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LATTE & ZUCCHERO: A year of making notes

October 11, 2011 in I made it, Link, making, My life, Places to go, Thinking | 8 comments

Oh. Hallo. This is the announcement that at least two of you (hi, Neele; hi, mOm) have been waiting for: the 2012 calendar is nearly complete (just have to check all the dates and send it to the printer) and will be available on November 2 in the afternoon UK time (so morning US time).

This year, the calendar is about my habit of making notes and drawings all the time in my notebook. You can see Lisa Solomon‘s documentation of my documentation here. It’s also about the way that my imagined persona, the birdwoman, appears in that documentation–as a representation of my ‘real’ self, or as a way of doing things/going places that I can’t or haven’t.

It’s also, as you might be able to guess from the title, about sweet things (‘Latte & Zucchero’ means ‘Milk & Sugar’ in Italian). That’s me on the cover, asking for milk and sugar in my tea. Because sometimes I like it like that. And it’s in Italian because when I made that drawing (and wrote those words), I was in Milan, helping Lisa hang her show! Lisa, there’s a lot of you in this calendar, then.

There is less writing in this calendar–some handwritten notes appear, but there are fewer long pieces of text. One year, maybe next year, I’d like to make a writers’ almanac, a calendar with writing exercises and poems and things, but that would require some preparation I didn’t do this year (like getting rights to republish work). Anyway, less writing. I’m guessing those of you who have one like it for the pictures, anyway?

And lastly–a little rundown of what you can find in this calendar: writing utensils, folding chairs, scraps from my notebook, sketches from Portugal, lots of potted plants, a magical chest of drawers, peonies, scissors, streetlights from Venice, cioccolato from Milan, the birdwoman on public transport, rosehips (see above), old-fashioned Japanese toys, snow, and TOM the guinea pig hiding in a warm spot. So. November 2. See you there.

been a while

September 15, 2011 in My life, People to see, Places to go, Thinking | 7 comments

So here are some photos.

Tom enjoying his lunch on my desk. So, you may ask, is this going to become one of those blogs where the person replaces what was previously “thoughtful commentary” and “artful images” with tacky closeups of her “cute” pet? Probably. But how could it not when HE IS SUCH A CUTEYWOOTYPATOOTY. Ahem. Please strike that from the record.

Sometimes, especially if I am going somewhere ‘local’ (a neighboring town), the train will be one of these old ones with red velour seats and scuzzy fogged-up windows. I really like them. They remind me of this.

We got back from a week in Belgium and these green tomatoes had all turned red (and yellow. Some of our plants are yellow tomatoes. I hope the excitement we live with daily is not too much of a shock).

Waiting at the Beeston station on my way to Belgium (via London, on the Eurostar), I finally got a picture of something I’ve been trying to capture since arriving here four years ago. (Having typed that, I realised that my actual anniversary is on the 18th, which means I’m not talking about an approximate four-years-type situation, but am approaching FOUR ACTUAL YEARS in England. Surely there is a medal for this.) I love the railway workers in their neon suits. The guys down the platform from me were complaining that the work might delay the train, but frankly I’d rather workers delay it than a derailment. Dudes. Stop yapping and appreciate their work. Oh right, it’s England: Carry On Complaining.

While we were in Belgium we spent some time with J’s dad at a place near the Schipdonck Canal. I can’t believe they are talking about widening this. That would mean tearing out all these trees. They want to do it so the canal can be a more viable shipping route (eliminating some need for trucks) but…couldn’t they just make the boats smaller? It would be such a loss to cut down these trees. In so many ways.

contamination | Dounreay

July 25, 2011 in Art, I made it, Link, making, My life, Places to go, Theory, Thinking | 5 comments

This drawing is about Dounreay, a decommissioned nuclear plant in Scotland. It’s about contamination and fragmentation and residue. Nuclear catastrophe is one of my earliest memories–I remember Chernobyl and my father explaining the firefighters had gone in knowing they would die horribly. I was six. I already knew about radiation poisoning because I had read (maybe too early) Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I was privately obsessed with nuclear energy. I couldn’t have articulated it as such, but I read about the atomic bombs in Japan before I was in middle school, and made tiny shrines to the firefighters in Chernobyl that I kept in my bedroom. I was afraid of four things: the sun exploding (because no one would be there to care for our bones); radiation (this extended to nuclear war and power); cowboys; and the devil (how the last two came about I have no idea).

So I’ve been thinking about radiation for a long time. Twenty-four years, I guess. And thinking about contamination more and more in my work. The hardest thing for me about Fukushima is that there will now be, in the middle of this place I love, a dead zone. An uninhabitable place, a poison place. No one will go there. The photographs of Pripyat are horrendous to me. A human wasteland. Testimony to immense loss and immense foolhardiness and, most of all, waste. (You can see photographs of the reactor, people in the area today, and others here as well.) Waste of land, people’s lives, people’s memories, people’s records. Archives–gone. Photographs–gone. Drawings, paintings, musical instruments, scientific instruments, tools, religious artifacts: gone. And radiation contaminating everything that is left: water, ground, crops, plants, wildlife, graves, buildings, roads, toys, books, houses.

It makes me think about what will be left.

What an archaeology 4.5 billion years from now would discover. What will be left in places like Fallujah, where depleted uranium is causing unimaginable birth defects and misery. What fragments will spell out our foolishness and pride and trust and hope (because I do think that these things–nuclear energy–began with the hope and trust that knowledge will lead to beauty) and also our cruelty and short-sightedness and greed.

I think I will never stop thinking about contamination, either in this way (specifically nuclear contamination) or in a more general figurative sense. It is one of the most productive centers of my brain. How things change other things by their presence and how non-contamination is impossible, and also what can be traced of the effects of contamination and of people’s belief in it or refusal of it or fear of it.

I am making this work in part to make myself think outside of my normal patterns (it is not all figural/representative; what is representative is much more realistic than I would usually make). But mostly I am making it to think through the presence of this thing that fascinates and frightens me (nuclear contamination) and to reconcile myself with the fact of it, and to generate ways that I can, privately, work against it.