A Breather
A solid eighteen inches of snow since Saturday afternoon in the GTA. All available vehicles, from snowblowers through skid steers and pickups with plough attatchments to massive snowploughs all in 24-hour play on the roads. It’s Tuesday morning and the side streets are still thick with slush, cars without snowtires spin their wheels but go nowhere.
Neighbors are out and visible on every street, shovelling, clearing, hollering back and forth, making mountains of white, then plough-slush brown. I shovelled for 2 hours then met two of mine for the first time yesterday – recruited them to push me out of my driveway. I work part time in health care now; there’s no such thing as a snow day for us.
Yesterday I took my flat garden shovel out for an hour to cut through the ice that had me stuck, and shovelled another 4 inches of plough slush onto the pile. Epsom salt therapy and stiff muscles, yes. Joy in the labour and the neighbors helped and helping, yes. The beauty of snow-play and magic, yes.
Now the sun, full-on in a blue sky. The blue sky that has little scudding clouds in it, traveling left across my window, each one of them rainbowed at their top by Solar brilliance. Every once in a while the wind picks up snow from the roof above me and dances it in a funnel down the street. All the treetops are waving like joy.
It was a conscious choice, health care work, made about 18 months ago now. After 8 months of accelerated training I’m now in deeply satisfying service to elders who are living with dementia, whose caregivers cannot continue beyond burnout. This is good balance for studio practice which can often feel isolated and disconnected from the world, especially in the early stages of a project.
In my last project (Tree Time) these early stages were extended far beyond my expectations. It takes time to learn how to make ink from tree pigments, to use these astonishing, living colours in art-making. In that time deep things shifted for me. My idea of what my studio work is about and how I choose to present it is different now.
The reasons I choose to present the work I do in collaboration with the inks I make are more conscious. Who and what I make the work is for is much more conscious too. Does it make sense to say that working with living colours rather than lab-manufactured acrylics reconnects me with the natural world, I wonder. It’s like a lost puzzle piece, found and put in place to complete the picture. Ah, now it makes sense.
The work continues in my reconfigured home studio. I’m in the early stages of a project that honours these natural living colours, combines humble materials in simple ways. All the pieces are interwoven with human and other-than-human stories. I’m inspired by the MOTH project, by Tyson Yunkaporta, by many of the humans who write for Emergence Magazine. The working title for these new pieces is Noticings.
As I’m noticing now – it’s time to step out of Studio and prepare myself for Elder Care work. I love the balance.