes in so many forms and flavors and with an abundance of possibility.  

Last Spring I took a workshop with the lovely Leah MacDonald, she creates a magical world that speaks to me deeply.  I left her studio with oh so many images swirling in my head and felt like I had come home in a multitude ways, crossed a threshold of mixed-medium art that made me tingle all over with excitement and possibility.  The past few months have been busy and chaotic, but I've been trying to grab moments here and there to put the tools I picked up working with Leah into practice.  This is where I begin, this wax, these images, a griddle and many brushes, my journey toward fog shrouded mystical landscapes, a rabbit hole of possibility.  I hope you enjoy them!

in the time of flowers, revisited.

There is something about the preciousness of youth and the the preciousness of flowers, how each passes like sand through an hourglass, changing and shifting with the drop of each grain.  There is a vulnerability to each, but also a tenacity and an impressionability countered by a bold unique spirit. 

Summer and the season of growing whisks past at a heart-thundering pace.  Many blooms shine for just a few brief days or weeks and then they are gone, a memory of profound beauty.  When they are just unfolding toward blossom they posses a mysterious unknown.  They are preparing to show their face to the world, to reveal a glorious power, a full expression.  It is the stress of heat, the response to being pruned, the experience of time that presses a bloom into being, toward its fullest articulation.  From my perspective as a parent, after the age of three the clip of childhood can seem devastating.  Everyday is something new, a hunger to learn, to grow, to experience and with the turn of each page our babes are growing into themselves, cultivating an independence, a curiosity outside of the box, however expansive, that we have shown and shared with them.  They are revealing themselves to us, growing into themselves.  It is with every moment a molding is occurring, They are figuring and finding who they are and want to be and become.  They are trying on the different hats of identity and picking those that feel most familiar, most comfortable to be, what they share with the world, how they will face forward.

A few weeks ago as I wondered how I was going to chronicle the flowers I've grown this summer in my backyard mini-flower farm, I thought about all the dear friends of my daughters and dear daughters of my friends, there many expressions, the depth and sense of self they posses and pondered the potential of marrying the two.  I asked a few friends if their dear ones might be willing to frolic on this fringe of enchantment, and so here we are with me gathering flowers from my garden and roaming the alleys near by to harvest the wild bounty before we draw and dapple the grasses with orbs and specks of botanical bits.  I am so excited for the commencement of this project in earnest, to see all of these girls and flowers in similar repose, yet still so distinct.

It is a moment, in the time of flowers and in the time of youth, to preserve two kindred spirits of fleeting untold wonder.  Often my nostalgic heart fills with the intriguing dream of time travel to the past.   What if we could go back, delve just for a minute into the experience of some instant, unfold the layers of what has been.  There is a way in which in making these images, I am hoping to hold on to all this that is fleeting.  To let it wash over me and at the same time, when the flowers have wilted and the girls grown, their past will still be here looking me in the face. The passage of time will have ticked by and yet the rawness from whence they came will still be.

mark making.

A teacher of mine recently mentioned to me how we are all mark makers of a sort, each of us drawn to different styles of imprinting on to substrates.  Some of us are lovers of lines and gashes on our surfaces, others of us are more orbicular.  I fall into the orbicular camp.  I have always, always, always loved circles.  This love comes from somewhere deep and primal, somewhere inexplicable yet profoundly connected.  There is something relatable about spheres, dare I say universal.  When we tilt our heads skyward our eyes (iris and pupils, orbs on their own) are met with these circular symbols of cosmic unity, the sun, moon, distant planets and stars. The circle is infinite, without end or beginning, a constant filled with potential in each turn around the sun. 

And somehow, in my sometimes near-sited experience of life, I had no idea of this concept that we are each of us drawn to different marks, linear or spherical, that we might be divided into groups who see and feel the world through these lenses.  I have to admit that I am a bit curious about what marks others are drawn to and how those marks are possible expressions of our inner selves, maps that we might share with the world, where we might find commonality.

When I look back at so many pieces I have made over the years the circle is repeated time and again, woven into the background, highlighted in the foreground, layered one on top of another. Despite all this repetition, when I am at a loss of where to go, a cross-roads, or at the inception of a new medium the circle is where I begin.

Over the past year I have dabbled in the world of encaustics, dripping and spreading and molding hot wax, but much of this experimentation has been colorless.  And I thought my love of beeswax in its pure form, unpigmented, would be enough, that I would find my color elsewhere.  But, slowly a curiosity of how I might weave color into my dabblings bloomed.  And so this project came to be, an exploration of circles layered one on top of the next, each piece a study in a different color.  The base layer, buried beneath the waxen surface, is fueled by color coded circles cut from my not very small collection of paper amassed over the years, a stash of letters, calendars, holiday cards, chocolate wrappers, gifting wrapping, advertising postcards, the paper the lined my grandmother's sock drawer, ticket stubs and oh so much more, a history in color.

Over the past year I have dabbled in the world of encaustics, dripping and spreading and molding hot wax, but much of this experimentation has been colorless.  And I thought my love of beeswax in its pure form, unpigmented, would be enough, that I would find my color elsewhere.  But, slowly a curiosity of how I might weave color into my dabblings bloomed.  And so this project came to be, an exploration of circles layered one on top of the next, each piece a study in a different color.  The base layer, buried beneath the waxen surface, is fueled by color coded circles cut from my not very small collection of paper amassed over the years, a stash of letters, calendars, holiday cards, chocolate wrappers, gifting wrapping, advertising postcards, the paper the lined my grandmother's sock drawer, ticket stubs and oh so much more, a history in color.

I am very excited to share these pieces in a more public space this Friday evening at the Zhou B Art Center during their monthly Third Fridays event.  They will be on display in Studio 303 from 7-10p.m.  I will be there to commune with you and yours, and in all likelihood if you want to try your hand at playing with hot wax, you just might get the chance to do so.

chasing memory.

Since late December I've been overcome with a deep nostalgia.  The morning after Christmas my grandfather passed from his earthly body into the great beyond.  He had been a rock for our extended family, an anchor to which we all held.  We as a family have gathered around him and my late grandmother for the entirety of our lives.  In this gathering we have grown as individuals and more deeply into ourselves.  The sense of place they created, the life with which they imbued every moment, has informed a great deal of who I am, and serves as an endless well of inspiration.  Back in January, knowing that the home in which they resided for over sixty years was soon to be passed out of our family, I took a trip with my girls in tow to attempt to capture some of my own memory.

I had a deep yearning for my girls to experience a bit of my own childhood, the hours picking raspberries and wandering through the fields, sneaking chocolate from high up kitchen cabinets, pondering the plants in my grandmother's greenhouse, sitting with my grandparents watching the muppets during cocktail hour...I wanted to, at the very least, put my children into the space where so many of my memories come from, chronicle brief moments so that they might remember or imagine a little of what being there was like.  

In our brief time making memory there I tried to capture some semblance of the magic that existed in our midst.  Since then I've been a bit obsessed with harnessing memory before it slips like so much sand through our fingers.  Part of this seems informed by a sense of the fleetingness of each moment, the fact that my own girls are already four and seven, that in not too many years the magic of childhood will shift into the moodiness of adolescents and perhaps our closeness will shift.  All of it, of course, is ever shifting, and that's the beauty right?  

So here I am with a camera in hand, grasping at the ephemera around me.  I long to chronicle snippets of the past combined with life in the present, and have been cajoling friends and coaxing my own kids to let me capture these moments for them. Last weekend my girls and I packed up the car and took a jaunt out to two magical spots.  One where we watched a puppet show cabaret in an old dairy barn, and the other where we frolicked with dandelions and the endless wishes that they offer.  These are a few of the moments that slipped around us on a summer's like eve.  The banter of these two had me giggling as they imagined themselves and their wishes down a secret dirt road to an oasis in the woods.

They were the forest bound wood sprites creeping out to gather dandelion, root, leaf and seed, to feed upon and wish...

They conjured me the suspect lady with a lens peeping on their adventures. I tried to blend into the grasses, my hair waving before my eyes, dangling like so many branches around us.

There was an over grown garden, stone walls, woods and fields. We called this day Bliss.

playing with hot wax.

Squared.

Oh friends I spent the tail end of winter playing with hot wax and, be still my beating heart, was it ever dreamy.  I'm a bit smitten.  Last summer I began dabbling in the art of encaustics.  Got myself an old griddle from the secondhand store, heated up a bunch of beeswax and slathered it onto several flower prints.  I spent way too much time with a heatgun attempting to make meticulously smooth surfaces, but the results thrilled me.  After reading several books and watching umpteen youtube videos on encaustics I decided to take a class in technique.  Last summer I used the wax as a coating, but did not incorporate multiple layers or color.  This class I just completed was a spring board that sent me flying into a world of layers and color.

Most of my pieces began with a watercolor painting or drawing as the base layer and then were layered with various bits of paper, dried flowers and drawings.  I carved into the wax and filled it with encaustic paints.  I etched into the wax and filled it with oil paint.  I ironed the wax.  I scrapped away layers to reveal the heart of the piece.  Manipulating this waxy medium is not exactly easy, but the process of relinquishing a bit of control to the experience was a sort of meditation, a portal to my own heart.  And so one more tool has been added to my maker's box and oh girl am I excited about it.

A Gardener's Heart is in Her Hands.

To add to this excitement my teacher, the lovely Jenny Learner, will be showcasing my work at the Zhou B Art Center this Friday on the gallery wall outside of her studio as a part of their monthly 3rd Friday event.  Three of my pieces will be on display:  Polinate, Waiting for Spring and A Gardener's Heart is in Her Hands.  Below are brief  descriptions of each of the pieces.  I'd love for you to come see.  The event begins at 7p.m. and runs until 10p.m. at  1029 W 35th St, Chicago, IL. I will be there from 7p.m. until 8p.m. to answer questions and hobnob with you and yours.

Pollinate: For years I have dreamed of keeping bees.  I sleep with the Beekeeper’s Bible next to my bed and am prone to researching the pros and cons of different hive styles late into the night. Colony collapse has been a greater inspiration and of course the delight of urban beekeeping and providing a local home for urban pollinators continues to color my imaginings. This year I hope to expand my backyard urban farm into a flower farm and next year, bees, perhaps!  This piece is a watercolor collage encaustic conjuring of the mystical path of such dreams.

Waiting for Spring: Each year as we creep from Winter to Spring I wait with baited breath as the snow turns to rain and the sun shines ever brighter, ever longer.  I wait for the time when we can be out of doors unswaddled by winter woolens.  I wait for the time when we can tromp through the mucky woods in rubber boots.  And, I wait for the time when we can plunge our hands into the earth, burying seeds in hopes of new growth.  This piece is a watercolor collage encaustic in the spirit of this waiting.

A Gardener’s Heart is in Her Hands: I have so many memories of my grandmother gardening, puttering in greenhouses, on her knees in the garden, dressed in cheery colors.  She had a passion for plants that ran deep from orchids to herbs.  Her love covered the vast territory of horticulture.  This piece, a watercolor collage encaustic, attempts to conjure the beauty and love that she brought to her botanical endeavors.

Waiting for Spring.

I have also been playing with wax resists and dying paper and stitching bits back into said paper.  My studio is strewn with strands of folded, dyed, stitched papers...just wanted to share a peek at that too, more on this too come.

Cheerio for now!

the mended snowball.

The great thaw is about to begin.  Yes, right now the temperature is rising above thirty degrees and it is projected to stay there soaring above frozen rigidity for more than a brief moment.  February 2015 was tied for the coldest Chicago February on record with 1875, and we felt it.  We felt it with our frozen fingers and frozen toes, bitter winds blistering our cheeks and keeping us unbrave indoors.  Meanwhile the polar ice sheets are at the third lowest February ice coverage in recorded history and if the ice sheets don't expand over the next few weeks they could be at an all time low of winter ice coverage.  We here in the Midwest and Eastern United States have been the recipients of the jet-stream carrying cold air from last summer's extreme polar ice melt which has stagnated over us and inundated us with extreme cold and record snowfalls. 

Despite enjoying the thrills and abundance winter has brought to our doorstep, I do fear for the future of winter, when the polar ice caps have melted, sea levels have risen and the jet stream doesn't have the punch backed by ice melt to drop such a chilling bounty upon our bodies shrouded in woolens and gortex.  My girls have so loved the few days after fresh snow has fallen and the temperature hovers just above twenty and it is warm enough to build snow forts and frolic out of doors.  Those perfect days have been few, but enough to find a little happiness out of doors and vitamin E.  I love both the hibernation induced by winter and the character built by the suffering (and joy) it brings.  Yes running along the lake front at 6 degrees can be harrowing and painful, but life affirming and invigorating all the same.  The same can be said for building snow forts or trudging the mile against bitter winds to my children's school.  There is great joy in knowing winter, in marking time through the rhythms of seasonal change, of coming indoors to warm up knowing we have been transformed a little through our endurance of choosing to be out of doors.  

Given the likely trajectory of our global temperatures, I have thought a lot about Winter's future.  What if ice and snow are no longer synonymous with winter?  What if sledding and snow shoeing and cross country skiing become folklore that our great grandchildren wonder about the truth of?  What if Dubai's indoor ski mountain somehow becomes normalized?  What will happen to our fortitude?  Our perseverance? Our growing cycles?  Which species will die and which will thrive?  How precipitously will our water sources decline?  Perhaps we'll pump fewer fossil fuels into the air in winter as we will need to heat our homes less?  Perhaps the snow will continue to fall.  But what if it doesn't?

If it doesn't will we make mock snowballs for our children to play with and tell them stories about the good ole' days of igloos and ice skating, of snow men and angels?  Will we endeavor to find joy in an earth deprived of her chance to sleep?  How over tired she might become, her fields no longer dormant in winter.  Given all of this potential I am offering up one mended snowball.  Both, as an effort to repair the damage we have already done, to mend some minuscule aspect of our changing climate, but also to provide some vague memory for future generations of how it might have been, snow rolled on snow to form balls, balls for chucking at our buddies in the park, balls for building frosty beings to converse with and dream about.  This giant snowball is made from my grandmother's vintage cashmere sweaters, worn thin and loved for their softness and warmth.  They have been bundled and stitch together, a warm barrier in the cold, a symbol of winter's past and the warmth needed turned into winter's future and the search for snow flush with playfulness and joy.

So get out there and love the cold while we have it.  Embrace the ice and snow, but then of course, relish the warmth that is about to sweep across our doorsteps.  I for one am pretty excited about it.  

**Okay so the extreme cold temperatures caused my poor mock snowball to deflate a bit.  Please pardon her wrinkles.  Have no fear, there are treatments for such things.  

keeper of the last garden.

I never used to think of myself as a dystopian artist, my work has often been hopeful even whimsical, seeking out the beauty in our world despite the havoc we as humans reap upon this earth. But as the results of our pillage of the planet have become more dire, I have begun to imagine the possible bleakness in our future.  What if we stand by and continue to allow the status quo to proceed, to pump infinite amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, spray life threatening chemicals upon our food sources and wipe out more species every year? What if we make large swaths of the planet uninhabitable?  What if water dries to a trickle in places with once abundant flow?  What if we kill all the bees and butterflies? What if GMO food requiring only hand-pollination becomes the norm? What if all the flowers die? Like so many, I have a deep love, fascination and connection to the natural world and I am haunted by this potential. 
 

Recently, I began a small series of cages, protective armor, shields,enclosures meant to protect that which lies inside their confines. This sculpture is entitled Keeper of the Last Garden and is an examination of how we might proceed to protect the flowers of a garden that no longer grows anew. If only the vestiges of past blooms remain, crumbling, brown, shriveled, how might we protect these once wonders? Will we build corrals for them to ward off further destruction? How will we remember the possible beauty of what was? Is there a way to highlight the stunning hues of a flower in her fullness of life when her vibrant spirit has flown? Using salvaged wood from an urban park and island driftwood, a dried peony from last summer and my grandmother's needlepoint yarn, I am attempting to preserve and recreate the beauty of this no longer vital flower. 

love is in the air.

a love collection.

Sometimes a girl has got to make Valentine's.  I remember as a kid my mother talking about Hallmark Holiday's and how we should not buy into the hype.  There is no reason to celebrate something that you should perhaps revere and celebrate everyday on a designated day by going out and supporting the corporate world by purchasing meaningless garbage.  And I agree, oh do I ever agree that there is no point in going out and purchasing mass produced, poor quality stuff just because it is a day to give stuff.  I am not one for expecting roses or chocolates or manufactured anything, but as much as I am more than happy not to receive anything I do get quite a thrill out of giving things.  And, despite my mother's stance on Hallmark Holidays, I do remember my Dad bringing home funny cards, fuzzy stickers and purple socks with red puffy paint sparkly hearts on the ankle when I was a kid, and well, they were from a store called P.S. I Love You and all of that was pretty cool.  

because we all need some Happy Love.

L is for love.

So as regards this holiday, my heart has been tugged in many directions.  At times I've cared about it and other times it has passed unnoticed.  I remember one year going to see Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues on Valentine's Day and finding it a profound moment to reflect on women and our bodies and how despite the abuse so many women have suffered that we should fiercely love our bodies such that we may love ourselves and find sanctuary within when the world doesn't always offer the necessary love and support.  There was another year that I was taken out to dinner at Chez Panisse, and, well, suffice to say I got all dressed up and had a delightful meal the likes of which my lips had never before or since tasted.  Oh oh oh and another favorite Valentine's Day excursion was going to see Aya De Leon's one woman Valentine's show focused on self-love, not only sheer genius, but I seem to remember some robust deep in the heart laughs.   Yes, there have been eventful Valentine's days.

a hearts' tale, in spines.

a nursery's love parade.

a pin head holds a bouquet.

Surely the most notable of these was in 2008 when my daughter Moxie was born.  See, she was due on February 14th,and I went into labor at 1 a.m. on that day, but deep in my heart I didn't want her to have to share a birthday with a holiday.  My birthday is often on Thanksgiving and it is a mixed blessing, a great opportunity to be together with family, but also it is a rare year that it gets celebrated as an independent event.  Really, that's fine, but to have a day that isn't mixed up or competing for attention allows for more possibility.  Also, we had been out to dinner at an Italian restaurant shortly before I went into labor and our server said that if M was in fact born on Valentine's Day she should be called Valentina and my beloved husband went with it.  Through much of my twenty-four hour labor, mainly the final hour in the birthing tub (in the room that is now my daughters' bedroom), he talked shop about how we were going to call her Moxie Valentina Amore Zises.  Yup, he thought it was a hoot, and it was, at least it kept other's amused and allowed me a moment's humor reprieve from the intensity of crowning and the ring of fire.  But I held out and didn't start pushing until a little after midnight on the 15th, and so this sweet little girl slipped into our watery world at 12:27 a.m. on the 15th and became Moxie Leil instead of Valentina.  That was a Valentine's Day to remember, one when my little love child was swimming toward the outside world and I was brimming with love and so was the rest of the world.  Was it all the love in the air that encouraged her to slip sleeping into this world?  Perhaps.

love watches over you.

feathery love conserves energy.

But it was last year that I got serious about sharing the love.  A few days before Valentine's Day last year a beloved friend told me about an artist friend of hers who had hosted a Valentine's making party.  This friend of a friend had provided all the supplies and they weren't your average doilies and sparkly hearts.  Oh no, it was bits and pieces of red and pink and white and lace and ribbons that she had collected over time.  There were deposit slips from the bank and bubble wrap and lightbulb packaging and remnants of condolence letters from estate sales.  It all sounded amazing to my collector's heart and I ran home and stayed up into the wee hours making garlands and stitchy hearts on cardboard.   Then secretly and anonymously delivered them to friends' houses before they woke on that day of love.   And so, it was pure delight when this year I received an invite in my inbox to attend a Valentine's making extravaganza hosted by this lovely artist at a local brewery.  My girls and I spread out on the floor in the brew room with so many inspiring bits and pieces I couldn't possibly keep up with my spinning head and moving fingers.  Who knew I like to collage so much?!  And here, these are the results.  I must selfishly say that I am a bit smitten with these little works and ho hum, well I'd love to keep them hanging on our wall here at home, but me thinks they must be distributed into the world...to spread the love.  Would you like to receive a little love on this sweet day?  

So I'm curious, I must admit, to hear a little about your take on this holiday.  Can you take it or leave it?  Do you have traditions you have created?  Do you send your love off in envelopes sealed with a kiss?  Pray tell, I'm eager to hear.

winter wonderland window.

Look, See!!!  My trees have sprouted in the window at Dragonfly.  Stop by for a gander if you are in the neighborhood.  I think they look rather smashing, if I am permitted to say such things of course.  The beautiful sculptures of Ashley Benton are on display as well, filling the space with an enchanted quiet beauty.  Enjoy!

revitalization.

Here's my dirty little secret, I love clothing.  I love getting dressed in the morning.  I love costumes and how we construct ourselves for our own pleasure and possibly the perception of others.  Last Autumn I heard an interview with the editors of a book called Women in Clothes.  The interview thrilled and astounded me, it got me thinking, oh it inspired.  The book is more or less a conversation among women on the subject of clothing, how and why we dress and how these choices define and shape who we are in the world.  At the core of the book is a survey that 639 women completed asking them to explain their dressing philosophy and habits.  Some of the questions:  Can you say a bit about how your mother's body and style has been passed down to you, or not?  Was there a point in your life when your style changed dramatically?  What happened?  What are some things you admire about how other women present themselves? When do you feel at your most attractive?  The interview really got me thinking.  Are there rules that I abide by when I get dressed in the morning?  Who or what am I attempting to conjure when I don my garb?  Do we as women dress for comfort?  Oooo how do we define comfort?  

This morning when I walked my girls to school we passed gaggles of middle school girls and all but a very few had on black leggings or tight jeans and Ugg boots or boots with fur topped cuffs.  There was the one goth girl dressed in black tights and a whispery black skirt and the girl in what looked like a hand-me-down trench coat and rain boots that couldn't have offered much warmth on this winter's day, but really and truly all the others were dressed alike from the confident ebullient pretty girls to the awkward acne struck girl who shuffled along with her head down.   The majority of the girls, in their self inflicted uniform, were dressed for comfort seemingly on a fabric meets skin level, but also on a deeply social level that maybe conveys status or conformity.  The goth girl, she perhaps has rejected the herd mentality, rejected the collective we and is finding herself through unique clothing choices, and the girl in rain boots, I suspect she possibly might not have had the luxury of options, the resources to conform whether she wanted to or not.  And so this question of dressing for comfort becomes expansive.  Comfort with the social norms of disposable fast-fashion trends?  Comfort with the extravagance of having options of what to wear based on your given mood?  Comfort of mobility and sensuous fabrics?  Comfort with the messages you convey with any item you choose to wear?

Strangely enough, prior to hearing the above mentioned interview, I don't think I realized how much of my psyche might be bound up in the act of dressing.  That each question of the survey used to start this conversation could inspire a thin volume of explanation from me defies logic.  It's not like I spend hours contemplating what to wear...

All of this being said, I dress my best for the everyday.  Dressing up for a special occasion, happy or sad, always puts me in a quandary.  Somedays I dress up, but when I have to dress up I almost always feel awkward, uncomfortable or out of place, like my "style" isn't made for occasions other than the every day.  I love the love worn, the comfortable, the tried and true.  My closet overfloweth and yet I continually reach for that same black cardigan.  And so in the repeated wearing of the favorite bits or the fragile bones, threads break, buttons pop, knees fray, bottoms tear, moths eat and holes form.  The love worn becomes unwearable, although I can often be found wearing something long after it's gone to shreds.  For many of us accustom to our culture of disposal, tossing a favorite piece of clothing after it has busted-up is a sad act, but one of non-attachment that we have come to know far too well given that the majority of clothing today is poorly made.

Over time I allowed all those love worn pieces to pile up in a corner of my studio and when the pile became to daunting I shoved the whole lot of it in the attic, lost but not forgotten.  Every now and then I remembered a favorite item lost to the abyss of the mending pile and wished for it, but never quite took the time to sit down with needle and thread to repair the poor garment.  Sure I'd done a quick fix with the sewing machine or put a button back on a child's coat, but really taking the time to re-inspire a garment with mending was a passing thought rather than an intentional act.  Oh I remember the winter I sat on the couch patching a pile of SmartWool socks that had worn through at the toe or heel, and I still wear those socks, patched and hole-less...and then there are the ones with holes that I continue to wear, but the commitment to repair has come and gone, it has wavered.  I think it is high time for a re-commitment to all the clothes that have served me well and made me so much myself, to take a vow of repair, of revitalization.  

If you were a favorite item, regardless of quality, if I have worn you through, I owe it to the plants that were grown and harvested to make you, to the workers that stitched, the designers that conceived to take the time to mend what others might cast off.  

When I "mend" flowers on a page I am attempting to bring the essence of what they were back, but also to inspire a slightly new angle of engagement, a conversation between stitch and petal that wasn't there before, a new level of reflection. When we love so fiercely that we destroy, that is when the work begins.  Well, it's hard for me not to wear my favorite clothing hard, I can't tell you how many times I have split the seat of my pants, but perhaps there is something in the act of taking the time to examine that split, to taking the time to lovingly repair it that will teach me about the way that I move and why it is that that split occurs repeatedly in different pairs of pants, to bring a new level of awareness.   With this renewed commitment to clothing of the past, I vow to at least attempt repair to those items that once were favorites and to the ones that weren't favorites, maybe with repair I can make them more lovable.  

To repair any given item is a commitment that requires the gift of time, since time is not always abundant for such tasks I am attempting to carry mending with me wherever I go.  Then when the opportunity arises I can whip out these frail bits of fabric and stitch out in the world.  It is the finding of  time in between where mending will happen.  These mendings won't be perfect.  They will contain rough asymmetrical stitches, some haphazard and in different directions, some stitches layered on top of others, a little crude perhaps.  Despite the rough shod stitches, new life will be breathed into old garments and new opportunity to wear something that has a storied past.

Alabama Chanin skirt project.

 Amidst all this mending I am also totting around an Alabama Chanin skirt project in my bag, one that I can hopefully wear the heck out of and is being mended forward, stitched with love, uber enforced, such that it won't require more stitches down the road, and if and when it does, well it will have proven to be a favorite and worth the work.

Do you have many items in your wardrobe that you have loved and torn or lost the love for?  Perhaps they just need a little mending.  Perhaps you'll take up your needle and thread and darn those cloth wounds into a new bit of delight to brighten your day.  Let's wear our mendings as a badge of honor, an act of loving, a commitment to the past and belief in the future, token and small as it might be.