Today I woke up with that small sour lump lodged between my throat and my sinuses. After a brief foray out into the world to meet a friend and his lovely new lady, I retired to my apartment to hunker down and hibernate. But when my dinner plans fell through and all I wanted was chicken soup and ginger lemon tea, I donned my rubber boots, my goretex jacket, and my newly made fleece armwarmers, and rode my bike through the downpour to the grocery store.

Outside, the leaves glowed yellow and crimson under the looming grey sky, and squirrels darted back and forth across the slick streets gathering nuts. That's actually what brought me here today, the sentence assembling itself in my mind as I rode, the chuckle. I've gathered just about enough nuts, myself. Don't need anymore of those, thank you. Wishing as I pedaled, that it was spring, that it was time for planting, that the wild sloppy summer was splayed out in front of me. Wondering what, exactly, I have to harvest this season—everything I planted seemingly razed to the ground. But I thought of those squirrels, scurrying up trees, gathering nuts and seeds, tucking them away; this isn't exactly their harvest either. They've planted trees over the years, but not these ones. And that offered some solace, a flash of new perspective. I've been planting seeds all of my life. I can take my harvest from anywhere that has borne fruit; it doesn't have to be the new growth planted last spring. I don't have to have planted it at all.

The metaphor made my breath expand in the rain, and made my afternoon seem a little bit softer. So I brought home my goods from the store, and made soup in the glowing yellow light of my kitchen, curled up on my couch with my cup of tea, and listened with gratitude to the wind and rain outside my window, the soup bubbling on the stove.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

There have been some major life changes in the last couple of months. Some good, some hard. No, scratch that... All good. All hard. My feet aren't exactly on the ground again yet, but I've been feeling alive in a way I haven't in a while. It feels strange and brave to talk about this here, but it's what/who I am, right? Isn't that what it is to be an artist? Raw-edged. At least the kind of artist I am, the kind I want to be. I've spent the last few years pursuing the particular vein of making public space for the private and intimate.

It makes me think of my first or second term of grad school, of a man who didn't stay with us in the program for long, but he made an impression. He was a little more than most of us could handle, but he would raise his hand in discussions, and count off on his fingers: raw, naked, vulnerable and lost. This is how he felt, where he was, what his world meant to him at the time. He was an aging surfer, a lawyer, a man whose life had veered from the path he had anticipated, and he was trying to make sense of new terrain.

These things aren't exactly true for me. I don't feel lost. If anything, I feel suddenly, joltingly found. But, new terrain, that's the case, to be sure, and to be an artist, there is always a fair amount of that grappling. There has to be.

I've been waking up in the middle of the night with ideas... feelings and ideas, and today, finally, I gave myself to the studio, to the press, to color and shape, to the particular kind of motion of hours passing while I work. I spent the afternoon with ink on my hands and I feel it all in me again. I feel that river coursing again. I feel like myself. I feel myself, and one notch deeper. I'm excited about this new terrain.

I made monotypes and played with layering color, neither of which I've explored much in a long time.

And here's little a peek at a few of the pieces I was working on.

on the wing of a bird

I've been in the studio again the last few days, practicing making things from the remnants of what's been broken. I am gearing up for a new body of work that is eliciting that tingling feeling in my fingertips, the one that makes everything feel brighter and better... and, you know, possible. I have an installation/performance in the works for next year that's rapidly tumbling and growing into an event I'm pretty damn excited about. There will be more details to come, but in the meantime, here is a detail of the wing of a bird in flight painstakingly constructed from shards of things that were once whole, things I have loved, believed, things that had to be broken in order to take flight:

Nourishment

The haze of the holidays is finally lifting, and today there was a small peak of sun. My mind has been filled, mostly, with the personal and mundane: shifting objects and patterns to make space in this home for another person, making meals, hibernating, gestating art ideas, feeling the rumblings of spring's imminence. I've spent some time out shooting with my new camera, and making things from what I find. Always. There is always that. The what do I make of it in my life. That's been focused on film for a time, and, suddenly, food.

I have become obsessed with food. Where art blogs once sat, food blogs. Afternoons in the studio have become afternoons in the kitchen. Maybe it's the comfy feeling of sharing my home with the man I love; maybe it's the hibernation of winter, but maybe there is something else here too. Nourishment. It's a word that has flashed across the screen more than once over recent years. What do we do to nourish ourselves, each other? What feeds us?

For the first few weeks of this month we did a bit of a cleanse, and every time I drank a jewel-colored glass of carrot ginger beet parsley juice (or whatever the combo of the day), I felt it. I felt a tingling rush into my body of nourishment. I feel it too in conversations with good friends with whom deep and true understanding is shared. I feel it when I witness someone in power speaking the truth, or when I see someone without power respected, honored. It's not as present as it ought to be in our world. And I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. It is, in fact, a palpable presence in my world. Wholesome food, love, connection, kinship... what nourishes you?

(Inter)Action and Artmaking

As my artwork has expanded beyond gallery walls, as the frames have fallen away, unsurprisingly lots of questions have arisen. Many from within me, and many from curious friends and onlookers.

The most common, and still the hardest to answer is the ever ubiquitous 'so, what is it, exactly, that you do?' More often than not, this question is my own. The jacket of a bell hooks book I've been reading describes her as a 'cultural critic'. Yes! I think to myself; that's a good term. I'm certainly a cultural critic. But that's not the whole of my practice, not even close.

Some colleagues of mine have decided not to call themselves artists anymore. They've adopted terms like culture worker, philosopher poet, environmental interventionist, and activist.

And, yes! All those fit too. My film, time and its passing is surely the work of a philosopher poet. And what could you call my private protest: sprouting alfalfa project if not the work of an activist/ environmental interventionist? And the gifting project? Culture worker, clearly.

But then there are the small private pieces, like this broken ceramic bird, each shard threaded together, a metaphor of brokenness and repair, of the glaringness of the fissures in ourselves, the possibilities of re-piecing into a new whole.

So, you mash all these things together, and you slap on the label artist. But the image that title conjures doesn't quite fit, either. The art itself has never lived exclusively in the lines for me, the composition, the color. (Though you'll never convince me that craft doesn't matter.)

Art is in the action, the interaction.

Which is why I'm so excited about the Occupy movement. This is not a protest; it's a movement. And that movement is pure art. People are out on the streets embodying the metaphor of change, of action, of engagement, of democracy. They are not demanding democracy—which, I think, is what has so many people flummoxed—no, they are modeling it; they are creating and performing it. Our cultural frames are being challenged, falling away.

So, when I marched down the street with fellow citizens chanting: show me what democracy looks like: this is what democracy looks like, and singing quietly to myself we are a gentle angry people (and we are singing, singing for our lives), it felt more like making art than a lot of afternoons I've spent alone in the studio. Art is about creating something, and there I was amidst thousands of engaged, saddened, angry and hopeful people who were co-creating something together.

Yes, this is art too. This is everything art is meant to be.

Life and Death in America

It has been an exhausting few days, full of alternating panic and gratitude, fear and faith, and all of the hairpin turns of days spent in hospital waiting rooms.

On Wednesday, at least three years ago now—or according to my calendar, 3 days—I spent the day glued to my computer watching the proceedings of Georgia Death Row Inmate, Troy Davis. Despite mounting evidence of his innocence, his execution was set for 7pm local time. I watched as hours ticked by, waiting on final word from the US Supreme Court. 7:10, 7:40, 8:15... each moment the tension mounted, each moment greater hope, greater fear among the family members, friends, and supporters gathered outside the prison. Then they announced that the Supreme Court had denied the stay of execution. Davis was going to be killed.

14 minutes pass.

I alternate between pacing in frustration, anger and sadness, and watching the events to continue to unfold on the livestream from Georgia.

Then my phone rings and I am shaken completely from this grieving and plunged into a familiar and unwelcome terror.  It's my father. He's in the hospital. He's had a heart attack, and is going into surgery in the morning.

What follows is a blur, but once the surgery is finished and I see my father again with my own two eyes, my thoughts begin to return to Troy Davis, to see-saw from my presence in the critical care unit to my anger at our communal choices. We, America, killed a likely innocent man. The miscarriage of justice is abominable, the humanitarian considerations are too much for me to even approach in my current state. But our priorities, as a community, as a country, are where my heart goes.

Estimates vary widely, but taxpayers paid from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to execute Davis.

As my father lies in his hospital bed, recovering from heart surgery, you know what he's worried about? How he'll pay his medical expenses.

Lecture after lecture from the nurses about stress, and he's sent home with prescriptions for drugs he cannot afford, a bill for surgery and hospital stay that's astronomical. And he's not one of the innumerable Americans who's uninsured. No, it's just the above-and-beyond costs, the medications that aren't covered, the deductible, the percentage of costs.

And I am angry. Livid. My mind keeps wanting to get an exact number for how much we've chosen to spend to kill someone, when we won't collectively keep each other well. Punishment is prioritized over wellness; death takes precedence over life.

When we'd rather kill someone in pure vengeance than support the health of our people, pardon my language, but our priorities as a country are royally fucked.

Wendell Berry on Conserving Communities

Wendell Berry's works, both in the field and on the page, have always had a special place in my heart.

If there were ever words to live by, here they are...

If the members of a local Community want their community to cohere, to flourish, and to last, these are some things they would do:

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth.

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products – first to nearby cities, then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labor saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.

12. See that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no institutionalized childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalized. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighborly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.

--Wendell Berry, from Another Turn of the Crank