Symbols are making their way across the screen, translating the buzzing and popping in my brain of various thoughts. Today is the Monday that I promised myself and you that I would do an extra entry here to make up for the weeks of entries missed while I was 100% present in a different time zone unable to do entries properly from my phone. Now I am home. I went to the party. There was no dancing but much laughter and copious amounts of rose and grapefruit infused vodka. This Friday I will dance regardless of parties and certainly without any vodka. Humpday this week will in part define the next year of my life and practice.
The studio is completely out of bounds since I got home on account of the dead mouse that is yet to be found down there. We took apart the air conditioner hunting for the remains. The smell is too much so I have been catching up on administrative work in my dining room avoiding the studio except in fits and spurts of dead mouse hunting. It is especially frustrating, because I am inspired to work down there on quite a few things.
It is dusk. The girls left a few hour ago for a concert and Marshall is on a shoot in the city. I am alone with the animals. I spent the past couple of days tracking and tallying all the fraudulent charges on my American Express and also slowly sifting through all the entries for the Wicked, Monstrous compendium of artists working with and about plastic pollution that I am working on with Patricia Lee Watts of ecoartspace. I am discovering many great candidates for Project Vortex in the process. Work piles up. Always so much to do.
The heat is intense in NY. I came home from Japan and Arkansas to a completely overgrown garden that is now also largely overly dry. The previously lush patches of clover in the lawn are shriveling, brown and crispy. I don’t understand how powder mildew finds its way onto plants in such dry heat, but my lilac and the bergamot are very much inundated with it. I will mix some castille soap and potassium bicarbonate with water and spray them after I finish this entry and hope it helps. Everything in the garden department got so out of control while I was gone. In the mornings before the sun intensifies I have been going outside, forgoing my walk some days to do bits to bring it more into focus again. I prefer being able to see the marigolds and nasturtiums as opposed to only seeing the more voracious growing native species that thrive here, including poison ivy, a foe that loves climate change and keeps cropping up everywhere, uninvited.
A museum is looking into funding to potentially support the realization of an idea of mine that is in response to a thought I keep coming back to about plastic pollution and the female body. Consider that the vast majority of the plastic you find in the environment are discarded empty vessels. Bottles, containers, buckets, bins… Women’s bodies are like vessels, carrying babies and then the milk to feed them, holding on to things inside of us in the service of others. The discarding of bottles and vessels and treating them like “trash” is something that has always seemed to me like an affront on the feminine.
Now that it is out, here is a picture of the UCSF Magazine cover and interior showing the body commission that I did out of post-consumer plastic which I promised I’d share. Interesting article, very disturbing though.
Photograph of the body by Marshall Coles
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