As I write this, sipping coffee and gazing out the window at the first snow visible high above the valley floor, a magpie is teasing out chickens...perching in the tree and then ever-so-casual, touching down on the ground. At which point a rodeo ensues...feathers fly and squawking ensues, and yes, nothing really can make a wholelotta outraged noise like a chicken. The snow is so beautiful, and the chill in the air this morning as I skulked around in the dark made my wool sweater and fuzzy boots feel soooo good...but there's always a moment of feeling unsettled when the cold comes in. We depend on wood for our heat, and this time of year I always get a cold panic - do we ever have enough?

          The magpie is back, picking at an old deer hide hanging in the tree. I guess he probably feels the same way with the cold coming on...It's so hard for the animals here. It really does get down to negative twenty-five, and some years it's felt like we always had four feet of snow.

              

I spent the last few days in the garden with Rob, trying to put away as much as possible. All the red tomatoes are canned, and I'm making pickles and chutney with the (many, many) tomatoes that hadn't ripened yet. I also tried to make pickled peppers yesterday. Here are some pickles below:

I can't believe how nest-oriented I am right now. I think that goes with the fall, somewhat - all your energy is directed inward to some degree. It's a symptom of the colder weather, and you see it in animals too. Even plants pull their energy back from leaves and fruit to keep the essence alive. Fall as a result is such an introspective time for me.

                

The show opening went well. I was excited to debut this new body of work. All these pieces were created while I was working at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA, from the end of April until mid-July...the ideas started last winter however. I began with a series of hourglass forms...it's a good exercise, to practice a new form over and over, and to a degree that's all I was doing...tweaking the proportions, exaggerating the waist...We started experimenting with a series of hourglasses that were no longer transparent, that had a mirrorized outer surface. So the line of thinking went: what are the implications of an opaque hourglass, one in which you can only infer time's passage? What are the implications of seeing your own image in that hourglass, distorted as the form swells and tapers? I carved some lenses into the surface, creating another layer of optics and distortion...they began to have this really nice tension between exteriority and interiority.

            I use the idea of the vessel as a metaphor for the body a lot in my work. So here's what we ended up with:

They feel really nice in the hand...and they have a lightness to them, sort of humorous...sort of lost. And this idea of the hourglass stayed with me, and it became the basis for the whole body of work, this idea of time passing...As a research tool, I use word etymology and myth (very linked subjects) to generate different ways of thinking about an idea...and so I did research into the root of "chronology". Here's some of what I found:

            

In Greek mythology, Chronos (Ancient Greek: Χρόνος) in pre-Socratic philosophical works is said to be the personification of time. His name in Modern Greek also means "year" and is alternatively spelled Khronos (english transliteration) or Chronus (Latin spelling).

Chronos was imagined as an incorporeal god. Serpentine in form, with three heads—that of a man, a bull, and a lion. He and his consort, serpentine Ananke (Inevitability), circled the primal world-egg in their coils and split it apart to form the ordered universe of earth, sea and sky. He is not to be confused with the Titan Cronus.

He was depicted in Greek mosaics as a man turning the Zodiac Wheel.  Often the figure is named Aeon (Eternal Time), a common alternate name for the god.

Chronos is usually portrayed through an old, wise man with a long, gray beard, such as "Father Time." Some of the current English words whose etymological root is khronos/chronos include chronology, chronic, anachronism, and chronicle.


                   Ananke, she became a piece in the series too...the idea of hourglasses became formally linked to this feminine form...to fertility...Here's the lynchpin of the series:

...This piece is called "Shakti"...the feminine principal...
We paired her in the show with this painting:

I watch the magpies as I write this. Putting a body of work together, it's a little like what they do...scavenging ideas and images...picking on detritus looking for something shiny.

                       We're starting plans for the new show in the spring. I'll be showing with three other really talented artists: Cheryl Wrangle, Sue Marracci, and Laura Karcher. Cheryl and Sue are both painters, and Laura works in three dimensions...very fragile Japanese aesthetic, handmade paper and wood, and light. Lovely. She's doing these things with old 30s and 40s era car hoods that I sort of love. It's an interesting mash-up. The suggested theme at the moment is: Deepening the Wonder. Here's the poem it's based on:  (by Sufi poet Hafiz)



Death is a favor to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.

The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity,
Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes

Of this mysterious existence we share
And are surely just traveling through.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks

And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that

We are just a midair flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His Cup.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world

Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.

Death is a favor to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.

The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.

_____________
Impermanence is the word that keeps jumping out at me, and I think it's the word I'm going to seize on to design the new work off of. Stay tuned...

Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth".
                                                                          -- Byrd Gibbens, Professor of English at University of Arkansas, Little Rock



...Check downtown Seattle on 6th Avenue and you'll find that my poor old coyote, salvaged from a bone pit on state land here in the Methow Valley, is having his fifteen minutes...Nordstrom's chose my piece, Reliquary for a Trickster, to be featured in their window alongside the work of several other glass artists. It's all to promote the Pilchuck Auction, which will be held at the Westin Hotel.  There will be an exhibition the day before the auction to preview the work as well! I'm really excited; Pilchuck is a truly unique place in the world, and has been key to my latest body of work by giving me access to studio space, equipment, and a community of creative, extremely adept glassworkers from all over the world to bounce ideas and inspiration off of. I feel really honored to give back. 
            I want to talk about that piece a little bit - it's actually a really important piece for me, in that it was the synthesis of a lot of ideas I had been thinking about for a long time.  The impetus behind it was actually a course I took in college on Jungian archetypes, and in particular the Trickster archetype...so we looked at that in traditions around the world, including Africa, Haiti, various Native American traditions...I think Hermes made an appearance, as did PeeWee Herman. Seriously! 
 
                    So Tricksters have become important to me , Raven (the whole Corvid family actually, including magpies and crows) anc Coyote in particular. They're part of my daily environment, and are fascinating to spend any amount of time with...why? I suppose one reason certain animals take on a certain interest is just more human navel-gazing - there are qualities they embody that remind us of ourselves.  The book "In the Company of Crows and Ravens" by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell is highly recommended...I probably have a few others I could think of. 
    
                    

I grew up in the full-on pageantry of a Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox Catholic background, and so the aesthetics of ceremony and the sacred are something that seems to be programmed into my artistic DNA...  the incense, the foreign languages, the mysterious golden boxes and candles and symbols, all tied to these issues of transformation, the transmutation of the material body...heady stuff for a little kid. And it's a place I find myself continuing to return to as an artist, rich ground I continue to turn over, even though in many cases the substance behind those beliefs mean much less to me now. 

         Those golden shrines, mysterious and always locked, often containing an actual relic or material embodiment of the divine, captured my imagination...made all those stories and myths lock down into an object that could be held and turned over, proof that magic still happened in the material world...As I began to study glassworking, reliquaries kept returning into my work, sometimes in the form of belljars or scientific apparatus. Really, in some ways, I'm still not sure I see the distinction between those worlds, of science and faith.  The ceremony and trappings behind both of those worlds remains a major source of my inspiration and work.
 
Trickster was conceived as a piece with a foot in both those worlds..."between-ness" being a state that comes very naturally to tricksters. The main body of the piece was based off of antique diving bells...(wooof, that could be a post in its own right...the short story is that the diving helmet represents: technology as a vehicle of transgression, ultimate isolation, ultimate protection, ultimate immobilization in the name of all three of these things. Oh yeah? :)  The neck of the piece was a series of carefully polished golden lenses...mirroring the gilded spine inside the helmet bit...the top lens has a tiny golden mouse skull attached (got that one from an owl pellet, incidentally)...The gilded quality, as well as the tongue-in-cheek addition of the belly-dancer bells and the brass peacock fan...well, let's just say Trickster likes shiny things, and loves laughter. :)

Rob and I found the coyote skeleton...actually two of them...a few years ago on a bike trip. I like coyotes, although most people really don't seem to feel the same. The name "coyote" is borrowed  from Mexican Spanish, ultimately derived from the  Nahuatl word cóyotl. Its scientific name, Canis latrans, means "barking dog." The full range of their vocalizations is astounding, and I stay awake often listening to their percussive yips and yelps. Their howls sound mad to me, so eerie on a night like last night, where the wind blew my curtains in through the window, and lightning silently lit shadows across the floor. 
          A lot of  folks just shoot them if they see them hanging around; they're a major livestock nuisance, although Rob and I haven't really had any problems, even though they do come quite close to the house. When we moved our chickens to a new house, we found coyote footprints investigating the old house, which of course smelled of chickens...But although we also found their footprints circling the new house, they didn't work too hard to get in past the door and locks. I've heard stories of them digging under fences to break through...but that hasn't really been my experience. We have a small Icelandic sheep flock in the fields behind our house, inside seven foot high fences...again, I hear coyotes all the time, but no one has ever gotten past the fence. Maybe if they were hungry or determined enough? There always seems to be plenty for them, at least as far as squirrels and weasels and mice, and maybe they're like anyone else - they'll exhaust the easy food supplies first before risking a break-and-enter.
           We think the ones we brought home from that trip, the one whose spine ultimately ended up inside Reliquary for a Trickster, probably died that way - shot by a farmer or rancher and then dumped in a bone pit that is used by hunters and DOT workers mostly to dispose of mule deer remains. It was sad...his whiskers and the fur on his front legs was still intact. We buried it outside for a year or so before I handled it, to let it break down a bit more. All the bones were clean when we went to retrieve him. His skull is here, next to the computer. Based on his teeth, I would guess he was quite young. 

 

 

This is the only time I've seen a coyote actually take something down...a young female deer, probably less than a year old. The snow had a hard frozen crust on it, and deer hooves punch right through that, which slows them down quite a lot...whereas Coyote wears snowshoes...She fell behind her herd, and he took her. I don't think she would have lived much longer anyway...there isn't much for anyone to eat in the winter. You can see a bunch of magpies surrounding Coyote, and in the days to come, we also saw eagles, crows, and ravens. Life wants to live, I guess...It was so sad, but her death meant a lot of other creatures lived through the winter from her.