when i can't sleep

i'm thinking of topographies. maps. cosmologies. is it possible to map a life? to create a topography? is that what blogging is? or is becoming? a topography of a life? is it even possible to come close to even a faint outline of a life? can you preserve the topography of a life in cloth? felt? stitches? fibers? are we able to read the map of that life even if the person who created it and left it behind is gone? do the memories and even more so, the meaning remain and can it be read? do they penetrate the fibers and can we access them? can i make a topography of sabin's baby and toddler life using the clothes she wore then? and will it retain its meaning for years to come? these are the things i'm pondering when i can't sleep at 4 a.m.

what do you ponder when you can't sleep?

today's story people story of the day is so appropriate for this post.

reflections on the february daily art journal

click on this mosaic to see the whole set on flickr.

here it is, my mosaic of all of the pages of my february art journal calendar. this is such an interesting process. here in february, i've been less religious about sitting down and doing a page every single day, so there are many which stretch across two pages, because i didn't do them until the second day, thereby giving myself more space. i'm finding that works a bit better for me.

here are the close-ups of the second half of february. the first half is here.

february 15 - doodlings on a heavily embroidered dress seen in jean-paul gaultier's haute couture show

february 16 - sketch of the inkle loom that we bought  for sabin to weave ribbon on at our beloved randbøldal museum.

 february 17 18 - experimenting with monoprinting

i scribbled a thick layer of pastels on an ordinary sheet of paper and then laid it against the page and drew on it. it was fun!

 february 19 - cutting up one of those free postcards

february 20 - more monoprinting, this time a spillover from the soujournal project

february 21 - 22 a doodle a bit inspired by these, seen on flickr,

but with my own motifs. 

this was the first time when i sat down with the calendar and didn't know what to do.

and i think that shows.

as you can see, the past few days, after elizabeth (aka my zen master) sent me a link to a wonderful artist named shannon rankin, i played with some maps and really found my groove. expect more map stuff in the near future. it was well-timed, because husband had just cut up a map to aid him in our property search and so i had some extra bits of map at my disposal. sometimes cutting into such things is hard for me, but since it had already been cut, i had no inhibitions.

february 23 - 24 thinking about redrawing maps

these are places that have been important to me.

but i shuffled them at will. that was liberating.

february 25 - 26  driving around, looking at 8 farm places had me spending a lot of time with maps over two days. i found myself wondering which road would lead to our new home.

february 27-28 - fragments of a topography

maps in general interest me - topographies and mapping and drawing and tracing the topography of a life. that's what we're going to do in moving, we're going to redraw our internal maps. i got a bit of a start on it here at the end of february.

i still don't have a clear idea where this project is taking me. but combined with the soujournal project, i'm doing a lot of art journaling this year and that seems like a good thing. in fact, it seems so good, i've been pondering ways of sharing it.

so i'm putting together an online art journaling course. at first it was only in my mind, but now it's spilled onto the page a bit and i've even begun to make up packets of pretty papers for it. i'm still at the planning stage, but i'd love to know if you'd be interested in taking an online art journaling course and coming to explore this medium with me? please email me with any ideas you have about this - what you'd like to do in such a course, how you'd like to interact with the other participants, thoughts on materials and the like.

and don't forget to check out my fabulous new orange coat below. it was totally worth breaking the year of not buying things. :-)

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?

documentary photography

i learned something yesterday on my usual wednesday afternoon trip to the henie onstad art center (i'm going to miss that place). they had a new exhibition up of contemporary norwegian documentary photography. the photos were all recent ones by norwegian photographers. mentioned in the notes on several of the photos were that they harkened to the traditions of american documentary photographer walker evans (1903-1975) and german august sander (1876-1964) and i intend to look into their work a bit and learn more. i suppose another name for documentary photography is journalistic photography, but it's about depicting snapshots of life as it is. and i suppose it's where the notion that a picture is worth 1000 words came from.

most of the photographers in the exhibition had little interaction with their subjects, they just tried to capture moments without interference, but there were several where they had posed the subjects. one of those is above, where a russian woman is posed on a train (the trans-siberian railroad, to be exact), tho' she is, in a sense, posed in her natural habitat. i had to snap it with my iPhone and i love how my own reflection is visible in the photo, which for me, further underlines the documentary nature of the piece...me documenting myself seeing the documentary photograph. that strikes me as powerful on some level, tho' i'm not sure that at the moment i can explain it. it somehow shows how the things we see, especially something like an exhibition, which is intentional on every level, creep into our own topography and become part of us in what we take away.

i think blogging goes well with documentary photography and many of us are amateur documentary photographers, showing our daily lives and the topographies (there's that word again, but it's on my mind of late) of our lives. maybe contours would have been better, but i love the notion of mapping inherent in the word topography. i wonder if blogs will be future source material for sociologists or historians looking at historical moments? or are they so ephemeral, they will just fade away? interesting thoughts to ponder on a grey and dark northern day.

walls in my mental topography

pondering walls, like everyone else on this 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall. already last night on the news, they were discussing it and the significance of the event, which marked, at least symbolically, the end of the cold war. sabin was watching and her response was, "berlin wall, blah, blah, blah," which is interesting. because it's clear that she has no reference for it (being 8 and all). she can't imagine what all of the fuss is about just because some people knocked down a stupid old graffiti-covered wall. she knows nothing of NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact, nor the Iron Curtain, nor the Soviet Union. (strange that those things are so deeply etched in my mental topography that i can't bring myself not to capitalize them.)

when i think about the fall of the berlin wall, it takes me back to college. i had personalized plates on my car that read CCCP (believe it or not, the state of iowa allowed that), i was studying russian, i was an avid fan of gorbachev and i despised ronald reagan with a passion (the only thing that cooled that was the 8 years of dubya, who made reagan seem quite harmless in retrospect). i don't believe for a single second that ronald reagan was a visionary that foresaw the downfall of soviet-style communism. he was just a guy who could deliver a good speech and happened to be in the right place at the right time to get the credit. and those who really deserve the credit were the people on the ground who pushed their way through that wall and in all honesty, the wall coming down was just the culmination of a long, slow demise of the soviet empire (which took another two years to formally dissolve).

but do i remember it per se? in all honesty, i really don't. i remember more the aftermath. i remember russian history departments in universities all over the world scrambling to find a new narrative. i recall those pierce brosnan incarnations of the james bond franchise that struggled to find a new narrative without the cold war as backdrop. i remember studying in russia in the early 90s with an east german guy who was a bit of a character and had a big fat laptop named hannah as his pride and joy. i remember that the other germans i studied with found him very strange because he was from the east. it was obvious that the divided germany had set itself deeply on the personal topographies of its people and that it would take more than the symbolism of knocking down of a wall to change that.

strangely, i'm left with a nostalgic longing for the dichotomies of cold war rhetoric - the whole notion of good and evil was so straightforward then. plus, i think we've struggled since with only one superpower in the world. i don't think it's been good for us. any of us, not just americans. in one symbolic gesture - breaking down that wall - an entire ideology and way of life crumbled - on both sides of the iron curtain. and we've had trouble picking up the pieces. it took another broad symbolic gesture in the form of september 11 to give us a new narrative, but i'm not sure the narrative of terrorism is a worthy replacement for the cold war. i don't really believe today's possessors of nuclear weapons have the same cool heads that the leaders of the soviet union and the cold war united states had. where is mutually assured destruction when you need it?

and speaking of destruction, i find myself thinking of other walls that have fallen. wall street for one, last year at about this time. but it's back up where it was now, isn't it? and the financial wizards are collecting their taxpayer-funded bonuses once again. and nothing has really changed.

maybe the last time there was real change was when the berlin wall fell. it had such fantastic symbolic value. and so we watch it again and again this week. and we read the stories. and we remember simpler times full of grander gestures. and i try not to let in the sneaking suspicion that what we are witnessing now in a kind of slow motion accident-type sequence, is the demise of the american empire...

this girl...

gillian at indigo blue wrote a wonderful "this girl" post about herself and asked readers to play along should they so desire. i'm a rather new reader of indigo blue, but as my sister always says to me, "it always comes back to you," so it feels like this game is a natural one for me to play along...

this girl is out of her element yet entirely at home. she is unsure but comfortable. at ease in her skin, but doesn't really know her own contours. she's navigating her topography, filling in the pieces as she goes along. she doesn't know the way, but is sure there is one.

she is searching, striving. wanting, always wanting. more knowledge, more input, more inspiration. more crocheted stones. more gadgets. more laughter. she's curious and open yet strangely closed and definitely opinionated. she's judgmental. she's live and let live. she loves to be with people, but just wants to be left alone. she's a mass of contradictions wrapped into one skin.

when she gets hold of an idea, she embraces it fully. she's obsessed with eyeballs. but it's because she's working on seeing. seeing the world around her in new ways (the camera lens helps this). she loves to wrap herself in mythology, which is why it's odin's eyeballs in particular that appeal... mythological sacrifice at the alter of knowledge. a prayer to sofia, the divine wisdom. (and now she's mixing mythologies too.)

she wants to be good, but she doesn't always achieve that. she's snarky and crabby and short with those she most loves. she's mean but generous. she procrastinates with blinding efficiency. she's not always a great mom. but she is constantly in awe of the little person she helped create. she worries about the world that little person will inherit and how to equip her for that task.

she jumps in with both feet and asks questions and figures out the logistics later. there rests within her a feeling that things will work out how they're supposed to. she strives to see. and learn. and seek. and love.

at times, she has a sense of being totally in the zone. she has no control of that feeling and has no idea how to make it happen (but knows that a great outfit helps). in those moments, she breezes in and brings with her a force of energy that's fairly beaming off of her and she can actually see its effect on people. during one of those times, someone once said to her, "you are like cocaine." she liked that very much.

she's always been one of the guys in her own mind. this has mostly been a good thing, but has sometimes gotten her in trouble.

once she's decided someone is stupid or not worth her time, it's totally over for her and that person. she can't really even be nice anymore. it isn't very fair. but she knows it about herself.

she is pedicures and fake eyelashes. she's natural, locally-grown organic produce. she's posh hotels and backpacking it on a balkan train. she's hugo boss suits and flannel pjs all day. she's a midwestern girl. she's european. she's sushi. she's tropical fruits on a philippine beach. she's pork rinds on friday evening. she's gold lounge and the first one off the plane. she's at home everywhere and nowhere. she's a coach bag and H&M dress.

she's moscow, not st. petersburg. she's nikon, not canon. she's white chocolate, not dark.

she's an avid reader. a writer. a photographer. an artist. she's finding her place.

she is mostly chaos. a force of nature. evolving. becoming. a bee charmer.

* * *

wow, that was fun and really liberating to write in 3rd person. you should try it too.

tripping down memory lane

i'm clearing a whole lot of boxes out of the attic. i had saved loads of sabin's baby clothes up there, for some unknown reason. perhaps for a sibling that never materialized. perhaps because they seemed so precious i couldn't bear to part with them. perhaps saving them for a rainy day. maybe because in my last life, i was in the siege of leningrad. maybe i'm part squirrel? or maybe just because i'm an incurable packrat.  but in any case, i've gotten them down and i'm going through them. i've decided it's time to wash them all up and save the ones i want to use to make her a quilt of her baby and toddler life and to donate the rest.

and i'm finding it strangely difficult. all those sweet little bitty clothes that i remember her wearing. it brings tears to my eyes to see them again and think of all the times i dressed her in them and washed them and folded them. remembering occasions when she wore them. me, feeling sentimental, imagine that? i hate sentimental, but i can't help it. just looking at these little shoes makes me tear up like a big baby. and i'm honestly not sure i can part with them. what is it about them? some lucky little girl out there could probably really use them, the toes are scuffed a little bit, but it's nearly in a charming way and there's really a lot of use left in them. they should be of use to someone, not tucked away in a box in our attic. i wish i could think of a way to incorporate them into a quilt that's a topography of her life thus far, but one doesn't spring readily to mind. why oh why is it so hard to face giving them away?

it's a bit strange, because i love the big girl sabin is becoming and in many ways don't miss her babyhood. i love how much she does for herself and how much fun she is now - she was also fun then, but in a different, more needy way. but tiny little clothes and shoes are just so sweet. now her big old long toes poke holes out the ends of her tights, back then, they were just so sweet and little. maybe that's it, i just have a thing for miniature things. maybe i'll just keep the red shoes and donate the rest (including the most precious pair ever of silver and pink nike shox). i've even got the original box for those. hmm, why is it so hard to let go of things?

pure creative potential: film swap

on the flickr blog the other day (thank you flickr front page), i learned of a flickr group called "film swap." people shoot a roll of film in their analog camera, leave the tail sticking out then swap with someone else and double expose the roll - two different photographers, two different sets of eyes, many different subjects, preferably two distant locations. once i read about that, i knew i had to try it. so i loaded up my old canon AE-1 program and asked if anyone in the blog camp 365 group would like to do a little film swap with me.

the film swappers in the big film swap group are pretty advanced and into lomography, and naturally so am i (stop snickering there in the back), so i loaded it up with expired (in 2007) fujichrome sensia 400 so we could cross-process it in the C-41 chemicals in the end.

so basically it's got like this mind-blowing exponential creative potential going on. slide film, negative chemicals, analog cameras, two different photographers in two vastly different locations, expired film, and double exposures. one photographer's eye imposed on another. i'm so excited about this i can hardly contain myself.

and i'm hopping up and down happy that the lovely shokoofeh of a new simple something fame is who i'll be swapping with on this first attempt! she has the most amazing, artistic eye and that alone is mind-boggling. but for me, the whole notion of views of iran layered on views of denmark and vice versa adds so many layers of meaning to the creative potential that it very nearly takes my breath away. i feel like an entirely new topography will open up and you know how much i love topographies!

i've finished my first film and just loaded a second one. i made some mistakes with the first...i didn't set it on double the ISO as i should have, which may mean that shokoofeh's pictures don't shine through as much as they should. i was also so worried about losing the tail of the film when i rewound that i opened the camera a little bit early and spoiled the first 5 or 6 exposures. but hey, i learned two things and i won't make those mistakes again. and so i'm sure this second roll will be even better. i think i'll send both to shokoofeh. i really can't wait to see how this turns out.

 * * *

psst. for those of you who sew and quilt and aren't so into photography, there's a very cool new project here. i'm going to be doing it as well. after all, sometimes one should use the stash and not just stash the stash.

stormy moods make for stormy weather

it's been a changeable week weather-wise. one of those weeks where i feel like i'm causing the weather with my moods...sunny, bright and glorious one moment, blustery and spitting the next, pretty much precisely how i've felt. of course there is a chance it's the other way around and the weather contributes to my mood and not vice versa.

despite the wonderful news on monday evening and the soul-nourishing event tuesday night, the rest of the week has been a series of petty irritations. an unnecessarily snotty mother at the stable. the fiasco that sabin's trip to st. petersburg is shaping up to be. political agendas. a strange woman who asked me to move my car from "her" parking spot in a public parking lot, where spots don't belong to anyone in particular. a dull, all day headache that prevented meaningful work or thought.

small irritations, but irritating nonetheless, especially when all lumped together. especially because they chip away at the good energy that came with events of the early part of the week. each taking a little bit of it away, until it feels like there's not enough left and you need to find a way to tank up again, but you can't because of that infernal dull headache.

maybe it's all just PMS, or rather DMS, since i think it's actually worst during, not before. but i realize that's too much information. i only talk about it because it really is a factor. moods are not something static or even or stable. they go up and down and you're in high spirits one minute and down in the dumps the next. just like our changeable weather - sunny one minute and raining the next. the good bit is that's the only way to get rainbows.

but a walk in the garden, photographing the autumn fruits on a beautiful morning before the rain comes, really does help. especially if accompanied by gathering a big batch of fruit, throwing it in the steamer to make juice and having the smells of warm raspberries and warm elderberries fill the house. it may not make the headache go away, but it helps.

happy weekend, one and all.

* * *

pet words.  

my conscious ones (at the moment) are: topography, synesthetic, troglodyte, xenophobic.

i wish they were: transcendent, elated, vast, encompassing.

in reality they are: actually, supposedly, apparently.

what are yours?

* * *

and speaking of words:
creative swear words.
made up words.

a weekend in denmark

i'm tumbling so many upcoming posts in my mind. when my inspiration/action correlation began to clear on friday, it provoked so many thoughts and ideas. so in the coming weeks you can expect posts on:

1. alice in wonderland
2. architecture
3. whether hyperlinks represent a topography of thought
4. nordic mythology
5. really tiny mushrooms
6. bullying in the workplace
7. whether it's possible to fast-track the process from inspiration to art
8. a perfume review (i've been thinking for awhile of doing these on a weekly basis)
9. hugin & munin
10. eyeballs

* NOTE: checking them off as i do them. 

but all of these things are still swirling in my head at the moment so for now, i'll just share some scenes from a winter-almost-spring weekend in denmark, some of which are hints to the above:

sabin's first riding lesson

it went smashingly and she's in love

mmm. latte.

and felt heat protectors in scrumptious colors (#22).

ATCs for sabin's swap

oops, we were supposed to mail these yesterday.

oh well, they're so good, tomorrow will be fine.

"where do i report my quest?"

lots and lots of world of warcraft

eyeballs (#23)

really tiny mushrooms

hope your weekend was full of laughter, candlelight , fresh bread, inspiration and a bit of fresh air.

topography of a life

i'm fascinated by maps. on pinterest, i have a board called topographies, that's full of interesting and inspiring art people have made of maps. but maps are art in and of themselves. they are a representation of a place, not a duplication - a map can never truly capture all that is about a place (borges knew this). they remain but an incomplete illusion. i think it's what makes art featuring maps so fascinating.

just as it's impossible for a map to truly represent a place, it's completely impossible to fully blog a life. for one, no one would want to read it, for another, it's simply impossible to put words to it all. that, of course, doesn't stop people from trying. there are those who blog their breakfast or nightly dinners and then publish books of the photos, in case you missed one of those prosaic shots. there are people who take a photo at the same time every day (or was that just a plot device in a midsomer murder?). or people who simply take a photo every day (i read about a guy who did that for like 30 years).

me, my life and my blog, are all over the place - sometimes it's a craft blog, sometimes a travelogue, sometimes it's about perfume, or raising a child, or living in self-chosen exile, occasionally it's even about politics. but mostly, i blog to think things through, work them out and make sense of the world around me. and it feels pretty real to me. but you can never truly convey what it's all like (especially not the bits inside your head). you can only sketch the outlines. map the topographies of a life, if you will.

i don't share everything, but i do think that because of the immediate kind of person that i am, how i'm feeling is pretty obvious - good and bad. of course there are things i don't blog "out loud" - because they might hurt someone or burn a bridge or get someone (usually me) in trouble (the tales i could tell you of several big corporations would make your toes curl). i also don't blog every worry i have, because to an extent, i want this to be a mostly positive space. but i do blog about those things on my secret blog, because blogging is how i think. or rather, writing is how i think, and blogging is my medium of choice. there's something about that little blogger compose window that just gets the words flowing. and the impossible mapping of a life continues.