SAFE

When I was working on this project about home, I was thinking about all the qualities a home should have - and feeling safe and secure was at the top of the list.The trees in this piece stay within the confines of the box and the nest and birdhouse are all inside as well. The crate was an old 7-Up crate and you can see some of the markings on the outside still.

where your heart is #2

Returning back to the concept that started this series, I wanted to create another piece like the first one which was auctioned off before I pulled together more assemblage works.This close shot shows the box portion with the collage and ceramic chicken, which is entirely moveable. Since it's been sitting in my space at the Kennedy Gallery Art Center, it's accumulated a rock that sits on the shelf or on top, getting moved around by my gallery mates at times. It's exactly the kind of interaction that I was hoping for when I created the piece.

The tree branch sort of seems to grow out of the box into the adjoining space - my heart always has a place for trees to grow in it.

nesting box

Another of my assemblage pieces for "Where Your Heart Is" - this is a cigar box I call "Nesting Box" and turned out to be less assemblage than I envisioned, as I didn't have a nest that fit into it well.

The top of the box has a house with a dog on it -

And opens to reveal the creek scene inside the box cover.

Inside is the nest, with a feather, my personal symbol for an angel - this time also referring to heaven, where Jesus promised he is preparing a place for us to live - getting the nest ready for us, in a manner. This box also has room for personal keepsakes, to make it even more special to its owner. In fact, it might gather things as it sits where I can put things into it...

find your way back

Another one of my assemblage pieces that's up at the Kennedy right now -

Titled "Find Your Way Back"

My husband and I are both from the Sacramento area; most of our families are here, as is much family history. But when we were young and first married, we could hardly wait to get the heck away from here. As far as I was concerned, Sacramento was an overgrown cow-town with little to offer. Scott was joining the Army as a pilot about the same time as I was graduating from college and we were eager to start our adventures in faraway places.

The first place I landed (after he finished basic training) was flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Different is what we wanted and different is what we got and I soon discovered that the biggest city in Alabama at that time was not as big as the little "cow-town" I had come from. The larger town with a real mall about half an hour from the post was about the same size as the little college town just west of my home, which I suddenly realized was actually a city.

It was in Alabama that I first became homesick for the dry brown hills of California... for a vista that I could look out over and see mountains with snow caps in the Spring, for the farmlands of the Central Valley running past the long freeways that connect north to south... all the things I had never known I loved.

From Alabama we moved to Germany then to Colorado, where my husband had his final assignment. The life of an Army gunship pilot wasn't all we had dreamed of for our growing family and we had started to feel a little like Dorothy over the years, often saying "There's no place like home!"

We happily returned to Northern California, to home with family and landscape and weather we know and love. We returned first to a smaller place in the valley, with a commute to the Bay Area, then were quite thrilled to make our way back to our home city of Sacramento, now wishing other family transplanted to far flung spots would come back, too, just for visits, if for nothing else.

There's no saying we won't ever leave again, but I don't think it would be to go to far...

WHOLE

As I've been exploring assemblage art and the concept of home, I've tried to share my own feelings of what home is and to take advantage of the three dimensional quality of sculpture. It's like whole new game that I get to play, creating a piece of artwork that shares something from every angle that it's viewed.

I call this piece "WHOLE" because a true home is where one feels whole and complete, and then also because a whole home is more than just a house that is built, but especially for me, it includes the landscape around it and the relationships within it.

I haven't used images of people to describe relationships but different animals, which also refer to our inter-species relationships...

Materials used for this piece include three cigar boxes, acrylic transfers from digital & film photographs, prints from my original sketches, twigs, rocks collected by my great-grandfather & a dollhouse chair. (And I am never quite content until I have colored & painted an artwork.)

assembling art

New work for my "Where Your Heart Is" show next month at the Kennedy Gallery Art Center.

Not really changing how I work, except that I'm putting it all on and in a 3D object, in this case, a wood cigar box. And there's more on the work table I need to get to work on!

on the work table

Working on new 3D pieces for "Where Your Heart Is" after class today; click on an image to see it bigger and try to identify all the stuff you see...

Bits and pieces of three different artworks in progress here -plus some tools and extraneous bits as well - signs of a divergent thinker at work...

This second shot shows a better view of the two that are farther along in the process - the upwards facing box in the foreground will be wall mounted & have a branch (in the background) inserted into it. The cigar box to the back left will be free standing and have a fork (sitting on the lamp base) in it along with a tiny ceramic piece.

I am having so much fun...

no place like it

So this is my new piece, pretty close to finished - I'm calling it "No Place Like It" - it's partly about where I call home, the Sacramento Valley, and where my final home will be in Heaven. There are maps from other places I've lived, that never quite felt like home, an image that has a tree with a wood cross on it, where someone apparently died in a car accident and went home.

It's also got a dog on it, as my home always includes my dogs - a bird, who's home is in the tree, a nest tucked safe inside, and a chair, so one can sit & rest...

shape of things to come

I have several things I need to be working on, but one that I've been dying to do, so that's getting done first, to get it at least a little out of my system & out of my mental way - at least I hope that's how it will work.

This started with an unfinished house-shaped CD shelf I found I found at Micheal's, which I've modified to accommodate a small branch I've collected. (There's a pile of them in my studio, I still haven't figured out quite how to store...)

It will get a couple photographs collaged on, with maps & sketches & whatever seems to make sense. This is going to be part of my "Where Your Heart Is" show in November at the Kennedy - it might be hard to keep it away til it's time, but I've got to start getting these pieces done.

new look

I finished my piece for the Outside the Box show with plenty of time to spare; I have to deliver it on Tuesday. It's actually harder to shoot this piece, now that I've ventured into the third dimension, but this will work.

This piece will be donated to the PlacerArts as part of their annual fundraiser. They'll be on display & I'll try to attend for Auburn's Art Walk on Thursday, April 14th, but I'll be missing the live auction on Second Saturday, May 14th... too bad, because this is a landmark piece for me, marking my first piece in this series.

If you don't win this piece, you can look forward to more in this series, which I'm planning for this November when I'll be featured at the Kennedy Gallery Art Center.

basic box composition

This is where the Outside of the Box project is now - I've got the basic composition laid out & I'll work on putting it all together today, as well as prepping & teaching, and seeing if I can make headway on the other projects in the studio as well...

where my heart is

Working on my Outside of the Box piece (this is the photo that will be in this box) & my mind is racing ahead to a new series... likely showing in November 2011 when I'm featured at the Kennedy Gallery. I'm seeing pieces similar in construction to this current piece (I've already begun what my daughter dubbed my stick collection.)

The imagery will be a little different than what I've been doing lately - I'm looking at homes and exploring the concept of "home is where your heart is" and all that might entail. I don't want to say too much yet but I do want to put out a call for anyone within driving distance that has a "home" that I might want to photograph...

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