Awareness

    In all honesty I was scared to come home. Lot's of personal situations, and the overwhelming fact that I was going to be running around for whole month not knowing what to do with myself, and crashing where I ended up: my sisters, my brothers, my Dads, my Moms' etc... tiring. It was time to pray. And I have been praying for a miracle. And the word that comes to mind is awareness. There is healing when one is aware of the source of pain instead of simply reacting to it.

     The trip wasn't easy. It was twenty hours of Sig time, but I love to travel and I love to drive, so it evened out in the end. The weather is so contrastable to Memphis, that it was almost laughable. I found myself looking out the car windows at a rainy day, as I left, to fourteen inches of snow the further north I drove.

    And I have been surprisingly busy!
I have been blessed to help my brother move and in so doing, have been able to paint a few rooms in the house that he has moved into. YES!

    Now I am continuing to work on  a mural on my mothers wall. I started it spring break but had to leaving it unfinished due to a lack of time. I wasn't really intending to dive back in it so quickly, but since I conveniently printed off a bunch of photos at school before I left, (I drained the printers of their ink) and brought them home with me. I thought, "Why not use them on this?" So I got back to work today.

Acrylic Transfers

             Lots of hanging paper now, but after the paint dries, I can rub all that off.

 I brought my weaving materials with me! Mom's kitchen is full of Signe.

 Little Eli Man has continued to capture my heart.

 I went to see a performance with Grandma on Thursday, that my mom and her friends were putting on at the DAC in Floodwood. We get there and settle into our seats around a table, and soon coffee was offered by a nice woman who worked there. We both readily accepted. After a few minutes of chatting with the folks across the table, Grandma looks at me and says, "We need something to suck on." So she takes out of her purse and old eyeglass case holding Grandpas meds, cough drops and a couple candies.  I love Grandma.  There is no woman more resourceful.

It's been a good first week. I think I shall survive this one yet.

Family

     This evening I am sitting at the kitchen table listening to Vicki, Gary and their worship band  practice for Sunday morning, and I am reminded that God has indeed orchestrated this semester for me.

      Four months ago, I was living at my dad's, and fretting/worrying about going back to Memphis and finding a place to live. It was touch and go, and every day I woke up I had decided the opposite of the day before. I didn't know what to do. If I went back to Memphis, I was going alone, and that was really hard.  It was also really hard to admit that I was no where near graduating if I went. What the heck was I doing. There were no safety nets (no family). I was having incredible depression phases, and struggling to get over from a gluten intolerance and it's effects on my have been playing my brain the past 13 years..


     But I knew that in my discomfort I was growing. I remember leaving moms house in tears and very upset, "Well I better go, if I'm going to go at all."

And look now!! I am so blessed to feel like I have never left home. How beautiful...

2D

This class was quite enjoyable for me. I had previously taken such a  class this summer back at home. But since I had audited it, I had to redo.  Everything is done through the use of cut paper, textural materials, glue, and sharp knifes. Every piece is roughly 16x20in.

Positive/Negative Space- First day of class, and I get it wrong entirely. The pieces were supposed to reflect each other.

Positive-Negative Shapes/ Arranging "Empty Space

Emotive Space/ Calligraphic Line/Line Variation

Creating Rhythm

Line Study

Line Repetition

Line Repetition/Movement 

Collage

Value into Shape/ Collage part II

Line Experimentation/ Self Portrait

Line Experimentation part II

Final Project/Visual Texture

Dreams and 2d work

Last night I dreamt that Caleb (my younger brother) and I had to catch up with mom who was in town meeting a woman friend. This old friend I felt was someone I knew from my younger years but I couldn't pinpoint her. Mom, dressed up, was meeting this friend at a open/cafe downtown on a sidewalk, in a unrelated small town on main street. We came up to where they were sitting and I sat down on one of the chairs. Leaning back and looking into one of the store window that was next to me I saw through the windows the ceiling of Duluth Famers Market. The roof still had that pale green paint, and the beams still held history of a burning.

 I mentioned to mom, "Do all Farmers Markets have ceilings like this?"

Caleb and I had arrived late for we were stuck in an odd situation just a few minutes before. I was trying to finish something in the photo room and then clean up the chemicals that were in the pans. Oddly the shallow sink like table that usually held the chemical trays was not a sink, rather it was  a deep brick vat that sank about eight feet underground. It was huge! The light was very dark in the darkroom (makes sense) and very yellow/red.

Caleb thought that he was going to help me clean up and so began to dump the chemical trays over into the water. I yelled out at what he was doing and Caleb to calm my fears, dived into the deep vat and and found that there was a drain that allowed the water to pass through. This apparently calmed me down, though I don't know why this discovery would.

Anyway, here is the makings of my last project in 2d.
To start weaving with photographs was first difficult for I had to take the knife to something that was coined, treasurable. But there are so many ideas going with this.

Final Project_Photo 3

I wanted to create a character that seemed understanding of the power play between advertising and reality, and how I struggled with its spell. A friend and I decided to attend the outdoor mall in Colliereview, and it worked out well. At first I didn’t know what to do at all, thinking that we were just going to finish shooting a video for a previous story, but as things got rolling the air cleared and ideas fell into place.  

The story initially opens up as I am sitting at the kitchen table falling under the spell of the immortal add. The audio playing of War of the Worlds in the background is enlightening to the viewer of this struggle play.  As I walk up to the windows in the next scene, I am showing the inevitability of me morphing, into this fake perfection. But it’s still a struggle! Mrs. Advertisement has given birth to many goddesses like creatures, and the desire and the disconnection war within myself. How can I be happy with this petty little bit of flesh? There is always someone a little thinner, a littler prettier, a littler more confident, standing ten feet tall and blowing my shabby life and image down the gutter with her perfected lips. But yet without me, she cannot exist. And so the spiral continues.  She feeds off of me, and I feed off of her. The glass from the windows was also a nice touch for it shows that there is nothing that really connects us. I am an odd site in the face of superficiality. The last clip of me ends at the table with another clip of the musical ringing forever in my ears. It’s a never-ending battle, for I will always be human.

Final Project/ Photo

Yes (disclaimer) it's long. I had not choice in the matter. If I wanted to do a video again, it had to be five minutes.

Can you guess, what my concept was??

The Good and the Bad

     It was a crazy day in all respects. Starting off cheering a marathon that passed our school doors at nine am this morning. No it really started with me waking up and regretting dearly that I signed myself up to be sign holder/amazing motivator. I found out I really lack in motivational skills. Half heartedly crying out, "Go, uh... ha... um woooei!" As I'm drinking my mug of coffee behind my sign.

 Then rushing out to Collierville to do a shoot, that wore me to the bones. I was so tired, and oddly irritated. Everything as usual wasn't working. I was doing shoot after shoot of myself the last couple weekends, looking like a fool, for all to see. And my final project seemed only to be getting worse. 

But before leaving Suzie's house this evening, she reminded me to pray about it. How odd I thought, to pray about a silly project like this. But I'll have you know, that in a matter of hours, after getting home, I  finished, and am happy to say that I am the proud parent of a finalized project. And I'm very excited about it!! Yes I know...

I ended the evening with Suzie, working on her final; Acetone transferring. It wasn't working . So tomorrow evening, it's another round.