The Current Starting Point

Strange Ciders Project

Culture is a 3.5 billion year-old project. By culture, I’m referring to the continual organization, communication, and exchanges amongst species to the ends of coexistence and progressive complexity. The microbial world was one of the first cultures to emerge; it’s also been one of the most successful, diverse, and durational. It’s true that our (human) culture, as we currently imagine it distinct from the domain of the natural world, is founded and totally dependent on the existence of these microscopic ecologies.

What we think of as the self—the idea of who we are as an individual distinct from our surrounding environment, including others who occupy that environment—is in fact a historical artifact and a farce. Each ‘one’ of us has ten times the amount of individual microbial cells in our body than our own cells. That’s as much as six pounds of our body weight! Our very early biological development, digestion, and immune system depend on this. Knowing these facts, how could we still presume to think that the term ‘individual’ is an accurate label? We are mostly and vitally not ‘ourselves’ at all.

Also curious: the belief in the existence of bodies. Like the ‘internal self’, our bodily identities have been worked and reworked in order to distinguish, separate, and individuate. We need alternatives for future iterations! We are not suggesting a bodily transcendence; on the contrary, we are advocating a bodily dissolution into the world, into networks, and into environments. We are barely discernable from our surroundings. We are always multiple. We consist only of flows, communications, and processes.

The microbes know how to live. They’ve been doing it longer than we have and in more diverse ways. The smallest living organism is a nanobacteria, or possibly a protobiotic known as a nanobe; the largest living organism is a fungus in Oregon measuring 4 square miles. The oldest organisms on earth are a 250 million year-old bacteria found beneath a salt flat and 40 million year-old bacteria living in the belly of a bee found in a chunk of amber. We mention these extremes only to point to the tendency that microbes have to be creative and radical in their living strategies and practices. We think that in addition to the anthropological study of these cultures, it would behoove us to establish friendships, romances, and enduring relations with the inhabitants of this world.

We needn’t travel far to undertake this endeavor. We need to look inside ourselves, literally. Our guts, skin, orphuses, all contain populations, ecologies, and communities. We are looking to these multitudes for collaborative opportunities and creative potentials. The idea of displacing creativity outside the bounds of the human seems very enticing to us. To this end, we want microbes at the forefront of our process; we want to follow them into an inter-species microbe/human world that offers new problem-solving strategies, politics, value systems, and ways of living. Eating pro-biotic yogurt doesn’t quite cut it.

We’re culturing yeasts from human body parts (hands, feet, crotches, bellybuttons) in order to combine them with hand-gathered fruits to create wild-fermented beverages that will not only intoxicate you, they’ll change the way you think and behave; they’ll give you more things to talk about. This is social drinking in the most radical sense.

We’ve been activating new ways to entangle ourselves in dynamic, symbiotic, and productive relationships with these indigenous yeast species. Ciders, beers, and wines are as old as Homo sapiens, the enjoyment of alcohol older and universal. For most of this history, the yeasts used to produce beverages had arrived as part of the fruit or grain ecology, omnipresent on the surface of things. They never left, but have been continuously ignored and replaced with more efficient organisms that have been selected to suit a normative taste, expectancy, and behavior on the part of humans. We’re bringing the ecology back but in ways that have never happened before; cider-making is no longer an addition of ingredients and prescribed process; it’s a set of practices, experiments, and an interaction of diverse ecologies meeting each other for the first time. We have fabricated a posthuman beverage with each glass constituting a world.

Diagrams:

 

Current Bibliography for Cider Project

DONNA HARAWAY—Feminist scholar examining human/animal relationships, science studies, and the posthumanities. When Species Meet, and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women are the two books I have from her so far.

ANGELA E. DOUGLAS—A biologist, author of The Symbiotic Habit. I’ve read this book once before, and even though it’s completely scientific (not ‘philosophical’) it contains many amazing ideas that run contrary to many Neo-Darwinist concepts of evolution. The most important of these is that competition is not a necessary or even common dynamic between symbiot and symbiont.

PATRICK E. McGOVERN—An archaeologist based in Philidelphia, he writes on the ancient history of alcohols and wines, and there impact on culture. I bought two of his books, Uncorking the Past and Ancient Wine and am looking forward to reading them this break.

JERRY LEWIS, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR—Classic movie, doesn’t he drink something that changes him?

ISABELLE STENGERS—A philosopher of science/cultural theorist dealing specifically in ‘political ecology’, a posthumanist political vision that grants things, ideas, and nonhuman animals their proper agency. Cosmopolitics I and II are her best-known works, this break I’ll be reading I.

BRUNO LATOUR—Same as Isabelle Stengers, a political ecologist. The Politics of Nature I’ve read and is an amazing book, reading next Pandora’s Hope.

LYNN MARGUILIS—A theoretical biologist, prolific writer. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution recently caught my eye.

KAREN BARAD—Takes political ecology a step further. Instead of focusing on the agency of things within a political network, she is more interested in the relationships that happen between things (intra-actions) that allow for the emergent property of ‘agency’ and even the emergent category of seemingly distinct ‘things’.

ERIN MANNING—Artist/philosopher, author of Relationscapes. Hopefully this book is about relations within scapes, that would be perfect for my project.

DELEUZE—‘Body w/o Organs’ posits a theory of bodily becoming.

GUATTARI—The Three Ecologies is an instruction manual for breaking cultures and making new ones.

SANDOR KATZ—Queer communist author of The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation. Both books posit forth radical histories and practices of food production and consumption, as well as recipes and instructions.

ARAKAWA AND MADELINE GINS—Two artist/architects that have exhausted the nature of being-in-environments, being-ecological (although I don’t think they’ve ever explored this via biological relations.

JANE BENNETT—Another political ecologist. Author of short book Vibrant Matter.

THE YEASTS: A TAXONOMIC STUDY—Edited by Kurtzman, the biological bible of unicellular fungi. Three volumes, covers everything. $400 but UMaine has it as an e-book that I’ve been downloading 50 pages at a time.

Giant post which will always be a draft

A Problem Worth Having (or several)

My problem worth having is to make an experiment without using my previous art techniques or well understood materials. For me, primarily a painter and printmaker with  lots of ready made techniques and tools available, developing new tools, and not using media I am well versed in is a challenge. My comfort with tried and true methods has become a barrier to creativity, and beginning to work without paint or printmaking is a liberating thing.

Values the experiment are in opposition to are perpetuating old habits, and relying on formulaic methods of work production which keep the territory narrow. Exploring this problem has begun to confirm what I suspected: that creative action is often a simple re-visioning of a known quantity, even if a simple step beyond is the result of many iterations of thinking.

Utopia, according to Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno (Utopias, 2009) is as simple as the next great goal one sets oneself, and this may change over time. It is the thing that is missing from the current idea of perfection. Each time a goal is reached, a new Utopia is needed. So, a problem solved is Utopian, but this brings about the vision of the next Utopia, and another problem worth having.

This problem of creating a Utopian, non-deliberative, participatory, problem-solving mechanism, although arrived at through an experimental process based on awareness of Heidegger’s Four Fold, matches my practice biographically. I am engaged in finding ways to make each work I do a mini-Utopia. Each work must have an inherent logic that is flawless, no loose ends, a development of what has come previously, and not containing comforting short cuts such as resorting to my favorite things to do. Each work is therefore a problem worth having, and is in opposition to lack of rigor on my part. Each work must also offer a route to the next piece of work by having a missing component that must be actualized in the work to come. 

The Experiment

The experiment began with an exploration of the degree to which our world is already organized by influences over which we have little control. We are in the grip of Heidegger’s 4-fold: Gods, Earth, Sky and Mortals and although we may feel that we are making autonomous decisions, we are bound by the current iteration of the land we live on, our awareness of time passing in one direction towards our deaths, and its influence by the histories we have experienced which provide our language, and patterns for our future conduct. We are influenced too, by the gods, the universal, big-picture director/s of our actions, the mechanisms of which we remain unaware. The “things” in our world affect us by their presence. God-like, things, because of their form and function have affected us in passive ways, stimulating us to use them in particular ways

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing
old categories—for probing around. When two
seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively
poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways,
startling discoveries often result.  Marshall Macluhan, “The Medium is the Massage”

 We go on perpetuating the effects of inanimate objects with our habitual use of them until eventually a new use is found, one that is not the original purpose, but a function all the same. A new thing comes into being, and develops a new network of associations. It exists outside of our existence in that it does not die and can be moved into different situations, be encountered by those who do not know it and perhaps re-purposed. To an undeveloped organism, the more developed thing might seem superior, more useful and with a new purpose, god-like. 

To make no decisions at all because we might be puppet-like in the face of the 4-fold is to deny that we can make any progress at all; we cannot proceed through time (sky) if we do not act with resolution. To create a world, or commit actions in it, therefore requires us to be conscious of the 4-fold influence and act with knowledge of the past and use it to change the future, making a new world.

The world-making process began with an assessment of our art practice and collection of a list of adjectives from fellow world-makers in response to it. The weight of habit to produce more work in the same “world” needed to be avoided, so the adjectives were paired by selecting them from a graph. The y axis contained words that increased in how finite they seemed, moving from “limit” at the origin, to “progress” further out. The x-axis contained words that suggested degrees of freedom from “archaic-ising” at the origin, to “freeing” further out.

See diagrams.

A coordinate pair picked at random was:

alter, method

Definitions were given for meanings of alter and method and another selection was made comparing order and entropy:

fusion, convulsive

A convulsive fusion was represented by a system in which detergent was dropped into milk with food coloring floating in it. 

See movie on my YouTube channel: Georgina Grenier “Milk”

The process of randomizing elements in world-making experiments continued with a list of items in my studio that could be used to make work. A list of objects selected for this experiment were:

fussball table and miniature cutting blades

to be used to express convulsive fusion in another way.

Expanding the concepts of convulsing and fusing, seeing them as an expression of unity of purpose versus participation (disparate individual actions) led to the task of finding a way to make a Utopian, non-deliberative, participatory mechanism to solve a problem.

A new world needed to be created, rather than repeating an old one, so I tried several ways to do this, and sought to avoid using methods in which I knew the result, or repeating procedures I already knew. A Monopoly game format and cracking gold surfaces were abandoned. See movies on my YouTube channel: Georgina Grenier

I wanted to use as few of my studio materials as possible, and in the most basic way, in opposition to my usual way of working Paper and scotch tape provided a “game board” in the form of a 15 feet x 6” strip. 

The paper strip was used to make a form that followed two rules:
bending to the left or right, or ii) making a sharp crease to bring about a change of orientation of the meandering shapes made by following rule i).

These rules provided a mechanism for making the first Utopian, participatory, non-deliberatory forms. See photos
A second form was made that met these requirements even better. I took a large piece of brown paper and scrunched it up to create random creases. Unfolding it exposed a network of straight sided facets in the paper. Although  Paul Jackson had explored crumple-folding in his book (See bibliography) I took this a step further by doing it with my eyes shut. The process was now even more non-deliberate. I took a pinch of the paper and followed its path across the whole sheet, keeping my eyes shut, and allowing the tiny creases in the paper to dictate the direction of the super crease I was making.  See photos

To make the crease more visible, I ironed the areas of paper furthest from the super crease. It soon became clear that paper crumpling and crease removal offers an analogy to the passage of time, history and Utopia. At the margins, little wrinkles make no difference. They can be removed with no effect. Little wrinkles are attached to wrinkles that are ever closer to the place of action i.e. the major change in form, the super crease I made. The nearer I ironed to the super crease, the less stable the crease became. The small changes in tension of the paper could not be removed without causing the crease to collapse or become straight. With no wrinkles, there could be no super crease. At some point in the net of tiny changes, a big event, became dependent on the existence of a chain of smaller folding events.

Not part of the paper folding, but small green rivulets become even smaller as they diffuse into the red.  Imagine the effect reversed: green is emerging from red,  at what point does it matter if small effects are removed? 

Crumpled paper with a crease, no ironing

Same crumpled paper, ironed except for the big crease

Paper bending 15'x6" strip

Territory Diagram

Egg Diagram

1. View: Transformation

● What is the big picture? 

To create objects that bring about transformative experiences in the audience by suggesting alternative organizing systems. For me understanding and experiencing the aesthetics of an organizing system e.g Amy Stacie Curtis’  white wooden installations, is very moving. These are flawless, logical structures, Utopian almost. Awareness of Utopia is bittersweet because it brings about consciousness of what is lacking in the present, yet it promotes transformation in an effort to bring a better state of being or living. 

● What are the main values it is in opposition to?

Art practice as an isolated, egocentric activity at the end of a historical process, and which may not have the capacity to interact with the audience. The practice should be embedded in events, a part of a history that may culminate in a change, but is participated in by all. There is no end, no path in it that is alone. 

● What model of action are you using?

I embed my practice in external events, dove-tailing earning a living as an educator with making art in forms that are systematic and are systematic in their production method.  Both practices are transformative and feed each other. I seek out simple techniques that produce work with organized forms made by techniques such as paper bending and casting, in which artifacts of hand production are not obvious. They are perfectly organized, but set up tension as one realizes that a better perfection, another Utopia could be made that transcends the present one.

2. Intention:

● What is the practice’s concrete intentions? 

Communicating with an audience overtly in an artwork, creating a mental space that allows cognitive associations to develop in response to what is experienced. I intend an audience to be transformed by interaction with the work, whether this is because they have altered their understanding, or because they have literally taken a physical piece of it away with them.

● What are the practice’s implicit intentions?

To make works that give people a means of becoming something else, of transformational processes, of unawareness crossing a threshold into awareness through interaction with the artwork. To uncover knowledge, to name it, bring about a state of becoming liminal from subliminal. Creation of new surfaces for scaffolding ideas on. To create small wrinkles.

● How do you differ from the intentions of a single piece and the whole of the practice?

Sometimes a single piece is an exploration of a technique, or preparation for a larger body of work. It is part of a general direction of a practice, or it can be a pivot point, a process where a new direction is taken. I have made numerous crumple-folds and perfectly pleated paper systems.

3. Speech

● What do you need to communicate to allow the work to have a context?

I see each work as a teaching and learning juxtaposition. This is not to say I am doing the teaching as a school teacher does; I am creating circumstances for transformation by presenting an artwork that is directed at particular understandings. The audience is teaching itself and brings its own set of experiences and filters to bear on the work, gaining new understandings of the world as they experience the work. I don’t expect people to have the same understanding of my process as I do, but by incorporating ideas that scaffold on what is commonly known, I can perhaps help people see things in a new way and assimilate this into their thinking.

Since I do not want to dictate the terms, I hope that each participant will apply their understanding to what they experience, and leave with a shared, altered perspective.

To communicate with an audience requires a coherent body of work to be considered. This too is a problem worth having.

● What terms and concepts do you have to develop?

I need to articulate my practice better, not just to remind myself that it exists and needs frequent re-assessment, but because the naming and describing process is transformative. Particular terms and concepts that interest me are connected to math and logic such as the nature of space, chaos, random distribution, logic circuits, how social change occurs from the smallest activities of a culture and moves through a system, memes, and stories of people who are left out, or lost.

● What spaces of dialog is your work involved in?

Dialog will occur in the space of consciousness and field of knowledge of each viewer of the artwork, and in the physical space in which the work is located. 

My practice is a system of spaces, each filled with a stock of knowledge, emotions, practical skills, life experiences, resources, livelihood, histories, and evidence. These spaces are metaphysical surfaces that are connected, some can be enlarged such as practical skills and resources, but others such as histories and experiences cannot be altered, only re-evaluated. It is also assessing and describing where the many small artistic experiments I make are leading.

4. Action:

● What are the practices associated with the work? (The practices of engagement,

i.e. “Viewing” the work). 

I see work as a a way of showing aspects of the human condition, of becoming transformed, or transcendent. It is also a way to explore the perspectives of other organisms and systems.This is not a religious process for me, but making ineffable things effable, if not in words then by other sensory means is important. Transforming surfaces and forms by suggesting new ways to consider them, such as offering them up for inspection, looking at the cavities they occupy, re-shaping them, drawing and experimenting with them helps me arrive at new ways of understanding change. How is a change introduced, how does the energy become removed from a changing system once the change has occurred, how does it build up again? What happens if the energy is not removed?

● What are the key actions involved in making the work?

Altering working methods so that they are simpler, using old practices as tools for new purposes: printmaking, and painting, seen not as an end in themselves but part of a means to an end. Finding new ways to create pure forms that communicate.

5. Livelihood:

● What are the actual life practices associated with your question?

I make art in ways that mesh with earning a living by other means. While this takes away the necessity of selling work, and allows freedom from economic worry, it might take away the urgency and depth of intent that a person earning their livelihood from art might have. I feel that things are off balance in this regard and have to work very hard to correct this i.e. find more time for my art practice. On the other hand, being a teacher gives me daily work that I value very much, and often gives inspiration to art practice. I have to invent new ways to explain things constantly, and frequently have to see things as naive people do, without preconceptions and with raw emotions.

I have always been mindful of living in an ethical way: raising our own food (less so, now), living without electricity (we have it now), home schooling our kids and having them born at home, helping to start a school, taking care of both parents with dementia and cancer, etc. These non-art experiences all add to the stock of experiences I draw on. They are the wrinkles in my practice.

Paper worlds:

I can crumple a piece of paper in a few seconds. Giant pieces of paper in a minute or two, rolls might take longer. The un-crumpling needs space, but otherwise this a quick, simple and profound thing to do every day. 

● How do you make a livelihood? see #7

● Where do you need to work?

Spiritually, I need to find a better balance between teaching, which comes with a ready made time table, and being self-disciplined enough to work in my studio. 

● What does this consist of?

Even when I am not engaged in making a “work” I read, plan, research and experiment with techniques. Actually having hands-on work underway opens up new ways of making progress, creating new paths towards a “change”

● Who are you working with?

I work alone in my studio, but am establishing friendships with others at Orono, and finding kindred spirits that have emerged in schools where I teach. Knowledge that I am in this program has brought a burst of curiosity and possibly a commission to illustrate a book.

6. Effort:

● Perfection: What does perfection look like in regards to this work?

Several pieces of work that are aligned, and show a coherent progression of  exploration that dictates the final form. The form is not decided by me, it is arrived at by successive experiments.

● What are you actually striving for? (For the art and in your own life).

I want to feel that I can justify my purpose in art. I need to articulate its path from beginning to end, its journey of change as it is made. In my life, I still have a need to do something ethical, of service and not connected to the intense focus and experimenting that making art involves.

7. Mindfulness:

● How do you make sure all the parts of this practice are part of the same general logic? (It is important to imagine that your thoughts and your actions link up so to speak). 

I am very fortunate to have a job in which I have a great time helping kids study their favorite topics of the moment, make art, ask questions, and share love of learning about things. It can be exhausting keeping up with students’ energy, but also inspirational. There is a huge amount of creative thinking involved when I try to find resources for them, and provide experiences that are rich. All the myriad small pieces of knowledge that my students assimilate into their lives, and that they will some day join with other lives and communities will bring about change eventually. 

The second part of my creative practice involves art making. Sometimes I feel that my my need to be “useful” is satisfied by my practice of teaching, and that I am not likely to be such an effective artist as I am a teacher. making art that helps my audience assimilate new knowledge is a new territory for me, but has the same general logic as 

teaching.

8. Concentration:

● Where should you locate your effort? (It is easy to shape your practice into existing

methodologies but given your problem in a pure state where should you locate your

activities -- imagine that it is not in art as we know it

Illustrating interactions of surfaces; I think I am a systems thinker (re: Donella Meadows), and this concept is a huge attraction for me. To be systematic and see  an artwork as not just a whimsical, internally driven creative process, but a collection of activities that work in concert to make it effective makes the task of actually making the work seem more feasible. Seeing art as the result of experimental systems, of problem solving, and made in such a way that an audience can participate in it and be transformed by it, seems more sound. 

Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, John Protevi, Yale University Press
An alphabetical listing of significant people, vocabulary and ideas of European philosophy:

Deleuze’s interest in the mathematician Riemann and the nature of surfaces being self-organizing curved planes rather than existing in an exterior 3rd dimension
“Dasein” or being-there employed by Heidegger to describe “being” as existence; we exist, or be, but this is not necessarily a human-making trait. Our humanity, our sense of aliveness is separate from the fact that we exist materially in a relationship with other beings that exist.
Jacques Derrida
Michel Foucault
Feminist re-readings of tradition
Heidegger, the idea of “how” we exist in the world, defines “who” we are. Our awareness of our mortality and the arrow of time that points to it give context to our being in a way that is different from a rock, as far as we know, not being rocks. Also “Four-fold” pp. 228
“Paradigmatic”
Utopia
Zizek Slavoj, also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCfiv1xtoU  discussion of our attempts to avoid pollution as a misconception. A polluted planet is the impending state of its being; to be assimilated and adapted to, and with little choice.

“The Medium is the Massage” 1964, Marshall McLuhan
A medium affects how its message is perceived: a light bulb, although without any knowledge of its own, is synonymous with being bright, smart, and possessing knowledge. It has gathered many knowledge based phrases and activities, and casts light on things which allows us to “know” more. A medium can affect culture as its use becomes assimilated. Its physical form and tangible qualities can create metaphors which may become deeply embedded in education practices, theater, advertising, and technology. 

The Structure of Space

“The New World of Mr. Tompkins”, Cambridge University Press (Amazon)
George Gamow and Russell Stannard
Mr. Tompkins takes a ride on a beam of light and observes time warping, and among many other things, explains atomic structure, the shape of space, and physics in layperson’s language.

“Thinking in Systems, A Primer”
Chelsea Green Publishing (Amazon)
Donella Meadows
It might be obvious to most people that a practice is a system of stocks of time, effort, health, livelihood, speech etc, but Donella’s diagrams of finite resources affecting fish populations, the pointlessness of turning up a thermostat in an uninsulated building made this idea very clear to me.

Paper Folding

Paul Jackson

http://www.origami-artist.com

Paul Jackson
18A Neve Oved
Nof Yam
Herzliyya
Israel 46625

Tel +972 (0)77-6633398
Mobile +972 (0)52-426 7481
Fax +972 (0)3-751 5780

origami@netvision.net.il

Check out these one minute movies from New Scientist.  Folding and unfolding rules!

Who folded in the first place?

This is the best thing so far...

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2012/12/micro-origami-uses-cells-to-fold-itself.html#more

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/05/micro-origami-unfolds-in-water.html

http://www.digitalarti.com/fr/blog/digitalarti_mag/ordigami

Page about Etienne Cliquet's ordigami. Ordigami is digital origami.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/11/shine-light-to-create-instant-origami.html

“Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form” [Paperback] Laurence King Publishers (Amazon)

This book has final chapters on crumpling paper and wet casting to make structures that are not typical origami. These are what led me to trying doing origami with my eyes shut. Book comes with a CD of crease patterns.

“Structural Packaging: Design Your Own Boxes and 3D Forms” 

Laurence King Publishers

I thought I knew how to make nets for constructing containers and solid shapes, but this book has net diagrams for boxes with curved vertices, twisted sides and accordion folded walls that were a new to me. No CD, but lots of illustrations and diagrams.

Origami from Angel Fish to Zen, Peter Engel

Dover books (Amazon)

This book has information about fractals, photographs and diagrams illustrating small and large processes such as growth of towns compared to cracks appearing in an oil drop as it dries. Page 27 has a diagram of a fractal-like form of cut paper which allows one to make a hanging decoration of 97 paper cranes. I suspect I would tear the paper. Many crease patterns are shown, and linked to the patterns on Islamic tiles, and in cathedral roofs.

Talas, book binding, archival and paper supplies

Talas sells a huge variety of paper related products, cleaning, degreasing, repairing, and book construction materials. Their  closeouts and specials section often has great deals.

http://www.talasonline.com

330 Morgan Ave  Brooklyn, NY 11211  Phone: 212-219-0770  Fax: 212-219-0735  Open Monday through Friday  9am-5:30pm

Cave Papers

 http://cavepaper.com

Contact

Telephone & Fax Orders: (612) 359-0645

Mail Orders: 212 N. 2nd St. Minneapolis, MN 55401

Email Orders: bomalley@cavepaper.com

Cave Papers, run by Bridget  O’Malley and Amanda Degener, make sheets of hand made paper with natural dye colors. The website is full of interesting information, pictures of artwork and links to other businesss that sell paper and papaer making supplies. Cave Papers offer internships in paper making:

Interns will be part of the regular production routine. Work involves all aspects of running a production paper studio: Fiber preparation, sheet forming, unique hand-dyeing of sheets, sizing, flattening and curating sheets. This is a learning and working internship. A small stipend equivalent to $7.50/hr is payable in studio time, handmade paper, raw materials or combinations thereof. We have worked with over 50 interns in the 15 years we have been in business. We have found that unless you can work for at least three weeks (out of towners) or one day a week for severall months (locals) then there is no point in coming.

Artist's Statement

by Bridget O'Malley
June 2004

The goal of any art is discovery. For me its is discovery of self: physical, spiritual, emotional, personal, sexual, intellectual. These interdependent and inseparable elements build the whole which is but a small part of a greater whole.

My imagery is visceral and personal in nature; biomorphic forms which originate as raw feeling and emotion in the subconscious and worm their way out through dreams, doodles and mind flashes. Some are precious and delicate, others, brutal and raw. In some way, all are cocoon-like beings; things which contain, sustain, nourish and protect a fragile life force. Mine.

The relationship between paper and print is one that is especially intriguing to me. Too often, paper is used simply as a substrate on which the printed image exists. I wish to explore the many possibilities of designing and making paper specifically for prints, and conversely, designing prints which are enhanced and completed by incorporating unique handmade paper. As a paper maker, I am fascinated with sheets which go beyond the expected look of paper. I am drawn to surfaces which are quite un-paper-like and instead evoke rusted metal, stone, leather and vellum. These unusual surfaces beg to be combined with underprinting, overprinting and incorporated into finished artwork.

The finished object is secondary in importance to the act of doing and making. The most interesting part of the process is the metamorphosis which takes place as the idea evolves into object. This is where the true learning and self-discovery take place. Idea, text, image, surface, structure and movement are manipulated, balanced and interwoven to create two and three-dimensional objects, books and prints. The resulting pieces serve as records of this process. Right now I feel a connection with paper, books and relief prints; there is an ease, comfort and familiarity with these materials that allows me to work instinctively, and to capture the subtlety of each medium separately and in combination with one another.

Artist's Statement

by Amanda Degener 2010

My work explores the inter-relationship between environment in both the material and spiritual world. Handmade paper is my life's work. I sometimes travel the US and abroad to teach hand papermaking, collaborate with other artists, and often write and publish articles about art made with paper. I make and sell sheets of paper, and I exhibit artwork made with my own handmade paper. As an artist the versatility of working with handmade paper is very motivating. Fibers can cast tightly around armatures; they take color and hold light beautifully. Depending how the fiber is prepared it is capable of looking like fragile translucent skin or it can appear massive without being heavy. Paper’s lightweight quality allows me to make large-scale work in defiance of gravity.

Another incentive to work with handmade paper is because it feels like I am in collaboration with nature without mechanizing her. I am not simply gazing and enjoying her, though I do that too, but actively learning from her. The plants and colors I process are a mixture of fiber, sun, soil, and rain; this natural world has a value and life of its own. Through touch, while I process the materials, I have a conversation with them. During this dialogue I cook, beat, color, mould, press, and dry what started as a plant. As my ideas are being realized my spirit and heart get infused into the work. There is a spiritual connection with being present in the natural world.

I am trying to step lightly on the planet, it is important to me that all my work is eventually biodegradable. My public art pieces are like theater, up for a certain period of time and then gone. They have a real or physical existence and after the exhibition they are often reincarnated into new work or left outside to return to the earth. These works are ephemeral, more like dimensional poetry than traditional sculpture. The editioned prints and artist's books, and the one-of-a-kind screens are tangible work that can be shown in galleries. The handmade paper that I make for sale is not "done" until it gets used. Most of our customers are bookmakers. I am thrilled to know that these archival sheets of handmade paper will be used in books that live in private collections and libraries and touched by hundreds of people over time. All of my work draws attention to nature and it evokes feelings towards the environment that we more typically reserve for other humans: love, empathy, compassion, and care.

Material Concepts, Inc.

Distributor for E.I. Dupont, maker of Tyvek

http://www.materialconcepts.com/products/tyvek/soft-structure/

Tyvek can be purchased for kite making, in sheets and rolls, black or white. Graphic designers can purchase Tyvek for printing on with an inkjet printer (though ink is not water proof), sewing, and cutting. It can be painted on with paints or inks that do not contain alcohol.

Heidegger

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy

Series of eight articles in the Guardian, a UK newspaper that explain Heidegger’s  work.

Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters

The most important and influential continental philosopher of the last century was also a Nazi. How did he get there? What can we learn from him?

All eight articles can be accessed from this page.

Re-purposing

Janet Echelman: Taking imagination seriously

Janet Echelman found her true voice as an artist when her paints went missing -- which forced her to look to an unorthodox new art material. Now she makes billowing, flowing, building-sized sculpture with a surprisingly geeky edge. A transporting 10 minutes of pure ...

http://www.ted.com/talks/janet_echelman.html

I shared this TED talk several times with kids I teach and they were fascinated. It illustrates the importance of resource finding, seeing a process with fresh eyes, and re-purposing it. 

http://www.echelman.com

Contact

Studio

Tel • 617-566-0770

artstudio@echelman.com

64-R Coolidge Street

Brookline, MA 02446

The Folklore of Discworld 

Jaqueline Simpson and Terry Pratchett

Transworld Publishers Ltd 

http://www.bookdepository.com/Folklore-Discworld-Jacqueline-Simpson/9780552154932?b=-3&t=-26#Bibliographicdata-26

Out of print. 2nd hand from Amazon. Available as an audible book from Audible.

Terry Pratchett has written a series of books about a disc-shaped world, Discworld, in which Earth’s folk tales are a reality. The books are humorous, but have serious intent. The Folklore of Discworld gives explanations of customs on Earth and observes how as memes they have drifted across the multi-verse to reach Discworld. These are stories we tell ourselves frequently, but do not know why, and in a sense are four-fold-god-like.

White Chapel Art Series, Documents of Contemporary Art
Edited by Simon Morley “The Sublime”
The MIT Press (Amazon)

Interviews, statements and writings of numerous artists grouped into:
the unpresentable, transcendence, nature, technology, terror, the uncanny and altered states. 
Jacques Derrida pp. 41 1978, Parrergon
An essay in which Derrida describes the sense of beauty and a sense of the sublime, the sublime being a projection we make in response to art or nature. It is outside the work, and undefinable: a parrergon, whereas beauty is inherent in nature and art and we can describe the physical characteristics that summon a sense of beauty.
There are lots of books in this series.

White Chapel Art Series, Documents of Contemporary Art
Edited by Simon Morley “Utopias”
The MIT Press (Amazon)

Michel Foucault “Other Spaces” pp.60 Foucault describes Heterotopias, places in which an idealized event occurs in reality, but the location of the place in which it happens is illusory, or a taboo.

Deleuze
Deleuze Guattari-Project Lamar

http://projectlamar.com/media/A-Thousand-Plateaus.pdf

Download the text of  “A Thousand Plateaus” here. 689 pages.

London Labor and the London Poor
Henry Mayhew
Oxford University Press (Amazon)

First hand accounts of un-Utopian life of London trades people and descriptions of street businesses they ran, how to pick the pockets of wealthy people, street slang and much more. These accounts were used by Charles Dickens to give a sense of reality to his books.

The London Underworld
Henry Mayhew
Oxford University Press (Amazon)
First hand accounts of criminal life, prostitution, destitution and suffering in Dickensian London. These are the un-romanticized lives of the poor in Oliver Twist, the people who murdered Nancy, the Bill Sykes’ of the world.

Where should we place burglars on the bravery-cowardice spectrum?

“Judge Peter Bowers's statement that burglary takes 'a huge amount of courage' is both correct and refreshingly inappropriate”...

A new way of re-purposing our ideas of right and wrong.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/09/judge-peter-bowers-david-mitchell

People and Places
The Edinburgh Printers

Dwight Pogue
Printmaking Revolution

http://www.cspoguegraphics.com/index.php

Dwight Pogue has made a light sensitive coating for metal etching plates and developed a system for photo exposures without the difficulty of a vacuum table. These products are still ammonium salts and non got to get on skin.

dwight@cspoguegraphics.com

contact e-mail

Barbara Alane Kerr

Williamson Family Distinguished Professor of Counseling Psychology

Barbara Kerr, Ph.D., gave a keynote speech at the National Curriculum Networking Conference titled "Gender and Genius" in which she suggested that "gifted men and women may sabotage their own dreams by trying to fit too well into the gender roles that have been prescribed for them.

Barabara Kerr is also a sweat lodge builder and adopted native American. She is working on a STEAM project, a variation of STEM (Science, technology engineering and math in education) STEAM seeks to build art into science and math education as a core principle.

bkerr@ku.edu

Joseph R. Pearson Hall 616
1122 West Campus Road
Lawrence, Kansas 66045

Phone: 785-864-9762
Fax: 785-864-3820

Research Specialty

• The psychology of optimal human development, including giftedness, creativity, and spirituality; counseling and psychotherapy; gender issues.

Rosalind Brown-Grant

Prof. Ros Brown-Grant

Professor of Late Medieval French Literature

r.brown-grant@leeds.ac.uk

0113 343 3491

Biography

I graduated in French and Italian from the University of Manchester in 1986 and was awarded my PhD, on the works in defence of women by the late medieval author Christine de Pizan, from the University of Manchester in 1994. My specialist teaching at undergraduate level is on the history of the French language and medieval French literature, and at postgraduate level on medieval debates about women.

Luce Irigaray

http://www.irigaray.org

Thinking Life University of Bergen, Norway June 5-7 2013

Luce Irigaray’s work has influenced scholars in a broad range of disciplines, such as philosophy, literature, art, religion, architecture, the natural sciences and law. Recently, much interest has been devoted to her work on “life”, be it understood as an ontological or an existential problematic, or as an analysis of the living human body in its natural and cultural environments. This international conference will examine in various ways the implications of Irigaray’s thinking on sexual difference for re-thinking life today.

We welcome submissions for papers from a range of disciplines and fields of research - graduate students as well as faculty - each engaging with the overarching theme of “Thinking life” after the work of Luce Irigaray.

In addition, the Irigaray Circle will sponsor the 4th annual Karen Burke Memorial Prize, awarded to the best paper submitted by a graduate student or recent PhD. The winner of the competition will give the Karen Burke Memorial Prize Lecture at a plenary session of the 2013 conference. Complete papers should be submitted to irigaray06@gmail.com by January 21, 2013. Authors will be notified of the committee’s decision by February 22, 2013. (For more information see www.irigaray.org).

Submission requirements: All applicants must be enrolled as graduate students as of June 2013.

• Papers should be no more than 4,000 words and prepared for anonymous review. 
• Applicants should submit papers as an email attachment to irigaray06@gmail.com in .doc or .rtf format, with the subject line “Burke Prize” 
• Papers should be accompanied by an email listing the paper title and the applicant’s name, affiliation, and email address. 
• Deadline for submissions: January 21, 2013. Topics:
• The history of philosophy
• Epistemology
• Ethics
• Ecology, environmental ethics, and sustainability
• Architecture and the built environment
• Bioethics
• Medicine, health, and the body
• Political theory
• Multiculturalism
• Psychoanalysis
• Language, literature, and the arts

Toril Moi

[Toril Moi From Femininity to Finitude: Freud, Lacan, and Feminism ...

www.torilmoi.com/wp-content/.../MOI_FEMININITY.PDFShare

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, and Professor of English, and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke. To learn more about her academic work, click here. In spring 2009, she was a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. Criticism of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of women.

Link for contacting her:

http://www.torilmoi.com/contact/