Art meets Unknown

Art has always been ahead of me. This dinner plate emerged out of a time of upheaval, as appearances fell away, doors closed, windows opened and simple fixtures of life were swept aside, including, ironically, my place at the table! The outside world was in flux, and my internal landscape was a moving mosaic.

After a divorce and 2 floods, my children and I moved back to land from 5 years of living aboard a 44' sailboat outside the Sauvie Island Wildlife Refuge. Our family was immersed in the ways of birds and animals on those woodsy banks. The flooding in some areas was a seasonal occurrence, but we actually faced 2 major disasters which left the world swollen with fouled water, contaminated by cow corpses and other stranded animals. Yet, unbelievably, the community rallied and by 10 months time, surroundings and people had largely recovered. In the beautiful times, there was nothing like living richly with wildlife, while sparsely with electricity and other resources, maintaining a handmade life aboard. It was an important period which left me and my daughters stripped down and grateful for essentials. We hit our cultural detox from typical American consumer mentality hard and early.

Once in a house that didn't move (boats are always in motion even at rest) visual art resumed its primary role. I salvaged fiberboard and test glass pours from a local art glass manufacturer. Their dumpster filled weekly, and they let me glean all manner of slabs. The moving mosaic of my interior life on the water was breaking itself out of me piece by piece as I made this large work freehand. Instead of using traditional methods of tesserae, which are highly uniform, I needed the freedom of varying glass shapes and sizes and working directly onto the board with adhesive, without sketching. We think of drama with seascape, but the river is a subtler world of contrasts. There was an immediate and panoramic intensity to those days on the water at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. The force of the river was fast each spring driving up through the bottoms of trees in the wash, while the boughs greened up and clouds stretched their wings. I was wrenched by leaving, and struggled to trust I would not be ultimately washed away in all the loss. And I was not.

Aboard a boat and in the sailing community, I maintained the ballast of my own identity through music and dance. 3 years after returning to land was when the diagnosis of Meniere's Disease was made. I brought the sea back in my body, always seasick and dizzy. Dance has been passed on to my daughters instead. Menieres has progressed so that I cannot tell when I will fall; some internal lighting strikes and spontaneous face plants occur out of nowhere. But, it has left my visual art which like this mosaic, still has it's own internal press. Art still leads, and now what I do with my hands reflects more and more my choice of how to navigate the rough waters of particular physical limits on a given day or over a period of time. I see music now. I see bird songs, breeze in trees, as deafness changes my senses. What helps me now is to enjoy this visual music and dance of my hands in the art. I recycle everything I can, from sensory input to my own physical being, moment by moment as if under the water about 40 feet. Each day is it's own and all I can handle. The inside story of the mosaic just means more now. The plate tells more than I knew at the time. I am facing an even bigger unknown within this body culture than any I have learned about before. I trust art to show me what comes next. Fortunately, I don't read it as I do it. I treat it more gently than I have my body, a hard lesson now. But more than ever before in life, it is how I will express my culture and share it with you. What leads you? What gives meaning to your unknown?