'My Favorite Things'

The last fifteen months absent of shows afforded the opportunity to create a new body of work. The experience of many failures, messes, and near-misses, coupled with doubt, frustration and fear gave way to a kind of surrender and then to curiosity.

One day, something I had made in a singing workshop caught my eye. Casually stowed on our back porch was a Gullah pounding stick. Created for the purpose of striking rhythms while singing in the Gullah traditional of the African-Americans from the Sea Islands off the coast of the US south, the simple wooden staff was decorated with fabric, leather, paper, ribbon, yarn, wire, and festooned with silk flowers.

It was created in total freedom and innocence, absent the requirement for meaning and message that concerned past work made for public consumption. That stick revealed what I make when no one is looking. Thus the exploration of my favorite things ensued. What do I make when it doesn’t really matter? What floats my boat, feeds my soul and thrills me? How do I “waste time?” What are my “guilty pleasures?” What if my work doesn’t mean anything?

Looking for my favorite things led me to well-known thrift stores mined in the past for unique fashion, this time in search of suitable fabrics for sculptural creations. Architectural salvage, friend’s garages, and a keen wandering eye yielded “found objects:” rusty used metal, glass electric insulators, old kitchen tools. A fellow artist whose surfaces I admire showed me how to dye and stamp archival tissue paper. A love of copper and brass wire resulted in “stitching,” spirals and curly-cues, anchored with various metal brads. All of this came on-line, permissible inside of a newfound freedom.