[sterling, 23 karat gold, lapis lazuli]
[sterling, 23 karat gold, aquamarine]
[sterling, 23 karat gold, aquamarine]
You know, all of this crazy lichen business began when I found a flippery and floppery, arm sized chunk of the stuff at Feather Beach on Diablo Lake here in the North Cascades of Washington. By the way, Feather Beach is what I call that beach, so don’t look for it on a map. Regardless, we’d all be bored to death like a handful of blasé, simmering and simpering dumplings if this series was repetitive and going nowhere but I’m glad to say it’s going somewhere and I don’t feel I’ve reached the end of the line yet! Each new design grows in trembling leaps and bounds every time I sit down to create and I like that growth very much. It’s exciting to experience the snowballing of an idea, repeatedly, and I’m so thankful that I have enough time in the studio to really explore lichen forms as much as I want to. You know, this entire series really began with the enameled Host Necklaces I worked on a couple of winters ago. That series (and this one, continuing) was all about human symbiosis — choosing what we host in our life with regards to where and what we pour our energy into, and what we receive energy from. I think all the lichen work I’m doing is still attached to that very same personal delving I was doing and am doing now, regarding how I spend my energy and what/who I allow to attach to myself and feed off my energy. There you have it. I don’t always give you the roots of the reasons behind my work but energy expenditure is really on my mind lately and so, I find it trickling into my work.
In other news, I found a partial fawn skeleton while running the mountains and have been boiling an entire spine segment all day long in the kitchen. It reeks something awful and Robert is not surprised with my kitchen activity or amused, to say the least. Good wives make dinner (or some such thing). I boil bones — they are not good for eating. It seems like such a morbid, gross activity, to have scraped the last of the tendons and sinew from vertebrae and pelvic bones with a paring knife in the kitchen, but it’s what I’ve been doing. I’d like to make a vertebrae mobile. They’re so white and delicate when they’re stripped down to their barest. I like to find bits of animal while out in nature — it reminds me how I was fearfully and lovingly designed and knit together in my mother’s womb. We all have the same things, you know, beating hearts, warm flesh, kidneys, brains, fluttering lungs, and thin, wavering strands of DNA that tie everything together like ribbons on Christmas packages.
It’s Friday! What the heck do you have planned for the weekend? I’m planning on working and spending the hottest parts of the afternoons at a lake in my sea foam green bikini, perhaps with a cold beer nearby and some guacamole and chips on hand. It was so hot here today, I thought I might perish. This body was meant for winter.
Have a beautiful and restful weekend, wee birds. I’ll see you in the week to come.
xx
:::POST SCRIPTUS:::
This is for waggling about. Turn it up.