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Return from Hiatus

Coptic bound book, blue cover with blue-and-black marbling trim near the spine.
Coptic bound book, completed for personal use

At last, posting once more. My drafts folder is full of posts in draft form, but the past several years have been…complicated. Covid, but also caretaking efforts and all that that includes. Very little spare bandwidth.

Slowly, I’ve been able to return and reclaim my time and space in the studio, and I’ve spent the past year acquiring new skills and pursuing interests that I wasn’t able to before. It’s been quite a process.

I’ll post later about some of my travels, but for the moment, let this be a start, with an image of one of my new pieces — this one just for my own use, a book I bound for capturing ephemera (ticket stubs, receipts, notes, contacts, quotations), completed while traveling to Detroit to learn some blacksmithing skills.

I’ve since been accepted into two juried shows coming up, and I’ll post about that in a bit. Still working on some additional pieces that I plan to submit to some other calls.

One thing at a time…

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Foraging

Yes, foraging for materials.

It’s a strange process, that starts with some material or other catching my eye, bothering my mind, but also bouncing around in my head demanding to be given a new purpose.

It could be merely because I noticed a preponderance of something, like wire coat hangers being thrown away in bags and tangled clumps. It could be the individual shape of an item (bottle caps cried out to be dapped into pretty little half-domes, bosses on something wearable – and readable, as it turned out), or it could be its material properties, like the plastic strapping that gets fastened once, then cut off a package, and discarded without so much as a second glance. An item at once necessary and protective, but then abruptly it becomes a hindrance and nuisance (plus, they don’t seem to be commonly recyclable).

I don’t always have to scrounge too hard to obtain what I need. Once I explain what I’m doing, everyone I ask seems enthusiastic to offload the scrap material that often accumulates, unwanted. Often, they also express enthusiasm for getting to, in some way, contributing to a piece of art, or at least giving scrap material new value and use.

Not that this doesn’t remind me, also, of the old George Carlin talk about how leftovers are wonderful because they give you such a good feeling, twice! First, when you put them neatly in the refrigerator you feel virtuous, “I’m saving food!” …and again three weeks later when you find them at the back of the fridge, becoming a biohazard, and you throw them away: “I’m saving someone’s life!”