This most recent artwork, Deeper, explores a personal and very recent new found understanding of myself, the artist. As a maze book it tells my experience without words, merely elements following elements.
Read here for more about this work.
This confusing work, as some have describe it is just that, confusing. The stop motion animation, Individual Focus (video link here) attempts to look at the larger idea of being self centered. And while it is true that all of us, to a certain extent, have left enough of this trait behind in our childhood to view the world, we still have a some of that characteristic as adults.
The video uses polymer clay to represent individuals and the wire and branches as the foundation upon which we build connections. It follows the path of one such “individual” along a story-like path, encountering (or losing) others, forming connections, and broadening their world. There are many emotions expressed throughout. Such as loss when some of the encountered others vanish or move to the side and seem to melt. Or fear as the individual moves to see more of the world, and the background begins to tear apart.
Read a more comprehensive discussion of this work, here, on the specific page dedicated to Individual Focus.
What is the secret to a happy life?
Many have asked this question in striving for happiness. And there are many, many answers; each as unique to the person who asks as to the person who answers. One thought is to find balance in one’s life. This at least is the answer the artist has come to herself and set out to portray balance in a piece of artwork.
Over time Built to Grow has developed from one idea to the next, always with balance in mind. In its final form, of paper, wire, and light, it grapples with the larger question of natural versus man made.
Some new crafts and drawings from the summer of 2019 finished! Check out the Drawing or Craft pages to see more!
In a final editing of the filmed live performance, the video production of “Our World is Burning” is now available to be viewed via the following link to the film production.
Our World is Burning is an artwork, half performance and half film production, about the impacts of deforestation. The tree structure represents the support each tree provides our world. The forests are carbon sinks, soaking up the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and producing the oxygen we breath to live. The vines of paper strips convey facts that are woven into the very nature of the Earth and our unsustainable life style; what deforestation impacts, what forests and regions are being lost, what animals are going extinct, and even more facts.
In the performance, white gas is poured on the structure. Our dependency on oil and its byproducts is only speeding up the destruction of our planet by adding more carbon dioxide while the forests that soak up this poisonous gas are cut down. Or more accurately burned down.
It is undeniable that deforestation is terrible for our world but controversies remain. Agriculture, the biggest industry destroying the trees, continues to roll onwards as farmers the world over struggle between two choices, to starve or to burn. Their livelihood depends on farming the poor soil of the tropical forests. And to succeed, to make space for the crops and give the soil the nutrients needed for growing, the farms burn sections of the forest every few years when the old farmland stops producing.
Given the choice to starve or to burn, people will always chose survival and thus to burn the forests down for their livelihoods. Deforestation, bad as it is, is not as simple an issue to be solved over night. The cause of deforestation, poverty, must be addressed if the land, animals, and peoples are to thrive together.
