New Work for the New Year

Here you see two images of new work that is not even on my website yet.  This continues within my recent "Pod" series where I make use of tiny organic forms and reinterpret them on a different scale. The series began with the idea that a pod is a hollow container designed to hold and protect something that is fragile and important. This idea seemed appropriate for the function of an evening bag as well, and so began the series.

So, expanding on that original idea, I noticed some beautiful tall grass blowing in the wind by the side of the road with purple tips, green and peachy stalks and I thought, "What beautiful grass.  Now, what can I do with that to make a purse?"  After doing some drawings and thinking about it for quite a long time, I came up with "Blowing Grass Purse." (Catchy title, huh?) I am very excited about this piece!

Ideas like this come about because I feel my job as an artist includes "paying attention". Earlier in my life when we lived in big cities, in other countries, while I was raising a family, I was paying attention to the stages in my life, paying attention to the lives of other women, and I tried to pay attention to my inner life. All of this is reflected in earlier purses that you can see on my website. Now, with more time and living in the woods of New Hampshire, I am paying attention to nature, not because I ever intended to but because it has pretty much forced itself upon me.  I used to resist being "inspired by nature" because it seemed like an overused theme for artists. Now, here I am looking at grass and reinterpreting it in colored plastic in the form of a purse.

By paying attention and then putting it somehow into my work, I hope then to open other's eyes and perhaps enable them to pay attention: to life, to the world, to people, to whatever they might be missing at the moment.