Monthly Archives: March 2021

4 posts

Vaccine

health pendants

2″ x .5″, found objects

I’m finally eligible, and I have a first dose scheduled on Monday!  I’m torn about accepting the vaccine when I could technically continue to work from home and there are people who are higher-risk than I am that still don’t have it, but as the warm weather has set in, I’ve been starting to work with students again, and it will be amazing to have one more layer of protection for them and for me.  I was thinking about ways to capture the disparities in vaccine distribution and the brain-numbing complexity of this process, but when I sat down I ended up instead with this upbeat stylized image of a syringe and the COVID virus.  I work in public health, so I know perfectly well that the vaccine doesn’t work by directly targeting the virus, but sometimes a half-inch-wide canvas requires some oversimplification.  Maybe next time I’ll find a way to capture my despair over health disparities and inequity in one square inch.  

 

Bones

health pendants

1″x1.5″, glass and found objects

I’ve always been fascinated by bones. Maybe it’s because they’re a structure that gives strength but also allows flexibility. Maybe it’s because they’re substantial but lightweight.  As a toddler I had a necklace made of fish vertebrae that I loved. As an older kid I dissected owl pellets and even joined the dissection club.  In university I snuck into the anatomy museum when it was closed.  In Chile I helped a nurse “rescue” bones from a cemetery to complete a skeleton for a classroom.  I’m pretty sure these bright red beads are made of bones.  Dyed this lovely shade of red and polished to a shine I imagine they aren’t disgusting to other people the way some bones are.  For me, they’re beautiful and fascinating.

Break-and-make

health pendants

1″ x 1.5″, found objects

When we’re planning art activities for the community, one type of activity is a “make-and-take”, where you can make something and take it with you when you finish.  In my house, what we do instead is break-and-make.  We were sorting pens this week and the broken ones got taken apart for the springs, the caps, the tubes.  When we had a broken keyboard it was deconstructed for parts.  And this pendant is one of the things we made.  I used the tip of a fancy pen, part of the deconstructed keyboard, and a handful of nails to make this beauty.

Faults

health pendants

1″ x 1.5″, slate and glass

We’ve been dealing with faults of all kinds lately, from cracks in the cement bench in our yard to disagreements about whose fault it is that the kitchen is messy. After Perseverance landed on Mars last week I learned that Mars doesn’t have tectonic plates.  No movement to create continents, no mountains or Marsquakes. It sounds stable, but less interesting than Earth, with all its faults.  In this pendant I filled the “fault lines” between pieces of slate with iridized black glass and recycled purple glass to highlight the beauty of the spaces in-between. It looks better in the shifting light of the sun, but the photo will have to suffice here.