.........

Letter to my mentor:

I have been pondering your question "What is your next journey plan?"

The MFA completion seems almost anti-climactic...we were submersed in an environment rich with art, commentary, visuals, opinions, theory, craziness and camaraderie for 11 days at a clip ( 5 times in 2 years!) and then also connected to mentors like yourself...whom we all envision living in that "world" we aspire to enter in to...only to return home, happily at first, exhausted at best, but in the end left to face ourselves, our strengths and weaknesses, and more importantly the one question that keeps on haunting us..."So why is it that we make art?"

Why, when I don't make art am I miserable, and when I do, scared to death sometimes, and who even gives a flying shit if I do or don't, and should they? Why is it that I want so badly to tell the world what it is I see about people, about things, about "stuff"?

I respect that you have stuck it out, that you keep picking yourself up and "get to the work of art" that you see things differently and tell those stories through your work.

One goal is to find a network of artists to bounce ideas off of, to tell me that I am a 'drama queen" (thanks :-) and to sometimes let me know that YES! they see what it is I am trying to achieve.

I still want to persue the humorous "widow" project, but for now I am going to continue with my shirts and see where they go.

I have taken about 10 days to get back into my high school teaching, student exams, new classes etc. and have been assessing the damage to my neglected family, health, and home... I already feel like a slug for not going into the studio, but I am just cleaning up to get ready for whatever comes next.

This roller coaster ride is far from over...

Get your tickets now! Hop on! A new ride is about to begin :-) Oh, how I DO love Rollercoasters............

Blog Workshop

Welcome to all of the new AIB MASTER's students
WHOOOO

Thanks Rob

The Ride of a Lifetime

Abstract
Drawing is my way of expressing that which cannot be adequately expressed through any other means. I have drawn with charcoal to connect my feelings of grief over my husband’s death with a larger story of loss. I have drawn, and continue to draw, with black sewing thread on white shirts gathered from the closets of my deceased husband, from family, friends, and strangers. These sculptured drawings evolve as emotive gestures that flow through me as I look, listen, and respond to the energy I perceive from my ancestors, who sewed white-collared shirts to survive in America after immigrating from Lebanon; and from artists with whose work I engage.
This thesis weaves the narrative of the struggles of my ancestors with my story of the recent challenges I faced in the studio after my loss. I connect the writings of Roger Pogue Harrison and Alexander McQueen, who both speak of death as a vehicle for informing authorship, to the redefining of my artistic practice. I document how my challenges to first express my own personal grief, using the mark on the page, evolved into an effort to connect to a larger collective grief, the grief and struggles of my ancestors through a self-imposed ritual of “letting go” (Kentridge). I show my process of exchange in making as I examined, appropriated, and recaptured the marks and methods of other artists who embody the element of loss, such as Arnulf Rainer, William Kentridge, Cornelia Parker, Annette Lemieux, and Chiharu Shiota. I speak of James Elkins’s writings on the process of sight as an influence on my transition from two-dimensional drawings to the use of object as a canvas for three-dimensional portraiture. The outcome springs from a more observant way of looking and listening, and an art that reminds me that I am not self-authored, but am connected to and formed by the marks of those who came before me.


To view DrawnOnwarD in its entirety, click on the White Papers link to the right!

The Legacy of Making

I come from a family of makers steeped in tradition.
My ancestors made white shirts.
I take them apart.
What they were constructing, I am dismantling, ripping.
Recapturing, Reimagining, Remaining.

The Ride is Eternal

“Art is never an end in itself; it is only an instrument for tracing the lines of lives”
-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Why create art about death?
“It is important to look at death because it is a part of life”, says Alexander McQueen. “ It is a sad thing, melancholic but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle—everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things.

As I searched to uncover a displaced identity, due to the loss of my husband, I was simultaneously battling the role of the artist in this 21st century—where the blurring of media mirrored a culture that lacked definition, and the use of traditional materials to convey meaning was dying.
Travel with me through the spaces of this thesis as I am led through the emergent process of the rituals of making, an interchange between losing and finding, which transports me into dialogue with others, past and present, who have influenced my artistic practice.
The outcome is one rich memorial: a vessel that houses the marks of those peoples and traditions that have gone before me in order that they may remain living. Through art we are reminded that we are not alone, that we come from all who have come before us and that our identities are formed through a collective consciousness, always evolving and redefining ourselves and others to come.
We are formed by the marks of others. We inform others through the marks we leave behind.
It is the cycle of life.