Reflections of this week...

I have been pushed very far out of my comfort zone this week. It has been fun.

The gallery walk i really enjoyed doing the deep looking. Finding a piece of artwork that resinated with me was easy in most of the rooms. I had one or two that reminded me of a place I had been or thought of. Even in the Asian art room made me reflect to a class that I took about culture. I absolutely love the quilts in the main gallery. My goal last year was to create a quilt every month... didn't quite succeed but 10 was good.Quilts to me have very deep meaning. They are not easy to create and take a lot of work. Quilts convey meaning love and so much more. I have found when quilting its much easier for me to do so when its for someone else then when its for myself. I can create these panels that create meaning for others and I love it. So the quilts there reflected so much more then just their image to me. They reflected a place, a time, a question.

Starting with making of miniatures I really enjoy the process of creating the elements. I have seen large miniature scales of things and always wondered how they did the work and what processes they used. I liked how David is able to capture these places in his work and create the feeling of a real place. I could understand davids miniatures much better then the other things we have done this week because to me it was concrete. There was an image he was trying to recreate and feeling that he wanted us to get out of his images that I could understand.

Working with the Quink was very difficult for me. I haven't had much experience working with pain brushes and then being asked to try to create something with this ink form that you really have very little control of was hard. I enjoyed practicing and playing with it but struggle with letting go of control. I attempted to draw a place that I had been in the mountains last week. But I had to let the ink do what it wanted... the place turned out very different then what I wanted. I work in a concrete work and in science you have to be in control of where your experiment is going. In my classroom I could not lose control of the kids because bad things would happen... so having to work with a substance that MAKES you have little control was interesting. I enjoyed seeing the forms that i was able to create, and able to coax images out of very little. The process reminded me much of a lab that I have done with my students for years. The separation of pigments in color due to their affinity for a substance. This process is called chromatography. Every pigment has a different amount that it likes to travel with another substance. for example Sharpie markers are fun to separate out with acetone. and Vis-a-vis markers you sue water. if you try the reverse it wont happen... its great the do with kids. Anyway the whole Quink process made me reflect back to that specific lab and want to test it on different paper and substances to find is Rf value. (science brain sorry!)

Working with Ashley and viewing her work is a struggle for me. I don't get the idea behind a piece of sculpture until she showed us and explained the thoughts behind her work. The place she was coming from then I could understand the sculptures that she had created. Be the end of her presentations I was beginning to have a since of her art work. I enjoy being pushed past what i am comfortable in and trying new things so working in 3D is interesting to me and makes me look at things differently.

With Callie this week I have had a blast writing. There isn't much reason for me to write for myself lately and it was nice to be asked to. The free writing is something that i learned to do in High School and used much of it in college. I really enjoyed going back to that mental place and writing like that again. The bubble note writing for me was very restricted.I ended up using very scientific terms to describe the mountains. I found it interesting looking at the two pieces. the first free writing was very descriptive and poetic, however the bubbles where very restricted and scientific.

Writing the Haiku in the mountains was fun. Having the think and put it down quickly and not worry about where the poem is going or how it will look was liberating. Where writing similes where like watching ink pigment spread in chromatography... at first its all wanting to stay together and then suddenly the pigments spread apart and there is color.

Overall this talk of place has made me really reflect on the type of students that I teach and where I come from. My students have all been trouble makers in one way or another. Many of them the reason is because they don't have a sense of place. They don't feel like they belong at home, so they join a gang, get in trouble and land at our treatment facility. We focus a lot of time with them on how to create relationships with people and places. For some its a success and some it is a failure.  I feel like the idea of place can be so many things and really enjoyed our discussion yesterday after noon of how you could incorporate the essential questions we came up with in our classroom.