My art practice has always reflected place. All of these places lend context, contributing their own ingredients to my research. At times I even finished some ideas, others have been laid out for a future self. Influenced by being a photographer, I assess surroundings, engagement, and resources. In hindsight (and as I have discussed before) locality creates a natural form of guard rails. Work with what is here, as there are so many avenues one could take. Being an artist is my mind's maceration of information, not the medium.
In my early twenties, I walked the stories of an east coast forest with my dogs in the woods alongside wild swans. The later motto that was bestowed on me by my friend Bear - “I am not a hoarder” - was already rearing its complex head. I picked through the discarded treasures at P&T Surplus in Kingston, NY considering the lights and sculptures I dreamed to make. In my studio I studied the long, inch-wide strips of planed wood I had coveted from my neighbor, a fine carpenter. I decided they were for weaving together. I can still feel 30 years later, how wildly difficult the decision was, to act on. Pivotal in my understanding of the precious, his discards were my treasure.
Held in my eye or arms each were ideas. Each was (or is) what one might now call “the tabs left open.” I was responding to what was in front of me, to understand what was brewing inside of me. Hoarder, I am not. Full of ideas in differing levels of completion, mais oui.
Later it was the confines of motherhood that directed my camera to the beauty of dirty dishes. The dumpsters at the Foundry that were beyond decadent, from sign board to gold leaf. The walls around my children that I refinished with plaster, and world creation. The milder than New England climate plant world, topiaries, and orchids which each sustained my studies. Being a huge fish in a tiny pond gave fuel to my proclamation of what art and beauty could be. The caustic and buoyancy of human networks’ shifting their gaze. A Printshop going out of business, I shared the wealth to carry on a life cycle. I placed large sheets of paper in the hands of every artist I could find. The garbage of capitalism can be a most glorious vessel for creativity.
In Maine work came from the edge of the forest and the edge of the sea. My understanding of an artist brain had names now, academic labels. Seaweed and trees commingling and holding the imagined lives of summer travelers dreams and long winter starry nights. A university full of what Eric Roy labeled the death valley of inventions, and it was there that I picked up CNF. A pulp with no art history, and a reductionist version of a tree. Poetic, and some might wonder, how I came to proselytize such an expensive product as CNF. When I first started with the PDC at the University, they were throwing away excess CNF. As an artist, I stepped forward to use what was already deemed unneeded by the other researchers. I promised in return to bring other artists. While I still teach the curiosities of CNF, free is of course …no longer true. Each ounce has become valuable and costly.
Life now finds me squarely on an organic farm. Hot sun and I’m as tan as a girl running-free on a Mercury sailboat, albeit without the baby oil and sun-in. I have done - what they call - a jump in timeline. Solo out in the world, cauterized by death and divorce, my hands hold the calluses of a wheel barrow. “Good for my soul” my dear one says, and the tea bag confirms, we can always start again.
All of this to say, one night - I stumbled over baby avocados, discarded by the trees themselves. A shedding for the tree’s personal growth. It is not my farm, I am merely hands. Yet, again I seek the bi-product of place. Baby avocados, what a thing. As a New Englander, I never thought that I would be playing with excessive amounts of avocado skins and pits. So I present some of my recent research, a richness that glows in the afternoon light. Avocado dye, made because it is what I have, where I am, how I do, as one does.