30 June 2014

Future Library




Katie Paterson’s century-long Future Library art project contemplates the full scale of the publishing process.

"It will be 100 years before the trees are cut down to provide the paper for an anthology of books—a Future Library for the city of Oslo—read for the first time in 2114 … Every year from 2014 to 2114, a writer will be commissioned to contribute a new text to a growing collection of unpublished, unread manuscripts held in trust in a specially designed room in the new Deichmanske Public Library in Bjørvika until their publication in 2114."

Katrien De Blauwer
"Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”

― Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

28 June 2014

Saturday Poem

“Confessor. Mother. Father. Ghost. The who
you talk to when you are talking to yourself.
The ocean is one version. Gray green in
sawtooth pearls
all it meets it swallows.” 
 
El Dorado by Peter Campion,

27 June 2014


Enjoy your weekend!
Try not to get tangled in worries. It’s ok to move without knowing quite where you’re going.

(gif found here)



Ceramic diamonds by Michelle Quan.

(Found via The Jealous Curator)

26 June 2014

Ukemi, The Art of Receiving


"In my daydreams, the kindergartener is all grown now, and she has a man or a woman she loves, and the two of them have gone on dates to the pool―my daughter’s backstroke is amazing; the lifeguards make comments about it―and to the local Sonic for cheeseburgers. In the afternoons, between class sessions, she and her boyfriend or girlfriend will tell each other their histories while their roommates are out on errands for birth control. They’ll gossip about mutual friends and they’ll compare notes about the sports they played and how strange their parents’ behaviors are. My daughter’s love interest at college or culinary school will ask her about the photo I’ve sent with her, the one where she’s receiving her orange belt from Master Ochiai and looking into the space above the camera.

“What’s that from?”

“I took karate when I was little,” she’ll say. And this is where I hope she’ll continue with “And I stayed with it through high school. I’m a shodan black belt.”

And her significant other will say, “Show me,” and they’ll clear a space in the middle of the dorm room’s floor, kicking over bean bags and Calculus books. They will bow to each other and spar playfully there on the third floor of an expensive room-and-board dormitory, where my daughter will land her friend into a scarf choke on the area rug and will feel the tap-tap-tap of a hand, a matte, a signal to let up. And my daughter will smile because she will feel safe and equal to this person in her life. She will know full well how to cut off circulation to carotids and jugulars, but, more importantly, she’ll know when to release."

From Ukemi, The Art of Receiving By for The Rumpus.
Click HERE to read the piece in full. It's brilliant.

(Image by Estevan Guzman.)
"Don't make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don't make stuff because you want to be famous - because you will never feel famous enough. make gifts for people - and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts."

-- John Green

24 June 2014

23 June 2014

"...Patricia White just got back from a hip replacement, which she insists came from her long ago days as a dancer, and not from yoga. On Wednesday mornings, she steps into the room on a cane, a striking image in a yoga studio. Who do we put at the front of the room? An older woman walking on a cane. In her class I am beginning to feel tiny openings in the hip flexors and around the collarbones that I’ve never felt before. I can follow this network of fissures and they lead me to new places where I can say yes. It’s like the life you share with your best friends. As they tell you the story of the past weekend, even though the circumstances are new so much of the telling is familiar, you’ve been hearing variations on this story for thirty years. Those small variations are at the heart of what friendship is. How to love these small differences? What Patricia is teaching me is how to get in touch with and love the small changes...."


Hierarchy of Needs by Wendy MacNaughton

21 June 2014

Saturday Poem


The Light at Hinkson Creek
One final fall of sun slips past the ridge
behind my shoulder, coats the upper limbs
of a creek-side sycamore in gold too rich
for February, then settles on a stream
dead still, the clumps of foam scattered across
the water hung like fruit on mirrored trees.
The light seems somehow brighter brought to rest,
entangled in the far bank’s canopy—
the earthbound branches leafless, mottled gray
and silver-white, the rough bark’s loosening curls
inverted in immaculate relief,
and shimmering at my fingertips, so close
I have to reach for it, the twice-bent gleam
that passes in the swirl my reaching makes.

Bob Watts. Art: Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil.

20 June 2014

Peter Alexander






Resin Sculptures (that remind me of the sea) by Peter Alexander. www.peteralexander.com
"I think of why I left swimming, left Toronto, left Canada.
I know there are two sides, two lives, feel them acutely, not athlete and adult, but the life of the body and the life of the heart. 

I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational. About compromise, sacrifice and breakup. The heart can suffer more than a few not-quites, have poor timing. We are outtouched by others, can psych ourselves out, we lose, win, become our results, find our place and rank."

-- Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies

19 June 2014



Images of evening swimmers on the beach in nice by me from forever ago.

17 June 2014

“Stories can feel like some shiny thing on the ground … You keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry.”

-- An interview with Rivka Galchen at The Paris Review.

The Earth Underwater



Lapis Lazuli Moonscape ring and necklace from the Laura Lee Blue Moon collection..

Image by Damion Berger
Found here via koerperlich

16 June 2014

"Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins, the require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred."

-- Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies

Ryan McGinley | Olympic Swimmers






Ryan McGinley | Olympic Swimmers

14 June 2014

Saturday Poem


   All night the storm had raged,   nor ceased, nor paused,
          When, as day broke, the Maid, through misty air,
          Espies far off a Wreck, amid the surf,                    
          Beating on one of those disastrous isles—
          Half of a Vessel, half—no more; the rest
          Had vanished, swallowed up with all that there
          Had for the common safety striven in vain,
          Or thither thronged for refuge. With quick glance
          Daughter and Sire through optic-glass discern,
          Clinging about the remnant of this Ship,
          Creatures—how precious in the Maiden's sight!
          For whom, belike, the old Man grieves still more
          Than for their fellow-sufferers engulfed                
          Where every parting agony is hushed,
          And hope and fear mix not in further strife.
          "But courage, Father! let us out to sea—
          A few may yet be saved." The Daughter's words,
          Her earnest tone, and look beaming with faith,
          Dispel the Father's doubts: nor do they lack
          The noble-minded Mother's helping hand
          To launch the boat; and with her blessing cheered,
          And inwardly sustained by silent prayer,
          Together they put forth, Father and Child!                
          Each grasps an oar, and struggling on they go—
          Rivals in effort; and, alike intent
          Here to elude and there surmount, they watch
          The billows lengthening, mutually crossed
          And shattered, and re-gathering their might;
          As if the tumult, by the Almighty's will
          Were, in the conscious sea, roused and prolonged
          That woman's fortitude—so tried, so proved—
          May brighten more and more!

--  William Wordsworth

13 June 2014


Have a wonderful weekend.
I'm going window shopping; galleries, markets and junk shops.

Renate Hiller

'The use of the hands is vital for the human being, for having flexibility, dexterity. In a way the entire human being is in the hands. Our destiny is in the hands."

image found here

12 June 2014

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky. 

-- Virginia Woolf

10 June 2014


Fairfield Porter, July Interior, 1964

(found via aubreylstallard)

“I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.”


― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

7 June 2014

Saturday Poem

You think you’re always thinking,
but try to form a sentence
while you’re driving. A fence.
A pylon. A form of blinking,

like a quasi-town that won’t so much
as marry a Dairy Queen
and an El Rey Del Tacos. Lean
times times out of touch

equals areas where lives
depend more clearly on the wages
of atmospheric averages;
that’s how prayer survives.

Ange Mlinko, from “Wind Farm, Texas.”

6 June 2014


Have a lovely weekend x
“Fruits doesn't fall far from the tree but there seeds can go places
and wherever they go
by their virtues
they leave their traces”


― Indira Mukhopadhyay

Filippo Minelli








Silence // Shapes

Various locations, Europe. Starting 2009
Ongoing project

"The use of a violent tool silencing both visually and acoustically the scene in political demonstration and violent events decontextualized in natural landscapes to give silence a physical shape. 'Hidden manifest', or considering intangible beings of holy beliefs as existing presences in real life, is contemplated in most of religions: Orthodox, Islamic, Catholic, Jewish mysticism, 'Yin Xian' for Taoism, and also in great philosophies like Buddhism."

-- Filippo Minelli