January is the busiest month of the year for a bookkeeper. My tools for managing my work load are careful planning, copious communicating, and dark chocolate. In that planning is time for art. My art output has focused on small work that I could complete in a day with a random few hours of printmaking on Sundays.
Patterns of Privilege is rough 6"x6" and made of woven paper. The paper was initially a wrapper for some yummy fair trade dark chocolate. The chocolate was devoured, but I saved the lovely papers.
Costa Esmeraldas is another small woven piece. I included an Ecuadoran bank note as well as the inner gold wrapper. The chocolate enclosed in the wrapper was from cocoa beans grown in Ecuador and the work takes its title from the cocoa bean's precise point of origin.
Fair trade product is an experiment in equity. It's not cheap for the consumer, but it does improve the lives of the farmers in the source countries.
Single Source is a Zambian Kwacha woven with a chocolate wrapper. I chose to twine around the edge with a metallic thread. Weavers of all sorts traditionally use twining to set the spacing on the warp threads. I use it here to stabilize and augment the metallic patterning of the paper.
Messenger came from a Sunday afternoon of printmaking. I re-learn the same lesson in printmaking and it surprises me every time. The lesson is thus: time and paper are spent quickly and many prints can be produced. Some of the prints I can see right away where I might rehabilitate with other media. Some prints cannot be redeemed and I reuse the paper for something else. Then, there's always one print that says, "I am enough the way I am."
Currently, I have two works included in group exhibitions. Scout is up at the Red Bluff Art Center in Red Bluff, Ca. We are in gallery three called Best Friends Forever. My work Secondary Theory of Human Evolution landed at 4th Street Fine Art in Berkeley in the exhibition Embrace. There will be a reception Saturday, February 12th from 2-5 at the gallery. The gallery is at the corner of 4th and University in Berkeley - right under the freeway ramp. I plan on going and taking every appropriate virus caution. If you can come, I would love to see you.