thought control

So i was talking to myself about my art this evening (a dangerous way to start a post). I was struggling on not feeling as into a few of my recent ideas as i would like. I am still full tilt into the circle project, which is currently living in about 250 envelopes on my counter and carpel tunnel is setting in from all my late night circle snipping. Still really like it! This has left time for my thoughts to roam to what else am i going to do.

After some suggestions to prune down the rube goldberg machine i was thinking about making a mold of a house sculpture to cast ice houses and letting the melting drip form the catalyst of the concentric circle ripple by suspending the ice house on pantyhose stretched to the walls so the water would drip into my circular pie plate and make simple little circular ripples. I feel really moved to make a model of my house out of ice and watch it melt. toying with ideas like using the dripping water to do other things like water plants or make a cup run over, etc. i also though of doing a water torture piece and have it drip on my head. ha. i also think there is something beautiful in it just sitting on a table melting and not leaving a trace of what it was.

other thing i am trying to work on: suspended thread drawings of my house in ice. I am freezing water in layers and struggling to make a three dimensional thread drawing of my house by suspending the thread in the water one section at a time. not as easy as it sounds.
 I also thought about pouring wax over the ice house so it is preserved as it melts.

and finally the idea that i was so excited about i was talking about it with myself and decided blogging was a better outlet: making a shrine to control. as i was introspecting it occurred to me that my most "successful" pieces are those that are obsessive and that is what i enjoy most about making art. the ability to have (or try to at least) obsessive control over every aspect of something. who know what will come out of this?!
Excuse this late night and exhausted rambling.

i'm going in circles!

I am super excited about this project which i started a few days after coming back home as a way to "relax" in the evening without falling off my art making wagon. I took a somewhat guilty trip to home depot for the pure purpose of helping myself to their entire line of Behr paint chips. i could not take more than the first section without looking like an unabashed thief. I snuck back home where, after a long day of playing with legos and dinosaurs, i turned on my new audio book (thank you library) and cut out my best attempts at perfect circles of each shade of paint chip. The "rules" of cutting are simple, no re-cuts, backups, tracing of any sort, and keep each color series (a section of 7 paint chips in light to dark of one color) sorted in order with the "negative space" paint chip remnants in separate envelopes.

So far i have worked through the red and orange into the yellow. This was all going well until i ran out of envelopes two nights ago (i had about 170 left in my box of 200 when i started this).  i decided to start figuring out the installation thing before going further. i nailed the color series with a 1 1/2" finish nail in the center lightest circle on top darkest on bottom and stuck it on my wall.
 Magic! i am thrilled with the way it almost disappears when viewed from the front and then eclipses like the moon when you move around it. the uneven circles seem to peek out and then disappear.   i have nailed about 15 of them but haven't hung all of them up yet. the results of the first circle on the wall are definitely motivating me to finish the entire project.

looking at paint chip from front

starting to walk to side

side far away

front from about 8 feet away

spacing will be more even when i install

for reference the nail is 1 1/2 inches long and about 1/4-1/2 inch is in wall

more on the concepts of perfection, utopia, and control some other day.

Finished House "Interior"

I brought my needlepoint house installation entitled "Interior" to my third residency period at the end of my second semester. This was my most resolved piece yet in the program and that made a huge difference in the quality and direction of the critiques. I am currently reinstalling this in my studio at home to get better photographs with out the lovely oatmeal boards and flattering florescent lights. For details of the actual house look through my past blog posts. I also want to experiment and explore different ways of installing it perhaps eliminating the stand and finding alternative ways to support it.

Front of "Interior"

Side view

detail, floor 

detail, under table top looking inside of house

yarn tangle

hand dyed yarn in spools and balls

Building the stand and finishing the roof!

watch out world! I broke out the drill and table saw for this section of my house.... and still have all 10 fingers!

 table legs to be on the messy work area

prepping table top for leg holders

holes drilled for leg brackets

leg brackets and interior hole

first coat paint

paint on legs

second coat

the roof panel 

oh yesss.

process of pattern

filling it in with grey tones

So here is a look at what i have been doing for the last few weeks... The roof is killing me. i spend between 7 and 10 hours a day on it and it has taken me 9 days of working like this to get one half of it done.... i am now almost done with the second half and can not wait to be finished with this roof buisness. it has actually taken me longer to roof this house than it took my father and Jeff to roof our real house!!! That took two weekends at about 8 hours a day.
 this is NOT including the yarn dying/ drying which takes another day and a half. Oh the joy!

My intern giving the dyed yarn a head start drying. This is the most action my hairdryer sees in a year.

dyed yarn drying outside

the roof shingles take FOREVER to do

oval window embroidered 

my real door!

cutie pie in house

interior of houes

Finally  a good use for all those art books...

wool to be dyed.

hand tied yarn bundles ready for the dye vat!

the top of the cornerboard and the Capital molding 

the window

the bottom of my corner board where the side and the back of the house join

a detail of the siding again 7 squares/ inch. all of my yarn is made from local wool and the grey and cream is purchased hand dyed. the red shutters and roof (coming on up) are dyed by yours truly. 

house out flat 55 inches long and 22 inches tall at peak

my cutie pie with it (he thinks its going to be a bird house

the amazing interior with all the loose ends that will be tied to the knot ball!

here is the top floor of the front of the house. each side is made up of multiple panels that i join together 

the shutters are made out of yarn i dye and have french knots for a border and then two layers in the middle to cover up the mesh and give depth. the canvas has 7 squares to 1 inch to give a sense of scale.

this is my front door. the molding is made in a double herrinigbone pattern and my door is woodgrain with multiple brown yarns layered. eventually you will see the leaded glass oval window in the door and the finished door detailing. 

Here are some photos of my house not quite finished yet but almost there.... the front of the house (where the door is) is not yet on, here are some in process pics of it i took a few days ago.

a little yarn tangle

My blogging once again fell by the wayside.
  A lot has happened over the last few months (!). I am now an unbelievably happy single mom working frantically to get my project done.
   I was inspired by this passage line in the Tao about essentially how the emptiness inside is what makes things useful, a pot, house, etc. it seemed so perfectly suited for my life at that point. My  (ex) husband and i built our house with our own two hands over two long years and in 7 months after moving in our dream home had become a completely unlivable space because of his addictions, this tangle of my desire for control and his lack of control over any part of his life that also made me confront my lack of control and desires for an appearance of perfection while the interior of my life was a mess.
      After originally deciding to create an 8 foot tall 8 foot long 6 foot wide needlepointed house i came out of my insanity and realized that (in a most un-american fashion) i needed to downsize by a few billion percent! So now my house is a nice 14 x 21 inches and measures almost 1 inch to the foot to my real house of which this is a model. Inside this obsessively perfect hand made needlepointed house is a massive yarn ball tangle pulling at the yarn used to make the walls from the inside and dragging the whole thing down with its weighty disastrous mess. this little house sits on a 42" tall pedestal with a hole for a foundation and the  yarn tangle dribbling beneath it like entrails. yummy...
     In a brilliant stroke of luck my therapist, to whom i mentioned this project to, confessed to being a weaver and a yarn hoarder and gave me a trunk full of the nicest wool yarn ever in the most perfect colors of my real house (grey if you were curious), the other yarn she bequeathed me i had oodles of fun dying to match the trim, roof, and shutters.
    Now my fingers are ready to fall off because i have been non stop needlepointing for the last month and realized it take me over 18 hours to just needlepoint each panel (and my  house has 12, not counting landscaping) and this time does not take into account the cutting and measuring and planning and dying of each one.... who would have guessed that little old ladies took so long to make those tacky tissue box holders!? what a waste!
    So i have decided to take the train in to boston and either lug this or ship it or perhaps a bit of both with the pedestal table and am having a terribly hard time finding bar height table legs under $100 a pop. any suggestions are welcomed for that problem!!!
I have a meeting with Wendy (my mentor) next week after i see the biennial on Wednesday and will write back in then!