Last bits of the year

[This is from a lace show that Tatiana recommended, which I got to visit with Justine and Christie right before xmas on those days that were so bad weather-wise for most and in NY was warm and rainy turning into snow and then coldcoldcold plus howling wind.]

I'm in hellish re-entry from family time in NY where the time is not sufficient for the tasks and the tasks seem to multiply. The deadline is hard as I move to Oberlin on Monday and start teaching class the next day for the next month. One institution asked for a teaching proposal waaaaay back earlier this year and I have not done it, and only in recent days did I think, Could I ever create a proposal for teaching that I would actually be excited to fulfill? I never thought of doing such a thing, something that would serve me as much as everyone else. But of course that goes immediately on the back burner as I deal with basic stuff like a new hot water tank and packing and feeding myself and making sure nothing is on fire.

Until I get some composure, a few bits to share. Here we go headfirst into the next year! 

28ish Days Later

I really enjoyed this podcast about periods, which everyone should listen to (short episodes, very useful information for all people, not only ones who did/do/will menstruate—with the last one, in fact, saying that there is no good reason NOT to teach non-menstruating bodies about it).

Montello Foundation

Jan 22 is the deadline to apply for a residency at Montello, a quiet place in the desert off the grid away from wifi and phones and all about learning to live with yourself and the world around you. I could never handle a residency like this (not the being there, only the getting there) but have supported it since I could and think it would be great for lots of other more sturdy and adventurous artists of all stripes.

Herb Childress

Herb is a lot of things—writer, scholar, active community member (not in the amorphous sense but where he actually goes to meetings, creates protocol, takes care of the place where he lives through action and applied knowledge), thoughtful and gifted friend, and chaplain to those who don't have one. He also gives his work away for free. My favorite is Slush because I am more a non-fiction person, but you'd learn plenty from his novels and stories if you love fiction.

The last month always gets demolished

I didn't know until my friend Frank told me that there was a Rodin Thinker at the local art museum that had been bombed in protest of the Vietnam War and that the museum decided to just leave it in its destroyed state (rather than relegate it to lifelong storage, or try to repair to its original state, which wouldn't have been possible) in front of the former front of the museum (now kind of the back of the museum). So I took a look one evening at something I had NEVER noticed all these years.

I rarely am on this side of the museum, so that's one excuse. But I guess it never looked like a bombed sculpture, either. Getting close, it's actually kind of remarkable, and made me think of Steven Young Lee's work. It turns it into an old master's masterpiece kind of thing to embodied history. Given the culture of that time embraced the idea that thinking happens only in the head, this guy seems not perturbed at all that his feet are gone. We still foolishly think that it should be fine of major parts of our bodies, nation states, and planet are irreparably mutilated and destroyed that the rest of us should just carry on.

Right now, when I read this, my feelings don't match the words "tragically." If I was alive and knew this had happened to one of my pieces in protest of a very bad war, who knows how I'd feel. If I was dead for over 50 years and it happened, not sure either how tragic it would be. It feels like pretty straightforward human intervention. Almost a collaboration with bomb.

That was what I was thinking months ago when I looked at it. How is it going in the studio? There's a ton of unfinished projects going on, just as bad as at home, where my book/dry work is. So nothing has changed, except the idea that maybe it's a good idea to clear the immediate vision of stuff that has been malingering for too long. As if there was appropriate storage for that stuff!

Our contractor came by to look at the mold spots that alarmed me on a building only a year into a gut rehab. He was using the ladder I got from Bill, and I was in deep denial when I bought it. I've always managed to get around ladders but this one is 10 feet and heavy, and every time I pick it up I throw out my pelvis (which is extremely unstable to begin with). My PT recommended a different ladder but it's too hard to figure out which model to get to still have access to these 13-ft ceilings. But given how much I do go up and down, I will need a better solution since the exercise/PT route is so slow—I won't get strong enough soon enough!

Michelle came by a little after this stage to help cut down rag. We were going to run the beater this weekend to make paper for FUN and then the beater refused to turn on. I made an emergency call to a friend and after I emptied it of water and then removed the switch cover, it turned on again (very annoying because then I could have just left the water and beaten the pulp but I had lost all hope by then). So this will have to wait until next year, likely.

I leave in days to see my family and friends in NY. When I was sick over Thanksgiving week, I started going bonkers knitting (so the idea that I was resting was a pure lie). The first was too small, the second too big, the third not exactly just right, and the fourth not perfect yet. I'll keep two mismatched ones and give two mismatched ones away. If I can stop tinkering with them! Last night I took out the binding of one that felt too tight and even after redoing it...it feels too tight! It must be the super control freak in me raging up because I can't control the people who park in the studio parking lot now that the bar next door has opened and no one appreciates the handmade signs I made to say the lot is only for art studio folks.

But hey. Hoping that sabbatical next year includes more comics, one of too many things I want to do all at once and then nothing happens except trying to fix my house + studio + body. But there's no fixing to be done, only a slow process of learning to live with imperfection. The quiet two or three weeks of studio time I had hoped for in Dec disappeared when I was asked to do a shoot and then it was cancelled (lots of prep and then lots of cleaning up). But this weekend I have a studio visit, my LAST official engagement of the year. I need to get over my denial about what I want December to be (blissful studio time) and accept it for what it is (getting ready for serious winter AKA squirrel behavior).

On a less cranky note, please help fund more grants for the Collective!

Frank Brannon

"The Thinker Vandalized"

Steven Young Lee

Deliberate collaboration with Hyeyung

Hyeyung and I met when we were teenagers as violinists at a very intense summer music experience. I was almost about to go to college and she was a year younger. She and another friend were the clearest examples to me of Korean diaspora kids who had a really different way from me of approaching themselves in the world. Hyeyung was proud to be Korean, which I had never seen that in someone my age. Up until then, I had felt ashamed and misunderstood, but meeting her right before Oberlin helped with a long, slow awakening (which is still in progress). Here she is stripping and scraping milkweed from Michigan.

Hyeyung went into a professional music career while I veered into art but our paths crossed in unexpected ways in Nebraska when I was on a residency and she and her husband/string quartet cellist were living in Lincoln. After her quartet dissolved, we talked for years about collaborating. I've always been hesitant because my view of my collaboration ability is that it sucks. Since she is such an important and beloved friend, I did not want to do anything that would blow that up. But we have sorted out a path towards collaboration that feels right for both of us. She earned a New Music USA grant to have a weeklong residency with me in the studio. While I'd never say I understand the process of composing music, I have a decent sense of being a musician. So we focused on various papermaking steps so she could feel my process in her body. Here's days and days of work for just a quarter pound of milkweed bast, cleaned of its outer protective and waterproof layer (remember I had already scraped a bunch in Michigan, and it's all combined here).

Hyeyung's idea emerged from a letter she read in Epistolary Korea, edited by the late JaHyun Kim Haboush. In 1795, a grieving mother wrote a letter to her dead 10-month-old daughter that would have been read aloud at the funeral and then buried with the baby. Hyeyung herself is a mother and found both the writing (it is written in classical Chinese, the language of scholars and men in charge, rather than Korean script more often used by women) and content extremely compelling. In the letter addressed to her child, the mother creates an incredible narrative of why it was better that her daughter died as an infant, so that the mother would never know the deep loss of losing an older child, while spinning her dreams of how this baby would have grown into a beautiful, well-mannered girl with smooth hair that she would carefully brush while wearing the proper clothes and so on. It's so very Korean mom. To give Hyeyung a sense of different fibers, I soaked Florida mulberry for her to scrape after we finished the milkweed.

The letter went hand-in-hand with ideas Hyeyung has been exploring around Korean women and what it means to be part of that population, especially when your stories have not been told. The most obvious to us are our mothers and their generation. Our mothers do not speak often about their past. I know that my own avoids mention because it was bad. She was born at the end of the Korean War and experienced deep parental loss, abandonment, and poverty. She was too often cold and hungry and taunted by others for that. There is so much more that only comes out in dribs and drabs at the most random weird times. I only found out this summer that her name is not her given name and that her mom said, "Let's change your name because your given name is too sad." So it resonated with me when Hyeyung asked, can we ever give voice to Korean women in generations past, with respect and honor, without putting words in their mouth? I think music is a fantastic way to do that. Because I could see that she was so fastidious, I had Hyeyung do an extra step that I never make anyone do: after scraping the outer bark layers, we separated the black bark (flakes on the left) from the green/white bits (on the right).

Maybe Hyeyung is fastidious by nature, but what I observed was an example of a theory I've had for years: that discipline learned as a musician translated to other fields. I always say that my training in violin, where I had to be alone for many hours trying to solve problems, or with a teacher for many hours watching them and trying to replicate every last movement down to the finger knuckle, prepared me for this papermaking life. The intensity of focus that I brought to my music lessons I brought to my papermaking teachers. And I saw it in Hyeyung, how she saw details that most students never see or notice, how she was fully present as she tried to piece together the myriad of physical movements and observations to replicate my labor. She also approached it without the judgy baggage a lot of people have, because she has an entire lifetime of proof that if you pay attention and practice consistently, you learn and get better. It was so satisfying to see. She is in a whole other universe of musical ability than me, so it would make sense that she saw things in the paper studio and in my work that had been invisible to me for years. This is one day's batch of scraping, in between lots of other activities.

Being together also meant sharing a home, cooking, meals, cleanup, pots and pots of tea, and even the furnace gas leak. Often people try to get back to the stage of living in dorms with college friends, when they were so accessible, because it is such a luxury to be able to be close and share lives together. This was the first time I've been so comfortable with a house guest, mostly because we've known each other for so long, and partly because she's a mom so I know she can handle certain things that I normally would never allow a guest to do. But also because we are a good match. I love the contours of her mind and how she thinks so deeply and earnestly about what she cares about, how she is always open to learning more and discovering things that change old patterns or ideas, and how purposeful she is in everything she does and the worlds she creates professionally, personally, and for her family. She spent at least three days I think beating this wad of milkweed bast. Most students would get upset that this was going on so long but she kept wanting to get back to the studio to beat. 

This was one of four giant prints by He Sanqing (Chinese, born 1988), made in 2016, called Neither Mountain nor Water. We visited the art museum two days in a row and I absolutely loved this contemporary print show in the rotating section of the Chinese galleries. I walked Hyeyung through the sweep I like to take to get to the Korean gallery each time that I visit. Since it was the first residency I was hosting, I also wanted to make sure we had a good balance of non-studio time that would be generative or rejuvenating. Which is why I scheduled a massage for us early in the week! Korean women rarely got to do this kind of thing so I insisted we take that time for ourselves.

I usually don't visit the video room but we happened upon this Patty Chang video. I haven't seen her name/work in years and it made me think about how our art history educations revolve around when we were born, who taught us, and who was big at the time that we were learning about art (I know, this is the case for ALL education!). Patty Chang (b. 1972) was huge when I came up. The tag read, "American artist Patty Chang's 1998 Melons (At a Loss) shows the artist mutating and eating a melon as a surrogate breast while discussing the death of her aunt, a performance that both is absurd and subverts expectations of exoticized female bodies." When I met Hyeyung, I still wanted to be a performer even though I knew I was on a lower tier music-wise. I needed time to figure out that this wasn't going to be my thing, and also visions of what might be my thing, before I could give it up. I haven't performed since 2008, right before I left for my first research trip in Korea. Seeing Hyeyung at the airport with her violin case made me not at all miss flying with my violin! She shared insane stories about her husband being thrown off the plane with his cello even when he had bought a second seat for it. A great reminder of how well we both understand the travel that goes hand in hand with work. She's an very seasoned and skillful traveler.

Our second visit to the museum was with Sooa, the Korean art curator, and it was like having art history on demand. We could ask all the little questions we had and get brilliant answers on the spot. Sooa had also read the book that inspired Hyeyung and we discussed the various letters that struck us. It was so eye-opening to hear about the funeral tiles that were a prized object in the collection that she pushed to repatriate and return to the Korean family to which it belonged. The stories are so very human, how these things get lost. We talked about tomb excavations, and an upcoming exhibit that gave Hyeyung the kernel of the idea that we will use as a jumping off point.

I really wanted to connect Michelle to Hyeyung because of how the former is working on degrees in both studio art and music composition. We had a couple of studio days together and Michelle helped me with dessert one night and hosted Hyeyung for a meal when I was doing something else. She remains the most wonderful student I've been able to interact with over the course of years.

This is the first time I've ever gotten Michigan milkweed to paper form so quickly! Since it was such a small batch, we did small sheets rather than full-on hanji formation.

Early in the week, Hyeyung said that she wanted to not only learn about what I do in the studio but be helpful to me. That made it so much easier to let her do work that I would normally do. This is another key aspect in working with her: she has excellent boundaries and communication skills. And she really just rolled with all of the unexpected things that came up, which made it so much less stressful for me.

Because of the stupid gas leak and other scheduling issues, we were only able to board and then she had to fly away the next day so she didn't get to peel away the final sheets to take them home. But now that the hard part comes, collaborating while separated and back in our regular lives, it means that I can write longhand and enclose paper. I had hoped to do that sooner, but had to work in Columbus a few days after her departure, and then got sick. I've been home nursing myself and variously unhappy about being ill while happy to have a good excuse not to work. Still slowly processing this precious shared time and looking forward to how it will eventually manifest, while always grateful to Hyeyung for her friendship and vision.

Hyeyung Yoon

New Music USA 2022 Creator Development Fund grant recipients

Epistolary Korea

Modern Impressions—Light and Water in Chinese Prints

He Sanqing

Patty Chang

Sooa Im McCormick

Reaching back to early November

In fall, I always want to stay home and sew, knit, make stuff for myself at home. When I found out that Youngmin was going to teach a class for Tatter, I signed up for hers and then also an extra one for piecing. I'm usually super ugh around Zoom classes but I wanted to support Youngmin and had always wanted to have a better grip on how to use scraps properly when piecing (not because I quilt but for my obsessive and culturally historic desire not to waste any bits). I LOVED Zak's class even though I had to leave early for a dental appointment.

After that, it felt very urgent to make a bunch of scrunchies. There's another not pictured, and meanwhile I had hoped that the big dental work (yet another crown) would be the end of my fall financial woes. Oh, how wrong I was!

While I may have been able to skate by another winter with the furnace that came with the house, it seemed like a better idea to upgrade to a high-efficiency two-stage one, which means that all the grass (and maybe weeds?) in this side border will die from the exhaust.

A new chimney liner had to go in as well since the new furnace was no longer venting through it, so the hot water tank would need this (as well as my chimney). Surely, I've done the right thing and nothing else is wrong, right? The day they installed, I asked if it was normal to smell so much natural gas. They said yes. Days later, it still smelled a lot like natural gas. I finally called the company a week later to say I smell gas, they said it's probably not gas and just wait for it to burn off. I'm glad my house and I didn't explode because of course I was right. Two weeks after installation, the gas company guy confirmed with great alarm that the gas leak was not at the connections but inside the furnace itself, gas valve hissing away. I'm still trying to decide how to go forward, do I contact the attorney general, blahblah. While I've had a great life, this is NOT how I would have wanted to die.

Before I knew all this bad stuff was happening in the basement, I had a lovely trip to the College of Wooster to give a workshop and lecture. After a lovely lunch with Professor Jim Bonk and his students, we visited the art museum, which was having a delightful container show. Marianne, the curator, explained the genesis of the show as she started her tenure during pandemic. She knew that people would not have the bandwidth for super conceptual work and started looking at the collection. One piece led to fascinating discoveries and ideas for the theme of the show. I LOVE IT. 

It made me think about my own work, how it does better with the many layers of meaning and understanding of technique and history, but also is fine on its own. The kind of work that requires lots and lots of reading used to be so fascinating to me but is less so now. The immediacy of a teapot, there's nothing like it. Also, how killer is this install?

Every detail of the install is excellent, like having burial containers lower to the ground.

Marianne explained how this was for koi in a private garden and we all mused about if they enjoyed the painted scenery inside and also how many would fit in there and do they get to come in and out of there? There's a whole history of this pot at the school; it was broken and vandalized but then pieced back together. Every piece has a story.

Marianne also got Doug to come by to say hi, because he is the genius behind the install. Somehow he works here and at another college doing preparator work. I say somehow because how do you do all this work in two days/week? This table is also his own, which is a fantastic way to display these pieces, and made me look more closely at all of the stands and supports for the work itself.

The workshop was held in the art building, which was an old gym. That above was a track and now it's individual studios.

We had a great group of students across several different departments, and it was just the right technique (joomchi) for the slot of time. After that, a quick dinner with Jim's family and friends at their beautiful home and then back to school for an evening lecture. I really enjoyed the visit and how obvious it was that these professors really care about teaching their students. You can see it in the direct connection they have to their students in person but also in the concerns they have about them outside of the classroom.

Back home, my precious Michelle brought amazing homemade cake to share with me. I try not to think about how I was at that age at Oberlin, because I really did not have a clue. She is trying to cover up the bottom of the other slice because it was slightly scorched but truly, it all tasted great. I'll share about my residency and final gigs of the year next time. Have a great holiday!

Tatter

Youngmin Lee

Zak Foster

Jim Bonk

College of Wooster Art Museum

When I say coming up for air

I really mean it! I was going to do a regular long post but this is not the time. I had a two-week gas leak thanks to the installers of my new furnace (always love it when the guy on the other end of the phone says, nah, it can't be natural gas, you're probably smelling something else) and then found out that my hot water tank is also spewing insane amounts of CO2. But I was too busy with an excellent residency with a collaborator that I was hosting, so I couldn't handle the life stuff on time. More on the residency later (it was so good)! For now:

1. My lovely Oberlin assistant helped me with the above dessert platter for a potluck

2. Please donate to the New Media Caucus to support BIPOC creators: The Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead Microgrant Fund

3. Isn't this a wonderful artist? Sabeen Omar

4. I leave tomorrow for Columbus and will be there until Friday. It will snow and snow but my snow tires are not on so fingers crossed that I survive the trip. I'll lecture Thursday (at 4:10pm) at OSU for a co-sponsored talk that you can attend via zoom if you like. Or you can come in person!

Michigan for the win

I like to think this wee one blessed my most recent trip to Michigan. I started with a detour to Detroit to see a good friend at the DIA and visit one of my past students' offering at the ofrendas exhibit there. As always, it was a stimulating and energizing meeting because she always gives me new perspectives and logical ways of approaching my problems. Already I was driving away with all kinds of new, practical, and not too difficult things to do. It was also good to have time to roam the galleries and discover new work, whether really old or recently made.

The colors this fall everywhere I've been are glorious, and that is another blessing. So much to admire and enjoy, and I was elated to be able to be outside working amidst the blazes of all kinds of colors.

The first morning was harvest, and the fields yielded plenty of milkweed as always. I'm carrying my bunch as I wander on new paths more to water than to harvest. This year I felt less worried about the cutting back because I knew whatever we got would be more than enough. It takes time to learn not to be panicked and selfish, to ask for permission (and wait for the answer!), never take the first plant, leave more than half, leave your own gifts, and remain grateful.

I left this bit in the field, already separate from its core and adding fiber to the field.

I liked seeing this stand of color and lone milkweed leaning out into the path.

Pati and I created a way of working where we make piles on the ground in various places that we work and then gather them at the end. Because I was in so much hip/back pain and it was hard to walk, I did a lot of organizing work as she stayed out in the fields, moving one pile,

then another, to a clearing next to the car to make it easier to process, bundle, and load.

We were so happy to have Jill join us for the harvest! We sat around for a while first and then showed her what we had been up to.

Unsurprisingly, she did a great job and came back with her own bundle to work on. I decided this year it would be easier if we trimmed shoots and pods away in the field and took them as separate problems to tackle.

It was great to sit outside and catch up while trimming and collecting. I kept watching free coma fly into Jill's hoop earrings and hang out.

Back at home base, the colors were just as glorious and welcoming. This is the one place in the world where I know I can be fully present without danger, where I WANT to chuck my phone and computer out the window, out of my life, and be.

I had lost all track of time and we came home for a late, late lunch and I started a pot on my new induction burner to steam the greenest of the stalks (they weren't very green but I wanted to test a range).

These hung out to the very end, and I got almost all of them done but once I was at the final ten or so, I gave them to the compost pile. I had already come with steamed bast that had sat around for almost a week because of my furnace problems, so first I had to scrape all that before I got to the new batch.

Many hands make light work! It was also great weather for both Tim and Pati to do outdoor chores, and it feels easier to do all of that when everyone is outside doing something. I even had a whole bucket of exploded pods from LAST year that I hadn't gotten around the separating! So this trip covered a lot of ground.

Stripping bast from the inner core

Scraping away the outer layer that I call "plasticky"

Taking away that top layer doesn't get rid of the spots, those have already stained the fiber and flesh underneath. It's too much work to also try and take the flesh away (and means I'd lose more fine fibers).

This was from my home border, not that many plants but enough to fill a pot and keep me busy scraping for a day and a half. The batch from Michigan was way bigger.

Pati took great shots of me wrangling coma from a fresher pod below her studio. Opening the pod here.

Keeping it intact while I pull away the inside from the pod.

Pulling off seeds without disturbing the coma too much, or they become a big mess and not something you can hold in one hand.

Hard to see if you don't know what you're looking at, but pulling out the central soft bit that houses the free ends of the coma in remarkable compression.

These were a bit more damp so they didn't fluff up immediately and fly away.

The outdoor cats also tolerated all of our outdoor work, and here you can see the fluff that I threw away a few feet away from our working spot because it looked like there were spots that would do better in nature than in the beater.

Both of them like to hang out near the studio and hydrate near the rain barrel. As always, Pati fed us like royalty and Tim answered a lot of my questions about any number of mechanical and practical life things (why does that go there and how does this work??). I was so happy to be peacefully present in unusually gorgeous warm weather, ensconced by the trees doing their showy display before they dropped all the pretense—each day, leaves fell on and around us.

It was even harder to come home from this and do re-entry than from Hawai'i. Especially because I knew everything ahead this fall is work, and there isn't much reprieve until February. Grateful for the paying work because it keeps my house heated (the furnace guys are downstairs now putting a new one in) and my teeth from falling out of my head (I've been to the dentist three times in the last month) but retreats like this are what actually keep me feeling effortlessly buoyant.

DIA Ofrendas exhibit

Pati Scobey

Tim Moore