Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Trying to be slow while spinning

Whew! My apologies for the lack of blogging last week - my schedule was so jam packed I could barely breathe! Here are some of the highlights...

My guest author stint on Arden Hill's blog, Four For the Day, finished on Sunday. Here are some of groupings of four I shared - check out his blog here to see all seven of my additions. Arden is also taking submissions for future blog authors. Follow this link for submission information.






Here is my progress on the breast milk fountain. After these pictures were taken I started to hollow it out so it now looks like it has been destroyed but it will be rebuilt soon enough!







Photos from the FLESH: Featuring works by Megan Driedger, Leslie Roos, and Rachel Schappert at Gallery Ingenue. The opening was this week but if you missed it the work will be up until March 4th!


Rachel Schappert

Works by Leslie Roos and Megan Driedger

Works by Leslie Roos and Megan Driedger

There was also an article in today's paper about Dominique Rey's Slowness project that you can check out here. I was talking to Dominique about her project when she came to the Gallery Ingenue opening last Friday and we were talking about how hard it is to slow down and the stressful urge to be ahead of the game and productive as possible. I've definitely been feeling this lately but have been finding that going to yoga helps. Which is interesting because in this article, Dominique talks about how she spent years being high strung and stressed and realized that she had to change something so she started to meditate. Meditation and yoga kind of go hand in hand so maybe meditation is something I should try out... I've been vaguely familiar with meditation after my friend Lana's mom (also Kyla Roma's mom) had a meditation room in their house growing up. I remember 'the meditation room', with candles, incense, pillows, and next to no furniture. It was always a very mysterious room and I enjoyed its presence. It looked a little something like this...




This week I also started the process of restocking my cupboards after the cupboard falling fiasco a few weeks ago. I decided to check out an antique store in my neighbourhood that I had never been into before - Antiques in the Village - and I am in love. The owner is so sweet and sympathized with my loss of vintage dishes and I found an arm full of new treasures. My favourite is my new set of 6 vintage plates...



And today I am off to the studio of local textile aficionado, Melanie Wesley, to receive sewing lessons on how to make a shawl like this:



I will be using these fabrics today 


(green faux fur & wilderness print) to make a template for a series of shawls that commemorate different events where animal rights have been violated. I've signed up for a workshop at Martha Street Studio that teaches you to print your own designs on fabric so I'm hoping to make a series of faux fur shawls lined with fabric I've illustrated to commemorate events such as the slaughter of 100 sled dogs in Canmore. I'm hoping to somehow tie in these pieces with my body of thesis work so we'll see what happens!

The Tom's show Design contest I'm helping to organize is also coming to a head as our show in GOSA starts February 28th. The artists selected have been given TOMS shoes to design and they will be featured in The Gallery of Student Art from February 28th - March 4th along with other works by the artists. I will be designing my shoes after my big crit this Friday but here's a sneak peek of Lauren McPhaden's design.


My head is already spinning with trying to list everything on the go right now - I'm going to make more coffee and a tofu scramble, try to think of slowness then just focus on today's activity - shawl making.

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