A variety of thoughts

In remarkably random order... perhaps mirroring the disorganization of my brain... here is a variety of thoughts for today (which is Earth Day among other important anniversaries)... My thoughts are often tangential and random and this post is no exception. I think my girlfriend is worried I'm going to have early onset Alzheimer's disease, but really I think the truth is that (a) I often just don't pay attention, and (b) there is WAY too much information coming into my world every day for me to effectively filter it and hang onto important pieces.

1. When I woke up this morning in a hotel in Dulce, NM (job-related hazard), for some reason the first thing I thought was, I'm so glad it is April and I don't have to worry about it snowing and me being stuck here until the weather clears. Then a half hour later after a lukewarm shower (apparently another job-related hazard in a hotel full of working people) I pulled back the curtain and there was a quarter inch of snow on my car.

2. I opened the medicine cabinet at home to get something for a headache and pulled out this bottle of Advil.

Then I turned the bottle over to look at the expiration date. This is an activity that my girlfriend has encouraged me to start practicing... and much to my chagrin I have found items in my kitchen that not only predate Obama's presidency, they predate my dog (who is on the elderly side of life for a labrador). This is what I found on the Advil bottle.

Admittedly, when I first glanced at the date I thought, "well, January of 2010 isn't too far outdated. Should be fine." Then I looked again and realized that a date circa Nine-Eleven was probably a little far gone for medication. I mean, that is older than the Iraq war and I'm pretty sure that has been going on most of my life now.

3. I walked into the living room to find this.

The offending party is implicated in the shot. Apparently my return home to feed her dinner at 6pm did not meet with her approval. Since the date on the raisin box was somewhat older than the current date, she probably did me a favor (though disposing of out-dated raisins is undoubtedly easier than outdated medication).

4. I am almost done with the piece on the loom. Tomorrow is a studio day and I am hoping that with some concerted effort I can finish it up. The next piece is planned, cartoon drawn, and yarn dyed. I just have to get this one OFF!

5. Lastly, this is the best piece of art I've seen lately. It is hanging in the hallway of one of the elementary schools where I work. Artist unknown. I may have to hunt him or her down and see if they will commission a tapestry.

A camera for tapestries...

I have been wanting to get a new camera to photograph my tapestries for a long time. A generous gift from my grandfather has allowed me to finally get a digital Nikon SLR and though I haven't taken one picture of a finished tapestry, I am having fun with it.

On my 14th birthday (alas, many years ago now), my parents bought me a Pentax K1000 single lens reflex camera. The very first roll of film--carefully chosen photos of my family and a set of shots of hummingbirds at Lake Granby where we were on vacation--came back in a very skinny package from the developer. The roll was unexposed. Turns out the Pentax K1000 has a tricky film start and that roll never went through the camera. I was devastated, but started again and pretty soon learned how to take all kinds of pictures including those hummingbird pictures (which somehow got me to the regional science fair one year).

Now I have my very own digital SLR. Mostly I have to admit that I use it like a point and shoot--in the auto mode. But I love that little sound of the mirror slapping. It reminds me of the years of the Pentax K1000. I'm sure I'll get around to taking better photos of my tapestries--especially the ones for the Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus shows this summer and fall, but for now I'm just messing around.

Thanks Grandpa!

Today at Plaza Blanca. Look Ma! New hiking shoes!

Unicorns

Here is the unicorn tapestry. It isn't my first commission, but it is my first commission from a 9 year old! It made me feel like an old-time tapestry weaver. Megan Swartzfager (age 9 at the time) designed this tapestry and I wove it pretty much exactly as she drew it. The tapestry is not as bowed as this snapshot shows--my zoom point and shoot creates this weird ballooning (yes I know I still need to get the new camera to photograph my work...). I had fun weaving this. It was the first thing I wove on a Mirrix and the only piece I have ever woven that was "realistic". Realism isn't my style (not that unicorns are necessarily real!), but it was fun to do something different. I used some weird novelty yarns to make the unicorn white and the tail fuzzy and the horn silver. It was a grand experiment and it ended up looking like the original drawing. I hope Megan is pleased. After the Enchanted Pathways exhibit at Convergence, it will go to her. She named the piece Mystic Moon. I think she might even make a visit out to New Mexico (she lives in Mississippi) to see her piece in the show on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. I hope in 2012 she has her own tapestry to submit.

Weaving Southwest Re-opening

Tonight was Weaving Southwest's re-opening. They moved just down the street in Taos and the new space is much better... better location also. Congratulations Rachel and Teresa!

Three of my pieces : Awakenings III, The Space Before Knowing, and Meridians. They have sold my more recent pieces. I can't keep up with them and weave for upcoming shows. How do weavers do it? (I know, they never sleep or go hiking for 5 months at a time. I do hope they take magic carpet rides though... and read... and eat chocolate...) I was happy to have my work next to Karen Benjamin! She has always been one of my favorite tapestry weavers and I can't even tell you exactly why. I've never even met her, though she did go to my alma mater (Lawrence University).
Somewhat magically while at this opening, out of the blue, the solution to a piece I've been trying to design in my head for months appeared. I don't know why or how this happens, but sometimes the right image just falls into place. It didn't have anything to do with any of the weaving there or even any conversation I was having--just got the right image and came home to figure out how to weave it. Finally! I've been mulling this one for months. Maybe it is because just before I left for the opening I cut the little piece for the ATA small format show off the Mirrex. Finish one piece, time for another one (not that there isn't another big piece on the Harrisville... small detail. That will have to be finished and the loom rewarped before the new one can be started.)

Quality in Art...

...or "Why isn't tapestry considered an art form in many places?"

I was having this discussion with my weaving mentor yesterday in Santa Fe. It is a long-standing discussion which is pretty one-sided as we both agree that tapestry struggles to be recognized as an art form. A case in point is HGA's difficulty finding venues for exhibits during Convergence. We were lucky to get a venue at Open Spaces Gallery for our Bauhaus exhibit (Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus), but many people were not so lucky. The small format ATA show ended up in Santa Fe and the ATB8 show didn't find a venue at all in New Mexico. I heard from HGA and ATA people looking for spaces that what they were hearing from galleries was that they only focused on "traditional" weaving. In New Mexico, that refers to the traditions of the Navajo and Hispanic weavers.

When I look at "fiber shows" I often am amazed at the poor craftsmanship that is hung on the wall and called art. It is an age-old debate, what constitutes art, but for me good craftsmanship is part of the equation. I think as tapestry artists, if we can't make good-quality work to start with, we are asking to be considered simply "craft." And this leads to situations where high-quality tapestry shows like ATB8 or an ATA show can't find a venue in a major American city--one that is steeped in art and surrounded by cultures devoted to weaving. ...just my beginning thoughts on the matter.

And for visual interest, a photo from a hike I took Saturday near Velarde, NM... an old adobe building that had a descanso inside it.

And here is a photo of some cranes at the Bosque del Apache during morning fly out a few weeks ago. I have watched them fly over my house in fast-moving clots of croaking sandhills through most of February. They seem to be gone now. When I was in the San Luis Valley a week ago, I was able to visit them again at the Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge. My Pentax point and shoot 4 megapixel is no match for the mega-cameras that appear at the refuge, but this shot isn't bad (at least at low resolution in small size).

Another Bauhaus Project Update

I have written a fair bit about the Bauhaus Tapestry Project that I am working on in conjunction with James Koehler and Cornelia Theimer Gardella. The project is in full swing and has several different facets. It is a mentoring project between James and Conni and I including study of Bauhaus principles and how those principles have impacted our current work as contemporary tapestry weavers. It also includes two shows in 2010. The first is in Albuquerque during Convergence and the second is in Erfurt, Germany. The project started as an idea of Cornelia's as 2009 was the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus and includes drawing parallels between the Germany Bauhaus ideals and our current practice as artists in northern NM (as well as Cornelia's work in Germany). Please see our website for the project description and other details if you're interested HERE.

We are still looking for funding for this project. If anyone has any ideas of where to get about $10,000, please let me know! I'm not a grant writer and we seem to be running out of ideas. We have a fiscal sponsor but money for the arts is slim right now. Most of the money is for a catalog which will include photos and descriptions of our process and connections to the Bauhaus, for the travel to Germany, and for shipping work there and back. Info on our fiscal sponsor is on the Bauhaus Tapestry Project website.

Lastly, if you are a tapestry weaver and you haven't seen Silvia Heyden's article On the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus movement: How the Bauhaus tradition has continued to inspire me for over 50 years of tapestry weaving, take a look at it. It is in the Winter 2009 issue of Tapestry Topics (newsletter of the American Tapestry Alliance) and can be seen online here. Unfortunately they were not able to put the entire text of the article online, so the combination of photos on the internet and the printed version of the magazine is needed.

Thanks also to Lyn Hart for her great review of the workshop Silvia presented in Mendocino in July. Reading these two articles made me wish I had been able to take this workshop with Silvia!

This photo is just to prove that I have been weaving. I need to get this piece and two more done before the show opens in July--and they have to be done early enough to get a catalog printed before Convergence! I have some work to do.

And lastly and completely unrelatedly--I was looking through one of my kitchen cupboards this morning and found some excellent potato specimens in a gorgeous state of growth. I didn't know potatoes could put out this kind of color! I was quite pleased... well, not pleased that I have to compost 6 big potatoes AGAIN, but very pleased by the purple shoots.

The mice that visit in the winter and other tales of woe...

**Disclaimer, warning, and general statement of non-culpability: This post contains a photo of dead, pickled rodents... almost as gross as Fluffy the cat (there is apparently a family compulsion to post photos of dead mammals on blogs). Read no further if you can't handle this stuff as I will take no responsibility for any squeamishness brought on by this post. There is a nice shot of some mountains and a weaving in progress if that helps though.***

I sat down to fortify my resolve to weave by writing about weaving (instead of actually weaving--some would call this resistance at work)...

...turn back as you can't get there from here...

(Incidently, this post seems to have little to nothing to do with weaving. Sigh.)

The last month has been full of frozen pipes, snow, cancelled school (YES!), and a little weaving.

Here is the photo of the weaving in progress. Actually most of this has been done in the last week, so I guess I am finding time to get some work done. (Photo deliberately obscure as I'm not sure my feelings about this piece and I don't want to commit via blog before I have to.)

Right, so the story actually has to do with frozen pipes, mice, water softeners, and wells. I have an accessory dwelling in a little town in Northern NM where I work in a rural school district. This dwelling is a single-wide trailer and I am continuously amazed at how inefficient a means of housing this tin shack actually is. The pipes froze in December (thawed out by the trusty school maintenance team) and then when I got back from a lovely vacation in January, found they had "frozen" again... the pipes in the trailer AND the pipes in my beautiful straw bale rental house in Velarde.

Unfortunately the pipes in straw bale house go through an outbuilding where the pressure tank and water softener are housed. This building, regrettably, is not made of straw bales and thus, when the temperature dipped to "it-feels-like-the-San-Luis-Valley" lows, the pipes froze. Fortunately for me, my neighbor noticed the problem when she tried to water my plants and alerted my most-excellent landlady who thawed out the pipes. All this activity along with subsequent problems with the well, the pressure tank, and some gunk in the water filter that looks like tar got me more involved with my water system than I ever wanted to be. This, at some point, led me to look inside the water softener. This may have been a mistake. I was only trying to see if it needed more salt. What I found, besides the fact that it did need more salt, was two dead mice. I felt the bile rising in my throat when I saw those little pickled bodies floating in my water supply. I'm not entirely sure how a water softener works, but in that moment I was pretty sure I had been drinking dead mouse parts for possibly quite some time.

The water softener and the professional tool (Cassy's Chuck-it, sorry Cass) I used to remove the mice.

The actual bodies before they were laid to rest in last week's garbage. I'm not sure how they got into this 4 foot high tank, but they are crafty little buggers.

After removing the mice, I started reading the (long) manual on how to backflush the water softener and got as far as the part that talked about pulling the brine water (which was still full of bits of dead mouse) into the cleansing beads before I took a deep breath and shut the lid. I then fortified myself with a beer and went back to the loom. I'd figure out the water softener another day.

Three weeks after the second freezing of the pipes in the school-trailer, here is the progress made by those intrepid maintenance guys (I mean no disrespect to that lively group of truck-driving, tool-carting guys. I know they're busy... I'm pretty much guessing I won't be living in that trailer until the daisies start coming up. I have plenty of experience living with no water and am quite happy to do this for awhile, but there is also a little problem with the heater involving carbon monoxide. And I definitely don't want to die in a trailer.)...

Yep, that is a pool of water flowing from under the trailer. There was a can of Red Bull on the porch last time I went by. Clearly this problem requires caffeine, a backhoe, and perhaps some warm summer days to fix.

Note: Currently my straw bale house still has some water issues, but the water pressure problem which had me looking like Jerry Seinfeld in that Seinfeld episode where the landlord installs the low-flow shower heads and Jerry and Kramer's hair is completely flattened, is fixed for the moment. My well was bleached, there is still iron staining my sinks, and I am drinking bottled water (something I usually disparage)... but heck, life in rural NM goes on and I have to say, I love it. As far as the rural school job goes, I believe Cassy and I will be staying in hotels for awhile longer.

Shot from Highway 64 between Tierra Amarilla and Tres Piedras...