Updated website! and starter statement

Here is my blurb about this semsters project on my website http://www.ndaviau.weebly.com/ . I am also in the process of making buisness cards (inspired by the fabulous ones i was given by all you at the residency...)

Currently I am creating 8760 felt balls to make a giant ball "pit".This project will be installed January 6th at The Art Institute of Boston as my fall semesters work. The balls will be unrestrained, piled up for jumping in and playing with. In the installation space there will also be an audio track playing with sounds of children playing, at school, video gaming etc.

  Each ball will represent an hour in a year of a child’s life (8,760 hours in one year), color coded to an activity. Red for free play, blue for television, video game and computer use, purple for school, orange for family time, green for structured activity (i.e. sport scouting, music lessons etc) yellow for sleep.

 My hope is to encourage adults and children to play and interact in a non goal directed, unspecified way. Adults are not encourage to free play, the activity "toys" for adults are expensive cars, atv's, new cleaning devices, boats, shopping, and of course the TV,  internet and I phone's host of distractions. As a mother of a play loving toddler I find myself being begged to play and often greeting this as a chore. "Shouldn’t I be doing something more "productive" with my time" I think. I miss being able to throw away the to-do list and play in an imaginary world more convincing than this one. When I am able to answer to the call of the child I find myself feeling significantly happier and less stressed, the dirty dishes and bills no longer seem so important- play therapy for a stressed adult. This space will be a reprive from the nagging humdrum of daily life, an open ended space for the child in everyone to come out and play.

If you are interested in helping with the project by making a felt ball (or a thousand) please contact me through my email nmdaviau@gmail.com Thanks!

interesting article

http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/635134.html  Point of article -children are now spending almost 8 hours a day using electronic media!!!!  the demise of free play.... the article touches on problems of multitasking, attention, socializing and academics. I am also starting a separate web page that  i will link to my blog to give to the felt united  www.feltunited.com  people who have generously offered to post about it and encourage people participating and generate interest.

art time!

So my fabulous husband has swooped up my son for their new saturday afternoon routine of daddy son time so i can actually make progress on my art.  now that i am done with full time summer camp art teaching he will also be attending to the wee one mornings when he come home from work (3rd shift sucks) so i can get to work! THANK YOU MOLLY for your fabulous suggestion! I love the idea of play/ prison. Talk about idle time on hands to play-- and make felt balls. my first wholesale order of felt should be comming in next week! I have done some serious reading and am updating my reading list- which for some reason does not seem to be comming up on my blog as visible. so i will also post it here: 1. Children at Play: an American History, by chudacoff 2. there are no children here by kotlowttz 3. childhood and society by erikson 4 becoming animal an earthly cosomology by david abram 4. the evolution of childhood by konner 5. last child in the woods by louv ( one of my favorites)

fabulous news!

I spoke with christine white (owner of new england felting supply and friend of friend) about my project and she was very enthusiastic and helpful. I have started a few trial balls in my washing machine and testing different felts and temperatures and other variables, (load size, pantie hose type, detergents or none) Christine had excellent suggestions for wholesale suppliers of felt and also a great tip to check into Felt United! an amazing international  movement http://www.feltunited.com/  check it out here! to encourage felting as a way to connect people and encourage felting. I emailed elis ( co founder) and she thought using felt united day would be a great way to get communities . I am also recruiting some of my elementary kids to help out ( i have made balls with them out of felt as a project many  times and they are beyond eager to be a part of a "real" artists project. So we shall see! If i can make at least 63 balls every day for 20 weeks i will have enough for the project! any volunteers?!! free felting lesson in exchange for balls!

8,760 felt balls?

So i have embarked on the revised ball pit. during a series of long drives to and from work my idea became more concrete. I was thinking about what the ball pit idea means to me and realized that the balls represent the idea of play to me. Play is a big part of my life, i was an avid player as a child (as most) and now with my three year old am immersed in play allll day long. everything is a game and nothing is as it seems spoons talk and inanimate objects have personalities. However wonderful this is i find myself feeling guilty about my sometimes reluctance to play and miss just playing as a child, being able to forget about bills and to do lists. not the kind of play involving an activity like a sport but just quite time lost in my own imaginary worlds. i then began to think about how children play less and less with found objects instead turning to one directional toys, video games, computers, i pod games, back seat dvd players, and of course a huge chunk of each day going to school and structured post school activities. where is the free play in the woods on the block. I started reading a book about this before the beginning of the residency that i decided to re rent from the library called "children at Play: an American history". it is amazing. So i am going to make one felt ball (ball pit size) for each hour of the year (8760 hours/ year) and then color code them for each activity group ( free play, school, organized activity ie sports of cub scouts, sleep, family time, etc) and make one ball for each hour spent doing that activity in a year. the resulting rainbow of balls will be a huge pile on the floor (maybe in a corner) for people to jump in ala leaves or throw, whatever. There is also going to be an audio component of children in their daily life and activities (including play) so that the upon entering the installation you will be hit with the feeling of children but eerily none there. I am also thinking about visually incorporating some interesting quotes i have read by children such as "i like to play inside, that is where all the electrical outlets are" - from last child in the woods. 

felt ball pit and one hundred ways to not make a bowl seating unit.

So in the mode of experimentation i am starting a felt ball pit. I have a very unrealistic ideal sitting unit for them and am trying to find something a little more engineer-able and fiscally practical (not to mention transportable by car) . I would like a squishy bowl able to sit 3-6 people but the shape going out on the sides from a smaller bottom is incredibly difficult to make (not that i haven't tried a with a few projects before) any suggestions are welcomed! I am looking ito making my own inflatables but if all else fails may somehow modify an inflatable pool. when someone leans against the back of it from inside the inclination is that it will tilt unless the same pressure is applied to the opposite side and there is a lot of weight on the bottom. This is what takes so long with installation art. Engineering. bleh. hours of frustration and failed efforts. but i cant wait to sit in the pit with a few people covered up to the arm pits in felt balls that i painstakingly make by the tons in pantyhose! (finally a good use for those infernal things!) a slide may be a bit over the top but would be loveley. The idea of public playgrounds for adults is enticing to me. all these expensive "toys" boats, atvs, shopping, computer games. and no good ball pits and slides that we can use without a child as an excuse. Sometimes we just want to jump on a bed and have a pillow fight for christs sake! maybe that is why there are so many grumps out there! It will be interesting to see how this tangent intwines with my art for the blind trampoline with video and black room style waterbed experience.

FINALY Back into the 21st century!

Hi everyone (who is not reading this blog), after an unbelievable 8 weeks of no internet we are getting a special online usb phone thing that will ring us up a pretty penny. Onto the art note, one of the benefits of not having the wonderful distraction of the www is i have gotten to chew through a chunk of my reading list, Stealing the Mona Lisa (the best book about looking, seeing, and art) Instillation Art: A critical history, Blurring the Boundaries, James Turrell: The other horizon, and Rothko's bbiography (an uunplanned find that was very interesting and pleasurable bed time reading compared to oh, say, critical theory articles, for instance).
 I have been having a lot of mid night waking ideas and also have developed my own version of sensory deprivation tank. every night when i am exhausted (i am currently teaching super fun, full time art camp its ending next week) i nearly drown myself by climbing into my gigantic 18 inch deep insulated bath filled to the brim with lavender bath salts and hot water and sink up to my chin. In a few minutes i am off to sleep in the bath and luckily wake up when my nose starts to sink. however in the few moments of sleep i drift into that fuzzy gray area of remembering and being slightly conscious and not controlling thoughts. Lucid dreaming i believe its called. a delightful phenomenon. so now i have all these soaked sketch books with odd ideas i want to explore. some involving videos, trampolines, water bed mattresses, and black out chambers etc.
On a more practical note i have started to look into galleries that will let me have a space to experiment on their patrons with my installations for a short period of time (even a weekend) so i can get some video of how people actually interact in the spaces i want to create. if all else fails i may just have my middle age woman artist crit group that i belong to with about 7 members, and some of my husbands friends (for the non artist's viewpoint) come to my studio and take a trip. we shall see.
And if i have not lost you yet, i am meeting with my mentor Liz Nofziger this month and super over the moon excited about workin with her. Love her work and feel as though she will have a wonderful influence on my studio practice and insights into my art. Check out her stuff!