Quote of the Week

"The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to 'World.' Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing."

~Anne Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

Well here we are.

It's all over. I spent the week between my last post and this installing my show, adding images to my document, completing my oral defense, spending over three hours just on page numbers, submitting my paper electronically, and gathering all my signatures. My parents came into town Thursday night and left this morning; my brother and his girlfriend came in Friday afternoon and left Saturday morning. A dear, dear, friend of mine from Towson came down too, and stayed with me. We hadn't seen each other since I'd moved down here so it was great to catch up on her life, her thesis experience and what was going on with some other good friends I left behind in Maryland.

The show looks amazing. I couldn't be happier with how my work looks, or how the entire gallery looks. I think we were all a little apprehensive with so many of us in the gallery, but everyone filled the space and it all went together incredibly well. The opening went great as well; there was a steady stream of people almost the entire time! Some of the faculty have been saying that this is one of the best MFA shows they've seen. I could not be graduating with more talented people.

But people are asking "What next?" In the immediate sense, we still have a couple weeks of school left, and while I do have very few obligations, I do still have a few obligations. I have work to make for friends and colleagues, work I'd like to make for myself, job hunting and applications to begin working on in earnest, grad assistantship hours I need to keep showing up for. In the more long term sense, as in where am I going to go, and what am I going to do after graduation, well, that's a little trickier. I got a summer studio assistantship at Arrowmont starting the end of June and running through the end of July. I couldn't be more excited about this opportunity, and I'm hoping that by the end of my time there, I'll have the next place to go. And as much as I hate moving, I realize that this is how my life is going to be for the next few years. There are too many things I want to do, all over the country, for me to pick a permanent spot right now.

The future seems scary and exciting all at once. Even this blog is going to undergo some changes I expect. I would stick around for the ride, if I were you. I have a feeling it's gonna be good.

Quote of the Week

"I assume that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. . . . It is noble work, and beats, from any angle, selling shoes."

~Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk

Quote of the Week

This week's quote is more like a whole passage. Ok, well, it is a whole passage. We had our final for our Readings class today, where everyone shared the book they had been reading on their own. I read For the Time Being, by Anne Dillard. This book is a wonderful blend of geology and theology, so it was perfect for me, but not so much for anyone else I know. But I do want to post this passage from the book, which I shared with my Readings class and would like to share with you.

"Chert, flint, agate, and glassy rock can flake to a cutting edge only a few atoms thick. Prehistoric people made long oval knives of this surpassing sharpness, and made them wittingly too fragile to use. Some people-Homo sapiens-lived in a subfreezing open air camp in central France about eighteen thousand years ago. We call their ambitious culture Solutrean; it lasted only about three thousand years. They invented the bow and arrow, the spear thrower, and the needle- which made clothes such a welcome improvement over draped pelts. . .

Solutrean artisans knapped astonishing yellow blades in the shape of long, narrow, pointed leaves. The longest Solutrean blade is fourteen inches long, four inches at it's beam, and only one quarter inch thick. Most of these blades are the size and thickness of a fillet of sole. Their intricate technique is overshot flaking; it is, according to Douglas Preston, "primarily and intellectual process." A modern surgeon at Michigan Medical School used such a blade to open a patent's abdomen; it was smoother, he said than his best steel scalpels. Another scientist estimated a Solutrean chert blade was one hundred times sharper than a steel scalpel. Its edge split few cells, and left scant scar. Recently, according to the ever fine writer John Pfeiffer, an Arizona rancher skinned a bear with an obsidian knife in two hours instead of the usual three and a half; he said he never needed to press down.

Hold one of these chert knives to the sky. It passes light. It shines dull, waxy gold- brown in the center, and yellow towards the edge as it clears. At each concoidal fractured edge all the way around the double-ogive form, at each cove in the continental stone, the blade thins from translucency to transparency. You see your skin, and the sky. At its very edge the blade dissolves into the universe at large. It ends imperceptibly at an atom.

Each of these delicate, absurd objects takes hundreds of separate blows to fashion. At each stroke and at each pressure flake, the brittle chert might-and by the record, very often did- snap. The maker knew he was likely to lose many hours' breath holding work at a tap. The maker worked in extreme cold. He knew no one would ever use these virtuoso blades. He protected them, and his descendants saved them intact for their prefection. To any human on earth, the sight of one of them means: someone thought of making, and made this difficult, impossible, beautiful thing."

~Anne Dillard

Progress Report

Fossil Rich Dirt from Piratefest

Here's a few of the things I've been up to over the past few days. As you can see, it's pretty book centric in more ways than one:

- photo plates ordered from Boxcar (I think I got my files right)
- power point about halfway done (still trying to figure out what direction to go with it, I don't want to talk forever, but I have a lot I could say)
- halfway through 2nd book for readings class (For the Time Being, by Anne Dillard)
- halfway through reading another book
- 23 wall brooches (so far)
- 2 coptic stitch books and 4 simple 2 hole books (just for fun and procrastination)
- chain for the case for my final book
- some salt experiments and a repair (Salt Vessel came back damaged)
- started gauche painting for a wet media mono type (for my end pages for my final book)
- fossil hunting a Piratefest (found a whole mess of shark teeth, some nice, two shark vertebrae, some tiny gastropods and a nice porpoise tooth, among other things. Thinking about making a piece with the bones I've found . . .)
- baked two loaves of Honey Whole Wheat Bread (delicious and nutritious!)
- Spring Cleaning!!! (ok, so I didn't vacuum, but you should see my microwave!)

Quote of the Week

"What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? We spy on whales and on intersteller radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray til we're blue."

~Anne Dillard

Quote of the Week

"The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? . . . . The sea pronounces something, over and over in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried."
~Anne Dillard
From Teaching a Stone to Talk