Today I spent most of the day working on cyanotypes. I decided to try my hand at making digital negatives today, so I took three of my favorite photos from the past week and set them up for printing. It took a couple of times to get the exposure right on the paper, but in the end I think these three worked out pretty okay.
I’ll take a few minutes to take the less successful prints and recycle them into test pieces for tinting, but I am pretty excited about how these turned out.
I also had a chance to go to artist Sheila Novak’s guided meditation session for her exhibition seeding/seeping today at the Experimental Gallery in Tjaden Hall at Cornell University. The exhibition is fantastic, and incorporates really captivating ceramics with fiber arts/fabric sculpture. The work commands a presence with it, and evokes bodies and nature and so much more. Though the show ends tomorrow, I really recommend checking out her work and going to see it in person the first chance you get.
The guided meditation session was wonderful. The perspectives that she offered in it by inviting the participants to engage in their bodies as a rhizomatic system, engaging simultaneously in decay and growth, had me visualizing my body in a way I had not before. This was interesting to me, particularly as I have a regular meditation practice and have done many visualization practices that engage with sinking into the earth and contemplating decay, but something about become part of a mycelium network really offered a new perspective that I am going to think about, and likely meditation on/with, for a while.
I know I have a few days left, but those last three days here are going to fly by. Tomorrow the Soil Factory is having a community dinner followed by a Listening Intensive that I will be leading, offering everyone a chance to engage in some of the practices I have been working with since I got here, and I still want to get a bit more footage and more audio before the end of my residency on Friday. It’s been so great to be here, and I’m grateful that I still have a few more days to focus on making new work, learning new skills, meeting the wonderful people and artists here in Ithaca, and hopefully get up to a few more adventures before I leave.
