eyeball "i"
michelle boettcher
1990
a couple of weeks ago,
i asked
willow to give me a letter so
i could be part of her
letter-related meme. she assigned me the letter "
i" and
i immediately thought of the artwork above, which was done by my friend michelle, who we affectionately call michellea, who
i worked with twenty years ago during college at a daily newspaper. well, michellea managed to locate her brilliant eyeball "
i" collage and photograph
it for me, so now
i can write this post.
the letter "
i" built entirely out of eyeballs cut from magazines
is, to me, totally
inspired. the alliterative marriage of "
i" and "eye"
in the form of a lower-case "
i" speaks far beyond the simple letter and all those disembodied eyeballs. the very notion of self, of "
I" is there as well. the hundreds of eyeballs speak to a self constructed by how we see and are seen.
i always thought
it was such a powerful work of art.
i felt michellea had captured some essence that was at once comforting and disturbing and
in which
i could almost literally feel
it looking directly
into my soul.
i always wished that she had made
it for me.
that christmas, michellea gave me a different collage artwork, the "
i" was her own.
it was a collage made of magazine clippings as well--and
it captures perfectly who
i was at the beginning of the 90s.
it's made up of repeated versions of my name, one colored
in purple, because
i was crazy for purple then. and the rest made up of all of the pop culture references and news
items of the time--madonna, the first president bush, things russian, things pageanty, television shows.
i put
it away when we packed up the house for our remodeling project and
i can't find
it at the moment, but
i'll stumble onto
it one day and scan
it and share
it, because
i still have
it, a sort of snapshot of who
i was during a given era.
but, back to the letter "
i." as
i say
in my title, "
i"
is for
inspiration.
it's also for
innovation--a word that's been overused
in a business context and lost some of
its meaning. but
innovation, as
in "
introducing novelties, making changes
in anything established,
introducing something new," that
innovation
is powerful. and as
i scour the wonderland of
inspiration that
is the
internet for things which provoke my artistic
imagination and my muse,
i find that
i most often try to
innovate rather than
imitate to make those sources of
inspiration my own when they end up
in my art.
this week,
i've been inspired by
resurrection fern.
i first visited when
margie did an interview of
melissa from
tiny happy, one of my other sources of
inspiration and where i go when i want/need a feeling of peaceful calm. but,
i started going back again and again and basically just lurking, never leaving a comment (
i felt a little unworthy for some reason). margie often
interviews other artists as well as sharing her own work and sources of
inspiration. well, this week,
i decided that
i had to check out her
etsy shop and
i was lucky enough to be there at the right time to score one of her lovely covered stones, as well as one of her sweet merfish.
i couldn't believe how quickly they came to denmark from canada--
i think
i ordered on tuesday and wednesday and they arrived already saturday--so this
is my very stone and my very merfish, photographed by me on the cobblestones
in front of my house.
i've long had a thing about stones and we have many of them around the house, gathered on beaches all over the world.
i even have a couple from a beach in oregon that my grandmother gathered thirty some years ago. so you can
imagine
i've had my share of overweight luggage fees because of schlepping stones back home from my travels.
i really love what margie has done with these stones.
it's like she sees something
in them and
it's called forth by her crocheting.
i get the feeling that the little flat stone WAS a merfish and margie saw that and just gave him his tail. these are THAT wonderful. and i don't know how to crochet, but
i feel that having them near me on the shelf in my studio will spur some creativity
in me
in some way that
i don't yet see.
i think
it will be something to do with combining natural and manmade materials, but
i guess time will tell. but already,
i made it a couple of friends--
i felted some of the many stones that are lying around the house:
i saw felted stones last year on etsy and
i can't locate the shop again,
it was too long ago,
i guess, tho'
i vaguely recall
it was based
in the netherlands.
i had ordered some beautiful rovings to use for felting, also nearly a year ago, but it took having this little resurrection fern merfish to push me to do
it. for the
inspiration to come forth. sometimes you just have to wait for these things to happen.
i'm learning that.
other bits of
inspiration
i spotted this week (on etsy or flickr, or
design for mankind, among others) are as follows.
i'll be very
interested to see where they take me:
and these cards:
these fabulous hand-carved stamps by
geninne spotted on flickr:
check her blog for even more beauty and inspiration! and she sells gorgeous things on etsy.
and this, which
amanda pointed me to at
sundance :
i'm so gonna be making something like this
and
andrew moore's fantastic photos of russia which the lovely and talented and very
inspiring
tangobaby pointed me to not long ago:
and
i'm finding
inspiration
in words as well, words like these:
and that pretty much does it for the letter "i," because it's taken forever to put all those i's in bold.
