31 January 2014

29 January 2014

Katie Paterson





‘Fossil Necklace is a string of worlds, with each bead modestly representing a major event in the evolution of life through a vast expanse of geological time. From the mono-cellular origins of life on earth to the shifting of the continents, the extinction of the Cretaceous period triggered by a falling meteorite, to the first flowering of flowers, it charts the development of our species and affirms our intimate connection to the evolution of those alongside us. Each fossil has been individually selected from all corners of the globe, and then carved into spherical beads in a secondary process of excavation.’

--Guy Haywood, Kettle’s Yard.

Katie Paterson's Fossil Necklace is one of the most beautiful things i've seen in a while. 
It is currently on show at The Welcome Collection (London) as part of the Foreign Bodies Common Ground exhibition.

from kettlesyard

28 January 2014

27 January 2014

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance. 

 --Margaret Mead

26 January 2014


Chalcopyrite on Calcite

Rock Crystal


But hers through which the crystal tears gave light,
Shone like the moon in water seen by night.

-- Shakespear
Venus and Adonis 1.491. D iii, 1. 16, 17.

(photo credit: NoƩ Sendas)

Sunday Tune

25 January 2014

Miso




Miso

PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV

(leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and burned the bodies.)



The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colder      then the wind
died down and we slept

If in this sleep I speak
it’s with a voice no longer personal
(I want to say      with voices)
When the wind tore      our breath from us at last
we had no need of words
For months      for years      each one of us
had felt her own yes      growing in her
slowly forming      as she stood at windows      waited
for trains      mended her rucksack      combed her hair
What we were to learn      was simply      what we had
up here      as out of all words      that yes      gathered
to meet a No of no degrees
the black hole      sucking the world in

I feel you climbing toward me
your cleated bootsoles leaving      their geometric bite
colossally embossed      on microscopic crystals
as when I trailed you in the Caucasus
Now I am further
ahead      than either of us dreamed      anyone would be
I have become
the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind
the women I love      lightly flung      against the mountain
that blue sky
our frozen eyes unribboned      through the storm
we could have stitched that blueness      together      like a quilt

You come (I know this)      with your love      your loss
strapped to your body      with your tape-recorder      camera
ice pick      against advisement
to give us burial in the snow      and in your mind
While my body lies out here
flashing like a prism      into your eyes
how could you sleep      You climbed here for yourself
we climbed for ourselves

When you have buried us      told your story
ours does not end      we stream
into the unfinished      the unbegun
the possible
Every cell’s core of heat      pulsed out of us
into the thin air      of the universe
the armature of rock beneath these snows
this mountain      which has taken     the imprint of our minds
through changes elemental and minute
as those we underwent
to bring each other here
choosing ourselves      each other      and this life
whose every breath      and grasp      and further foothold
is somewhere      still enacted      and continuing

In the diary I wrote:  
Now we are ready
and each of us knows it      I have never loved
like this      I have never seen
my own forces so taken up and shared
and given back
After the long training      the early sieges
we are moving almost effortlessly in our love


In the diary as the wind      began to tear
all the tents over us      I wrote:
We know now we have always been in danger
down in our separateness
and now up here together      but till now
we had not touched our strength


In the diary torn from my fingers I had written:
What does love mean
what does it mean      ”to survive”
A cable blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow      We will not live
to settle for less      We have dreamed of this
all of our lives

-- Adrienne Rich (1974)

24 January 2014

Friday!


Mar Seck



This album has accompanied me on my travels around London this week. Mar Secks voice is so delicate. Beautiful.

22 January 2014

N. Dash








N. Dash creates works across mediums that emphasize the hand-working of materials. Beautiful.

1. Untitled, 2012. Fiber, silver gelatin print
2.  Groundings (4), 2012. Linen, rabbit skin glue, wood support
3.  Healer (1000), 2011. Indigo, linen, wood support
4.  August 11, 2010. Indigo pigment, paper
5.  Commuter, 2011. Graphite on paper

See more here.
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies


  -- Emily Dickinson

21 January 2014

Joan

"Wisdom tells me I am nothing, love tells me I am everything, and between the two my life flows."

-- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

20 January 2014


(found here)

Trisha Brown







Movement Drawings by Trisha Brown



(Images from Chantal Anderson , Mii Y and me)

Dialog


Rudolf Bonvie, Dialog
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
 

-- Langston Hughes

17 January 2014

Friday!


(From mollyrstern)

“Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.”

Marilynne Robinson

Memory


Anna Calvi: Memory on Nowness.com
“Memories always change,” says Anna Calvi of the inspiration behind her second album, One Breath. “The fact that they fade is sad but healing, and something I wanted to explore.”


16 January 2014

Luc Tuymans







Luc Tuymans

The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.

--  Margaret Atwood

14 January 2014

Breathing Light




James Turrell retrospective works at LACMA...what I imagine walking into a Josef Albers painting would feel like.
"The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through."

–- Richard Siken

Rainbow Church


Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka's a glass window made of 500 crystal prisms at MUSEUM.