Posts Tagged: circus sideshow

The Importance of Self-Care (as Illustrated by My Broke-Ass Bernina)

When we’re young, we don’t dwell on thoughts of mortality. Our bodies feel good, look good, and perform well. Lack of maintenance – or even self-abuse – doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on the resilient machines that we are.

After 40 or 50 years, however, the machine benefits from more regular maintenance and less rough handling.

I would have done well last week to keep this in mind when I was racing my 52-year-old Bernina 731 sewing machine and flipping switches back and forth like a demon. One rough flip too many and that was that. I broke the needle position pin.

L: The pin I broke off. R: Where it came from.
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Bearded Ladies and Broken Beliefs

Not having access to a dedicated woodshop has meant that I’m finding creative solutions for the shapes and sizes of wood that I need to build the base and four 42” high columns for The Bearded Lady diorama.

Progress has been slow, but forward moving. On one hand, the snail’s pace of this piece has been agonizing. On the other, it’s meant that I’ve had bonus time to enrich the work by adding more details and contextual layers. Have I mentioned lately how much I love research?

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Gallery Talk: Freaks, Geeks, and Strange Girls

For logistical reasons (and, if I’m honest, to keep my nerves at bay), I decided to not capture the December 6th artist and curator talk for my solo show at Radiator Gallery on video. I was happy that curator Peter Gynd (who leads an excellent conversation, BTW) caught the audio on his phone and kindly shared it with me.

There were 30 or so attendees who enjoyed the talk immensely. I thought I would transcribe it and share here for those of you who are keen to learn more about my practice, process, and, in particular, this intensely detailed series.

Confession: Transcribing the audio was a bit of a harsh reality check ;-).

There’s nothing quite like hearing yourself consistently substituting “and, so…” for sentence breaks instead of ending a thought and then starting a new one after a clean pause. As it turns out that my comfort words are, “actually”, “sort of”, “kind of”, “like”, “um, so”, and “and”. I also have a habit of starting a sentence, then changing my mind part way through and heading in a completely different direction. Quite natural and acceptable in conversation, but a mess to read.

To make your experience of the transcript more pleasant, I’ve polished up the text, omitted many of these personal verbal idiosyncrasies, and added images for reference throughout.

Enjoy!

FYI, it was a 30 minute conversation followed by a 15 minute Q & A. Get yourself a beverage (we had wine!) and then sit down to read. It’s the next best thing to having been there. And don’t feel sad about about not being able to participate in the Q&A – feel free to ask a question in the comments!

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Freaks, Geeks, and Strange Girls

I have a confession.

I’ve been using my ramped up studio hours as an excuse to let the admin side of my practice slide. It’s reasonable considering I’m on a very tight production deadline, but I also know when I’m starting to use studio time to avoid other tasks.

The time is drawing near for me to put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) and work out word-wise what the current series is about; soon the gallery will need to have images and a statement for promotional purposes on their website. I’ve had this task on my to-do list for two months. Not surprising, my studio production in the last two months has been AHHH-MAZING.

So, because I haven’t written a blog post in a while, and because I love me some efficiency, I thought I’d combine tasks and write down some thoughts about the One of Us series and share them in an article here.

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