Weekend Reporting and New Work

Hope you have had a restful weekend!  I wouldn't call my weekend restful, but I defintely got some rest and I had a little rejuvenating outing to Sioux Falls, the biggest city in South Dakota...located about an hour north,  with a population somewhere I'm guessing between 125,000 and 150,000.  I know that's quite laughable to many of you from large metropolitan areas and I quite agree...but what it means is that there's no traffic in this state to make you road weary, there is plenty and I mean plenty, of wide open space and the people are friendly and relaxed.  But, it means that we have to drive an hour to get to a city with a major choice of restaurants...which is what we did, because we had noticed a couple weeks ago when we were there for a doctor's appt. that there was a brand new Indian restaurant.  John and I both did a doubletake because the only one that had been there closed last year, so we were very excited by this new possibility!  The bonus for the outing was that I also got to see a beautiful print exhibition that I thought I was going to miss at Augustana College...a Russian artist, Michael Goro.  John had taken his students up to see it last month, but it was difficult for me to get there when the gallery was open. It was quite a treat to see the beautiful work AND have dinner at the new Indian restaurant!

Meanwhile, here's a bit of what I've been up to in the studio.  I have several pieces still in the works, but here are two that are finished.  I apologize again for the bad photos, but tomorrow I'll take the official shots of the work so I can post these pieces in my shop....in the meantime, you can get a feel for them I think...I hope!

I've been continuing the practice of making found text poems on a weekly basis for my other blog MissouriBendPaperWorks and this piece started out its life there on the post for March 2nd.  I've also been posting them for sale in my shop, but thought I'd change things up a bit and so I dipped this one in beeswax and because the poem itself was only on the lower half, the upper half was asking for attention....although wasn't sure quite how it needed to be resolved.  Eventually this dragonfly stamped onto a teabag that had been floating around the studio was dipped in beeswax and sewn to the page.  And then another little fragment...a little circle cut from a printed copy of an old photograph from the albums my mother kept since long before I was born.  Two little stitches hold it to the page....you probably can't read the poem in this photo...the text reads:

we know 

what little we know

driven to act the clown

with one side

weak and 

the other strong

This appears to be Botanical Specimen no.5....those colorful shapes look like something under the microscope...they are teeming in their centers with activity in the form of tiny stitches.  I still think these pieces I'm calling botanical specimens appear to be more biological in nature...but then I also like to think that they come from a time before life differentiated into plant and animal....before this was this and that was that.  Anything could have happened and we're surrounded by what did happen...and is still happening!

Cheers!