NO TIME*

 This is my first venture into curating more than my own solo show or children's artwork. I'm co-curating it with Meri Adelman. The show is sponsored by Outlaw Arts Clay Studio and will be hosted at iMPeRFeCT Gallery. Eleven artists featured in the main gallery space and an installation in the Project Room featuring more local creatives. We also have a concert with Spiritual Thunder (Pauline Houston-McCall's band) and live poetry with Toni Love and Sabriaya Shipley. I'm so honored to work with all these talented artists. March is going to be an AMAZING month! 

Artwork on the card is a ceramic sculpture by June Terrell, just one of the talented artists featured in this show. 

Groundhog Day 2024

One of my favorite things about winter is making soup. I make soup about twice a week all winter long. It's wonderful because it can be made so many different ways, and as long as a little care and consideration is put into the including and balancing of certain flavors, it turns out wonderful and comforting. The best gift I ever received from the parent of one of my students was a loaf of bread and some vegetable soup, given to me at the end of a long day. Little things matter. 

This is my 10th annual Groundhog Day card. Here are links to all the previous cards: 

Groundhog Day 2014 
Groundhog Day 2015 (I skipped 2016)
Groundhog Day 2017
Groundhog Day 2018 
Groundhog Day 2019
Groundhog Day 2020 
Groundhog Day 2021
Groundhog Day 2022 
Groundhog Day 2023 

Pickles and Bert

 

"Pickles and Bert" 
7" x 5", linocut on Stonehenge 

This is a little print I made of my kids' two small dogs for Baren Forum's Exchange #94. The theme was loved ones. 

All 12 SOME PIGS Woodcut Prints

 Each print is 12" x 12". The color blocks were wood and the key blocks were linoleum. Each is a reference to either a children's book or memoir featuring a pig protagonist. 

"Saucy" from the book Saucy by Cynthia Kadohata

"Sprig" from the book Sprig the Rescue Pig by Leslie Crawford

"Christopher Hogwood" from the book The Good, Good Pig by Sy Montgomery

"Tickles and Pickles" from the book How Tickles Saved Pickles by Maddie Johnson

"Babe" from the book The Sheep-Pig by Dick King-Smith

"Esther" from the book Esther the Wonder Pig by Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter

"Pigling Bland and Pig Wig" from the book The Tale of Pigling Bland by Beatrix Potter

"Wilbur" from the book Charlotte's Web by E. B. White

"Ernest" from the book Welcome to the Bed and Biscuit by Joan Carris

"Swimming Pig" from the book Pigs of Paradise by T. R. Todd

"Daggie" from the book Pigs Might Fly by Dick King-Smith

"The Three Pigs" from the English folktale 

Opening for SOME PIGS

The SOME PIGS show of my ceramics and woodcuts, as well as work by my 12 year old Bebe turned out great! 1040 Creative was the perfect space for the work. I'm so proud of having completed this project and presented it this way to the public.

Thanks to Pauline Houston-McCall and Sheena Garcia at the Gallery, as well as my husband Will for helping with installation, and all my friends and family who encouraged me as I was creating this work over this past year. 

Here's a video on my Instagram of the show as it was installed. 

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Book of Dragons Summer Fellowship

This was my 5th and final year doing a summer fellowship at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford. (Last because my kids have finally outgrown the program and it's too much of a commute from Philly to continue on my own.) 

For this project, we first read about folktales and myths featuring dragons and looked at different depictions of dragons from around the world. I had the campers draw dragons into foam sheets to make prints, and also each age group worked on a collaborate dragon collograph print for the accordion book that went on display at the end of the week. 

I'm very proud of all the great projects I did not only through these five fellowship projects, but also as a lead instructor with mostly 4th-6th graders, as well as instructing special classes in polymer clay to all ages, as well as Animal Drawing and Intro to Printmaking to teens. It's been a memorable decade with so many amazing students and fellow art educators. 

Links to fellowship projects from previous years at CAC: 

MEGAfauna, 2022 
Pollinators, 2021 
Whose Hoo Around the World, 2019 
Big Relief!, 2018 

"Pigling Bland and Pig Wig" Take 2

 

"Pigling Bland and Pig Wig" 
12" x 12" 
2 block linocut and woodcut 

This is the first woodcut for a 2024 art calendar, which is part of the Some Pigs project, an AiRM (artist-in-residency-in-motherhood). The project also includes ceramics, an installation, and a zine, all of which will culminate in a solo exhibition at 1040 Creative in November of this year. 

This particular print illustrates the final scene in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland. While Potter's more famous stories of Peter Rabbit  have been connected to stories of slavery and told by slaves in America, Pigling Bland's tale reads as a direct allegory for it. The title character and his brother are sent to market with papers. When they are stopped by a police officer, his brother is taken back to the farm because he misplaced those papers. After stowing away in a chicken coop, Pigling Bland is held by a farmer who has also "stolen" a little black pig named Pig Wig. The two plot their escape, and they achieve freedom by literally crossing a border. All of this is told in the most matter-of-fact tone, as if the inevitable and profound suffering of the pigs is utterly mundane. The comparisons to chattel slavery, distinctly from a perspective of the era, couldn't be clearer. It's an odd children's book. To me, a bit of a childlike illustration of what Hannah Arendt would decades later call "The banality of evil" in reference to how the Nazis carried out their genocide in the most dispassionate, bureaucratic manner. 

Pigs are, to me, an undeniable symbol of vulnerability. The ones presented in this series of woodcuts are presented as farm animals or at best, pets or animals kept in rescues or shelters. Pigs were domesticated to be food. Those in captivity are destined for slaughter. What's more, references to bacon and other pork products abound. (As the parent of a child who often weeps at the sight or mention of bacon, I am all too aware of this.) 

In these prints, it is important to me to present the pigs in moments of joy. Because even in captivity, even facing doom, pigs and people alike are beings that feel. We connect with our immediate environment and others and we experience living. It is in moments of joy, however brief, that we recognize the value of being alive.