This was an eight dollar junk shop find and I'm thrilled to lay it down on my $40 rug in my studio. It's most lovely when I've decided to sit in front of the wood stove like in this photo: I just love the scale of it and the color of it and you can probably see why I like it based on looking at any of my artwork. And it was only eight dollars!
Yes, there will come a time when I have to start removing more and more stuff from my studio to get through it, this alway happens right? Or it does often for me. For now it adds a cozy element, it gives me another height for sitting at, and it can also be for my feet. It's really important to me to have some comfort in the studio, so that I can sit with my tea and think and write and not feel like my creative space is only for a certain kind of hard productivity. I need a counter balance to the standing laptop station and I am grateful to have these soft elements to hold the more tender parts of the practice. Is there something you quietly rely on to bring a little tenderness to your work and focus? I would love to know. Leave a comment below. xo HB *Photo Credit: Abby Rose.
2 Comments
Before I share about sparkiness, I want to extend an invitation to the WestSideArt Hop this weekend. Please join us if you are in the area (of Ann Arbor MI). Details here. Lots of new things to see!
Was there a small creative spark in your early years that became a vivid theme in the work that you do today? I recently came across this little paper remnant from when I was a kid because it relates a lot to my artwork. I don't remember the specifics, but what I vaguely recall is that this paper was from a listening and noticing exercise I was invited to do for a class in middle school. This is the piece of paper I wrote on. It had been folded into fours. It's something I keep on my bulletin board to remind me of how impressionable we are as kids and how simple things like this exercise can shape a life. List making in and of itself has come into my work many times, most notably in Empty Full, in which I inventoried every single object I own as both a list, and as a single calculated volume of space, which then was shared as a hollow cylinder in the same volume, with the list of objects on the floor of the structure. In Yardsale, while I was holding an object with all of the usual stuff for sale, I asked each customer to cross off of a list an item of their choice for every object they bought. The list was of intangible things I was, I felt, ready to let go of at that time in my life. The list has things like: "Taking the bigger piece of pie" and "laughing when it's not funny". Visual Traces of Groups of Work. I and five volunteers observed what was happening in the gallery: minute repeating events that are a part of a group at work, that became a list as part of the work, and then got translated into different types of adhesive marks on the walls and floor of the gallery, exhibited along with the list. Lists also feature heavily in my third book the Elements: a love letter to all thing everywhere. Here, the objects and areas in which each element is found, are listed for all 118 chemical elements, as well as their behaviors, qualities and uses. All of my books except the very first have Indexes, another kind of list and another way to explore and enter the content of the books. Spot Count asked others to list their noticings in open public spaces like a weedy lot or a park, much like I was asked to do in school long ago, though they moved through the space like you would for a bird count, or for a forensic search, but in my project, leaving colorful marker wherever they stood and observed. I'm also excited to share that this same theme is coming forth in a new book project that will be ready to fully to share in just a few months. It's a book called Field Guide to Ambiguity, and is about all of the situations in which ambiguity is present, as well as some of the strategies we use to deal with it. It is essentially a list of such ambiguous situations, paired with a new artwork, reflections and variations on each situation, as well as beautiful design by my collaborator Patrick Barber in Detroit. Patrick has contributed much to the building of this book, the structure and the editing process as a book designer and a designer specifically of Field Guides as luck would have it. I can't wait to share it with you, but for now, let's return to the piece of paper that inspired this post! Do you have something from your childhood that made a huge impact on your livelihood, artwork or other creative work in a significant way? What small thing was introduced to you that became a seed, that then grew into something huge? Here is a photo of me holding one of my smaller landscapes in a landscape. I know this is a social media trope, but it seemed fitting because landscape is a kind of artwork that I've been making since I began. Before I continue PLEASE NOTE! If you are in Ann Arbor on June 11 and 12, please join me to see some of these works in the flesh at the West Side Art Hop. I will be showing at Cathryn Amidei's with four other artists and would love to see you there! Landscape started for me my first year out of undergrad at Brown, just after moving out from my mother's house where I'd been living. I didn't know how to start making art outside of the context of classes and senior projects and the things you do as assignments when you're a student. Without that structure I felt a little at sea. By a series of coincidences, I found myself living within a few months living in a big open loft space that is now luxury office space in downtown Boston, but then was a rough, non-live zoned space with huge windows, plenty of heat, and a bright turquoise floor, off of a shared kitchen and five loft mates with similar spaces. It was $400 a month, sigh. Landscape started then when one of my loft mates suggested that I just focus in on one thing and see where it might lead. I then made landscapes for years and years and sold all of the paintings that I made. It was an incredibly rich time. At one point I had a job that I quit so that I could just make my art for a year. I showed and sold most of that work. Over time, my landscapes became more conceptual and abstract, morphing into projects like Correspondence Project and like Draw Through It. The landscapes became the activity of writing turning into landscape turning into writing. At a certain moment the landscapes had the vertical red line of a lined paper margin, and blue lines across it. Landscape has continued throughout all of the other kinds of projects that I've done, and every year I always have a period where I return to landscape. In 2019 I had a show in which for the first time I showed both landscape and total abstraction together. It was a delightful pairing. It worked beautifully together and was really freeing to put things all in one place. Often I find that artists do this thing where they have certain rules of what is and isn't allowed for yourself and your artwork. I think I had the rule that 'you can't do more than one thing, and that if you did, it was problematic.' I want to honor the abstract landscape in my work because I have many of them in my own home, in other people's homes and I value them tremendously. The natural landscape is a place I feel deeply at home and return to every day to birdwatch and forage for mushrooms, and to get bathed in green or brown or white and get perspective. I wanted to make sure that you knew for those of you who have been collecting my landscapes over the years that I still actively make them. I make them with a new appreciation for the big open spaces of the midwest and the new bodies of water, the giant, ocean-scale lakes that I've encountered living here. I continue too to visit northern coastal Maine every chance I get and to be influenced by the landscape that I'm immersed in when there. I wanted to share some newer work that I have made, and to let you know that it's available for sale and for exhibition, and some of it you can find here! If you are in Ann Arbor on June 11 and 12, please join me to see some of these works in the flesh at the West Side Art Hop. I will be showing at Cathryn Amidei's with four other artists and would love to see you there!
|
ALIVECheck out the newest book:
FIELD GUIDE TO AMBIGUITY NOW--ISH A solo exhibition Opening June 7—Sept 6 2024, Saugatuck Center for the Arts, Saugatuck MI. FREE SESSION WITH HANNAH!If you feel overwhelmed, confused or just plain excited by what's afoot in your life, and would like some excellent clarifying space and tools, try a session with Hannah! She's been a coach for 15 years. First 30 minutes is just to see what it's like...
AuthorHannah Burr is a contemporary artist and author. Originally from Boston, she lives in Ann Arbor MI. Archives
November 2024
Categories
All
|