December 16th 2012, Sunday 9:24 pm The President of the United States has just ended his condolence speech to the Newtown,(Sandy Hook )Connecticut community that has just undergone one of the most horrific of incidents in the history of the United States. All the while I listened and prayed, I kept hearing words and phrases such as "we are not alone" "we will do this together" "the children are not gone, but are still with us", "the Nation cries with you", and "All of you in Sandy Hook will be remembered for your courage and your strength." The whole time I was so fully and emotionally engaged in this service, I kept feeling a strong urge to create an artwork in response to this tragedy. My thesis work, the white shirts, and the work "Counterbalance" kept reappearing in my mind. I was lead to search my writings and found the following excerpts: "My work has no relevance to worldly catastrophic events nor political and inhumane injustices. It is about the struggles of death, an every day human event, this wound that happens to the rich, the poor, humans of every race. It does not change the state of the nation directly, and does not illicit worldly notoriety. But it does affect a circle of humans connected by the mark of the one that has transcended the physical world. It is something that changes identities individually and collectively. It is what is left." -2010 “We are Not Alone is my exploration of the part of human existence that comments on our connections to all that we come in contact with, on that ongoing tug and pull between the notion of individuality vs. that of a collective conscious; of our identities as humans through the continual absorptions, transferences and transformations that occur in our daily existence. "...the marks that we make carry on, even when our physical beings do not" "The shirts and the marks remind us that we are not alone, that we come from that which has come before us, and with whom we have been and will be connected. That our identities are part of an ongoing collective conscious, and that we are only as individual as circumstances and choices will allow." I began to wonder, why do we as "individuals", and as a nation, feel so deeply for these people, for this community and for these children, teachers and families, that most of us do not know? I will continue with these questions and this writing. It has taken a catastrophe to get me writing again, to inspire me to want to work again.

There is much to consider.

DrawnOnward

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.
Drawing
(Bonillo)

.........

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!