Project #5: Still Morning - An Artist Couple's Exhibition Series

Your Project Title:  Still Morning – An Artist Couple's Exhibition Series

Project Timeline: To begin immediately. Ending with exhibition in Spring 2018.

Project Description:

My husband is a Printmaker. I am a Jewelry Artist. And our four-month-old son is as yet undecided. But together, we three are already heavily involved in collaboration.

So far my husband and I have braved two collaborative exhibitions and are now scheduled for a third in Spring 2018 at the Texas A&M University Gallery as part of their limited exhibition series, Artist Couples.

Our previous artistic entanglements combined the monolithic with the infinitesimal, the blusterous with the soft-spoken, the mythical with the painfully real. My husband drags in his ongoing tussle with the psychologically charged Midwestern landscape, vast but not sublime in its oppression. While my contribution is a desire to grieve well, to internalize what has been lost into jewelry and objects to be worn and carried into the relentlessly moving world, reminders that we are still growing, that all has not stopped, and there is still much room for good.

With this past in mind, our next synthesis of materials and feeling endeavors to bisect the heavy rage of loss and the quiet excitement of newness; that newness being the exclusively happy contribution of our still quite novel little boy. Already, as parents we both see changes in our work, new colors, surprising forms, a lightness of intention only available through a melting of fear.

So far, the work itself has evolved from jewelry, to objects, to prints, to collagraph prints of objects, to installations, and back again. We have worked separately to create individual pieces that speak to one another in pairs and groupings. And we have tied our studios together, building singular pieces despite the exchange of opposing wills. This new work promises a similar method of creation, with a few lingering hard-won lessons.

Lately, in soft contrast to that Midwestern oppression, my husband’s studio has filled with line etchings of rolling landscapes and wide-mouthed tornadoes overtaken with lighthearted storm clusters of multicelled chrystalline color fields. At least, that’s how I view them. Meanwhile, my last body of work depended heavily on the quick modeling of wax and slow growth of metallic layers through electroforming. Fortunately, this equipment is no longer available to me (change is sometimes better thrust upon us), and so I have been pressed to find a new translation for these still-evolving thoughts. Incredibly, as if in direct answer, I recently received a complete collection of donated stone cutting tools, equipment, even the stones themselves, everything I need to begin a new obsession. But with no appropriate space to house and operate this machinery, I remain desperate to begin practicing this new alphabet of solid forms.

With a little over a year to develop this next great collaborative effort, I am excited to see where these changes will take us, together and apart, as a family and as artists. And we look forward to staying connected to the Crafthaus community with tales of our successes and side steps, necessarily filtered through thick lenses of humor and sincerity.

Thank you for your consideration.

If you receive the grant, how will the funds support your project?

As both of us are interested in alternative display methods, these funds would allow us to experiment with gallery furniture. At the moment I have been thinking of stripped versions of personal studies, library shelving, and writing desks in hopes of creating a split sense of desperate reverence, futile preservation, and quiet after the storm.

This funding would also help to service my new (old) stone cutting equipment. Though it was very generously donated, the machinery is in need of some care and our back porch requires just a little renovating in order to house the tools and connect the stone cutting saw to a water line.

Remaining funds would provide travel assistance to and from the gallery for delivery and installation of the exhibition.

Project #5: Still Morning - Artist Couple Exhibition Series

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