Lately this is all

The old wall (2006), which I had wanted to just throw over the top of the partial wall, but was told go to ahead and suspend it as it had been built to do. The pedestal keeps it from being so obviously lopsided. I could have weighted the bottom to have it straighter, but I liked the way it rolls over because then it feels more related to Sarah Rose's work in the gallery directly to the left of this when you enter.

The new wall (2020), which was something I swore up and down I'd never do but in the end was the one decidedly new thing that required a daily studio practice that eluded me for most of pandemic.

This is my bit of the show after you enter the Euclid Avenue gallery space and all of the gallery shots were done ably by Jacob Koestler. Documentation work like this is very hard to do so I'm glad he pulled off a lovely group of images.

This is my favorite nook in the show, probably because this is where I spent the most time, with a ladder and step ladder, rigging the wall.

A basket case!

I made the left duck on a flight from Australia back to the US and it came out so much weirder than my other ducks that I had a custom stand built to properly hold it up. After a couple of rounds of dyeing, it has grown on me a lot and the wee one seems to be having a good time with it.

Mushroom stands ranging from very easy to a lot more work. The mix is: uncoated, persimmon coated, and then lacquered by Christine Puza. These are the gifts that keep on giving, after being inspired by woven mushrooms in the educational "touch" section of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Sometimes the best places in these institutions are where all the kids are gathered and clamoring.

I have many compulsions and one is to always get rid of things. Declutter. After hanging this show, I was tired of the older work I've been storing. This one was carefully disassembled for the meat.

The lesson? Lightly waxed hanji cords beautifully.

This is a nighttime shot so a big bleary, but the one one the left is what became of that little skirt. The vessel on the right was recycled from...

This one! Again, carefully taken apart for the meatiest bits (the jacket is still intact, I have to figure out what happens to that).

Much but not all of the skirt became this shoe.

And even though I finished this after the show rather than before, as I had hoped, I am pleased.

You can't see the driveway behind me to the garage, but I cleared from there to here before stopping for the day. Two hours of shoveling heavy snow and the wet underneath, plus carefully coaxing my shrubs to stop being iced and laden with snow onto the driveway. I pulled them up one by one and shook them, patting them and eventually hugging big chunks and hitting them against my body to remove ice and snow. Everything else is still buried, but I needed to not drive over the shrubs on my way to a video shoot at Oberlin the next day (there was more shoveling at night and the next morning). I'm still recovering from spouting the contents of my brain over a few hours to a camera.

 

On top of that, I was nearly scammed like this artist (I knew it was fishy from the start but ignored red flags until the very obvious one: "I'll send you more money than the cost of the art"), so I've gone into a memory bank of previous swindles. Finally, the process of trying to apply for a visa to Korea for my Fulbright research has been unfathomably fraught. I will write extensively about it later but for now, the fact that my Korean father was a Korean citizen when I was born in NYC means that I have to jump through A Great Many Unfair Hoops. So very many, so very unpleasant.

But you don't have to do any of that! Instead, you can join Sarah Rose and me as Lisa moderates a conversation about papermaking and art next Thursday at 5pm. If you attended the opening, I promise any video and photo documentation will be much, much better.