I made a set of transfer tools for my flat-bed knitting machine at Techshop a while back. Simple, laser-cut acrylic. The thinner one is a little easier to transfer stitches with then the thicker ones. That is, until it snaps under pressure.
This is why we test.
So excited to have found this Calla in bloom in my garden. Back east we never saw calla lilies until the early 1990s when Robert Mapplethorpe outed them. Some of the rest of his subject matter caused some small-minded people to protest his photography exhibit. I never knew what was more upsetting for Cincinnati: his gender, the genetalia or the varied ethnicity of those being pictured.
On clear days Sutro Tower and Mt. Davidson Cross in the distance. Today the city is fogged in. Our neighborhood gets a crack of sunlight amidst the grey.
This image of Fukushima Daiichi is a page (and a third) from my sketchbook. In addition to being a place for capturing artistic plans, visual expiraments, personal action items and practice drawings, my sketch book also contains imagery about things that are currently going on. Sometimes those things are within my sphere of influence and sometimes they are more global.
For anyone who doesn't follow disaster news it might seem that the tsunami–damaged nuclear power plant in Japan is no longer anything to worry about. At the point where it didn't immediately send up a television news-worthy spectacle in mid-March it dropped off the horizon. More immediate and flashy events (i.e. Gadhafi, bin Laden, the Rapture, Mississippi River flooding, Icelandic volcanoes and Mega-tornadoes) all got top billing.
Meanwhile quietly boiling away on a back burner amidst misinformation Fukushima Daiichi is in critical condition. Tepco is generating so many reports on the state of their reactors that it is apparently easy to miss a press release confirming the nearly complete meltdown of unit number one. This is news that wasn't in the news for about a week. Unexplained discrepancies between temperature readings from the bottom of the reactors and be insertion points for water was being injected into them were finally brought to light. Its not clear yet whether anyone really understands how low the water levels inside the reactors are at any given point. It was clear that radioactive water was leaking from the number of points at the plant. Once that leak was repaired it was discovered that Unit 1 had melted nearly all of its fuel down below the water line. Unit 1 now joins Chernobyl's Reactor Number Four in needing a New Safe Confinement structure. How long before the others do too?
"Cold Shutdown" is a really bad term for something that needs to be kept at 37 to 95°C. Water boils at 100°C. Hot beverages are typically served at 52 to 92°C. The famous McDonald's coffee lawsuit involved coffee that was served at a temperature over 80°C. Beef cooks to medium rare at 54°C. The lower end happens to be the same temperature as the human body: 37°C is 98.6°F. In short cold shutdown isn't cold. Since spent fuel keeps generating heat it needs to be kept in cooling pools for 5 to 10 years before it can be safely moved to concrete cask storage. Otherwise it catches fire, melts and has the potential to release large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. None of the reactor temperatures have been consistently in the safe zone for “cold shutdown.”
Reactor number four was described as being in “cold shutdown” because it was off-line during the quake and subsequent tsunami. Unfortunately it didn't mean it was empty, cold or safe. Unit 4 still has spent fuel and is affected buy the heat being emitted by the other reactors and the frail state of the plant's infrastructure. It was considered less critical than the other three even though it has been periodically catching fire and putting out clouds of smoke. Did the misnomer “cold shutdown” mean no one was monitoring the temperatures to make sure it stayed that way?
In a disaster there are so many things that go wrong that it is not necessarily possible to point to even a small number of causes. It is a disaster because everything that was planned for was not sufficient to avert it. At Fukushima Daiichi it may not have been possible with the information available at the time to contemplate all failure scenarios and plan for them.
I titled this post “Four good reasons to be anti-nuke." Each of the four damaged reactors is a reason in itself to be against expansion of nuclear energy. Unit 2 is believed to have core damage and is leaking radioactive water. Unit 3 may also be in the same state that has the added disadvantage of the much more dangerous uranium/plutonium mix of fuel. "Cold shutdown" doesn't really mean cold or shut down and the custodial responsibility for something of this magnitude lasts for 10s of generations.
I have always felt it was a bad sign if I couldn't paint, draw or produce something I was really happy with for an extended period of time. Every negative point in my life (family trouble, a bad boyfriend, etc.) has been marked with a distinct lack of art. I had been feeling like I had “painters block” with everything that had been going on for the past couple years. Every time we had a gathering people would naturally ask what I have been doing with my art and I was always bothered by that I didn't feel like I had a good answer. It was a point in Heide's illness where there was a lot of uncertainty and we were all still hoping for a silver bullet to put her cancer back in remission. A bit of creativity or inspiration would've been a welcome distraction.
Preparing my 50/50 entry form showed me that my work wasn't as bleak as I thought. Instructions from the prospectus said "Submit 3 artwork images (slides or jpegs on a CD). Choose artworks that are samples of your best work in the medium you will use." At first it seemed that all of my collage work had only been done throughout 2005 as part of the PaperScapes collection. Now it became apparent that I had to take inventory and figure out what else was finished and exemplary. It forced me to take a closer look at pieces that I had thought were my best work and open up to the idea of showing someone the very personal pieces connected to the later phases of Heidi's illness. There are several pieces in my studio that are by no means finished. They are on hold for a variety of reasons. Pieces in the Chefs series need a little bit more planning and design decisions. The SF Landmarks are held up by an execution issue about how I want to handle the sharp edges of buildings in a medium that is essentially a series of rough edges. Anything that is more solidly in textile and fibre requires some technical mastery that I haven't worked up to yet.
Ultimately I decided to go with the following images which demonstrate a progression.
The selection starts with "Peaches and Greens" from Paperscapes. It is one of my favorite of the larger pieces from that show. Not only is it more complex than many of the earlier pieces in the collection it also holds more “story.” As it was coming together inspired a recipe for salad.
"Desert Inn on Route 66" comes out of a road trip my husband and I took in 2007 as the inaugural drive for our new Mini Cooper. I was working with dual concepts of making paper from scrap and using the color of found paper as a paint. Actual paint and colored pencil in this method are used only as a tent to enhance the existing color in the scraps. The image paper it is on are integrated.
The long title of "Cancer in Pieces" is "I cannot stand this in pieces, how can you stand it at all?" It is probably one of the first paintings in a very long time I've done with a lot of emotion and instinct as opposed to forethought and engineering. The collage technique here is more of the skeleton of the image, the framework that the rest of it hangs off of. It is sparse by comparison to the others and it is also quite a bit larger. It is more raw, less refined and difficult to look at. It typically several days to find it even with a photographic memory. It is probably no irony that a coping mechanism for grief and trauma is to put images and memories away until we're strong enough later on to deal with them.
Seeing them together in person the relationship is a lot stronger than here on the Internet. It makes me think I should put together a timeline that includes some of the pieces leading up to PaperScapes, those coming after “Cancer in Pieces” and the destinations in between.
