Responsible art-making

When the show concluded, I had over 80 onion rescues that needed a home. On March 8th I hosted a campus-wide "adopt-an-onion" program, which saw an amazing response.  Each participant received one "still edible, but not very attractive" onion, delivered by a special stork, with an official certificate of adoption.  The certificate included statistics on food waste in America, along with global hunger statistics, and practical advice on how to reduce one's own food waste.

I saved the "special case" onions (those with rot and mold) for myself and carefully cut out the edible parts.  (And of course the act caused me to weep--not without literal and symbolic significance).  The inedible parts were lovingly returned back to the earth.

http://www.locallygrownnews.com/stories/Threshold-An-Art-Installation-at-Elon-University,27663

they sprout

the onions at the close of the exhibition.  a few had sprouted several inches, some were just beginning.  

Sorrow and Longing, from the Medical Terminology Study Card series

the medical body versus the lived body

to break
glass-like
movement of the heart

and...

coughing up
star-like star shaped
breast pain







These study cards were given to me as a gift, found initially in a thrift store in Oregon.  My friend knew I would love them....

I did love them.  But they sat on a shelf for almost ten years.  On occasion, out of curiosity I would pull one, read it, and then place it right back into its container, not yet aware of its potential. Several months ago during a period of crisis and transition I again pulled a card, examined it, and, as a healing gesture, burned out the text that made no sense to me.  I repeated this over and over, forming poems from the text that remained.  Over the period of about a month I created over 50 elegies, each one a combination of three cards.  They perform as little haikus, transforming a vocabulary of pathology, objectivity, and detachment into meditations on intimacy and desire.

The name of the paint, that provides the stage for their existence here, is stolen kiss.