Vibrant Matter

Borrowing a title from Jane Bennet's book on the political ecology of things...

I am moving around and through the house and studio at 10 Cedar Street. Looking at what I have saved and what I have built. I am under some pressure to keep moving, keep making choices. I put things here and leave things there, deciding their fate (as if objects have a "fate"). What is apparent as I do this is how I am still fascinated by this process of spreading things out and grouping them together. Tools here, electrical bits there, hardware over there, until the piles are boxed up. I have not let go of the idea that simply documenting the objects will make some meaning apparent. I imagine simple shelves on which the objects are placed to be changed at intervals. Not a game like Duchamp but more like the pictures posted on  the fences near ground Zero. An ongoing installation of sorts. Do you know this object? How do you know this object? Where is this object? How do you know they way you know this object?

I will make a place for this to happen and be documented here.

SO MANY BOOKS

As part of the move to Wendy's house,  I have set up a small library is a shared office space in Salem. This space will house the overflow of books coming from my studio that just cannot fit into Wendy's house in Beverly. I like this idea of having a place to go and read that is not in my house surrounded by the other work I have to do.


In order to mark the occasion, I am having the first in a series of conversations in the library with my friend Brian Pellinen. Brian is an educator and a writer who is a brilliant conversation person.. He listens and knows how to make connections to what is often a larger conversation. He also really enjoys just playing tennis with ideas. There is no agenda or plan for these conversations just a starting point from  some common interest perhaps.. Maybe a series of questions or projects to be discussed.

 I plan other conversations with lots of other friends and colleagues. I trust that this will turn into an interesting project and make The Library a valuable source for ideas and a fun place to go.

The Slow Tornado

I have been moving this month from a house and studio I have owned for 35 years. There is a long story about this but the short of it is that I have been married for three years now and have been managing two houses, lawns,  snowplowing and  everything else that comes with an old house. I also feel that in the past 12 years of being in a relationship with Wendy that I feel like I have moved into a period of time where I must measure my energy wisely and focus on getting the work done such that my gifts allow. Right now this means being a good partner and making films.
Yes, I will make some kind of film about the move. It has been hard to do the work and be reflective at the same time about what it means. I have found myself just sitting and looking at things that I remember, marks on a table or shelves built for a specific project and spinning the images of those times in my head, over and over.
I have discovered a lot and will discover more. Things that I thought I had lost, thing I didn't know I owned. I see that as I move this stuff to another place or storage and leave some of it behind that I have generated a very slow kind of tornado. In the way that a tornado scatters things far and wide I have removed these things from places far away and moved them with me until now I am moving and leaving behind and moving so that the things are scattered in the same way,  just slower.