An Ending Is A Door

Moving through an ending, looking towards what comes next

Endings can be hard to move through. Sometimes they feel concrete and like nothing else comes after. I’m trying to think of an ending as a door. While I close it behind me, leaving what I had known, I have entered a new space.

My Community Creative residency with Bloedel Reserve has come to a close. It was a gift to have free access to such a beautiful place. I am grateful for the experience. I made a good amount of work that I’m proud of and I believe I used my time there to its fullest potential. Here are some of the pieces and other thoughts about endings and paths taken and not.

Paths

I walked through Bloedel Reserve, with friends, family, and by myself, each time taking pictures along the way. In doing so I have a catalog of time within a boundary of space. It’s almost like an experiment - The place was constant, but the experience was variable, who I brought or what I noticed shaped it - and the place, while unmoving was never the same, it shifted and evolved through the seasons. A fern unfurled in the spring. A coyote trotted through a field in the summer. A robin pulled up a worm. I carefully held tiny tree frogs and touched bark and moss. This place is deeply moving, and with this work, I hope I am able to share some of the wonder I felt while exploring the many paths.

Obscuring the lines where one image ends and another begins is one of my goals with these mixed-media print paintings. It’s still visible; you can never fully merge two disparate things, but harmony is reached. There is a constant flow from one image to the other, even if they don’t perfectly line up.

When I taught the workshop on paper lithography in October at BARN I told participants to let go of striving for perfection. This is sort of the opposite of what most printmakers hold at the center of their practice. This process is more fun and rewarding when you just print. And even when I am lining things up carefully, I’m accepting the scumming I wasn’t expecting, loving the slight misalignment and how I register by eye.

Thresholds

I wrote a poem about aging last night. It came after a conversation with my friend Negeen about how we feel older. Not quite like our time is running out, but we can’t go back, there are choices we’ve made that have shaped our lives. Like we’re looking at all these locked doors, wondering what could have been, but also knowing there is an endless sea of doors ahead. We’ll continue to open some and others will lock in response.

The word threshold has multiple meanings for me. There is the threshold of a door - a liminal space, potential, and what’s left behind. The digital process of making images high contrast in Photoshop is called threshold. In some ways I think of these images as thresholds - a memory, a space not forgotten but not present. Each is a choice, I spend a lot of time deciding what images to print, especially with the large multi-print pieces. It takes a lot of moving through options to find the combination that flows.

A few more pieces from the residency..

See the work in person

I’m thrilled to announce that a number of pieces from this body of work will be on display at BARN (Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network) in December! There will be work by Pamela Wachtler, Len Eisenhood, Melinda Hurst Frye and myself. If possible make a day of it! Bainbridge is really cute and fun. Hope to see you there at the opening reception on Dec 1st, from 4:30 - 6 pm!