OMG DIY MFA N CRAFT!!!!!!

Welcome to the documentation of my continuing ongoing never ending education.

For the last 10 years I have really, more than anything, wanted to go back to school. Or is it just that in all my spare time I do things that are school-like. When others see what what I am reading, alot of the time I don't think they know what to do with the fact that I'm reading about spinning wheel construction or reading about craft theory. (whatever, thats what I do!) I also feel like I need to spend the time to fully develop my stand and body of work that makes sense of where Ive moved from photography to a more interdisciplinary form (including philosophy). (i.e. make that portfolio of work, work out the problems and ideas Ive got about craft and art and making.)

I hope to do this here. My new project.

Projects are the way that I make sense of the world. When I come upon something interesting, beautiful, complicated, my mind goes immediately to how that idea can be expressed in materiality or a process that could translate it into a more immediate experience. Having a "project" to do gives form to the many things that I am drawn to and have to consequently learn everything about.

Once upon a time I went to art school. (sort of - I graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a BA in Art.) Photography was my concentration, with healthy side dishes of Semiotics and Art Theory.

ART. NERD.

I experienced what Ive heard and read has been a common experience of others who were in art school in the early 90's - that the more I studied the world of signs n symbols and relating it to my artwork the less I feel bodily connected to the work. My photographs became increasingly more conceptual, even though the first attraction to the discipline was the craft of working in the darkroom and the working of the material and light. I felt more and more connected to the ideas and less to the photographs - to the point that I froze and ceased to generate new images of my own and embracing the cut n mix of appropriation in my work.

After college, I deposited myself right into the working world, hoping to find the reality and grit of daily life (modeled after tragic characters from Jean Rhys) Photography became a sort of thing that I could do easily commercially, and went from having day jobs and doing my "real artwork" at night to working in darkrooms and doing fine printing for other photographers and still doing my "real artwork" at night. Not that much more connected to the work - still working in the world of ideas. I was never quite able to wrap my head around my growing archives - the chasm between the ideas and concepts I would try to execute and then the actual process of how I used photography - which was instinctual, in the moment, responding completely to situations as they were and little manipulation of reality.

After the cancer days, photography felt like a betrayal. I stopped working in the darkroom and suddenly realized that was actually what I loved most in the practice of photography - the process by hand of printing. I suddenly felt that I needed to make a meaningful legacy, even if it was just hats I knitted for my newborn nephews. The hats felt more real, more lasting, more of an expression of life than any artwork I had ever done previous.

Something about Craft (and the timing of the start of our Los Angeles chapter of the Church of Craft) and seeing time expressed by thread (magic of every object knitted or sewn I could recall the time, the feeling of making the piece, the places I knitted on it) was intensely therapeutic while I was going through treatment. Not only was it healing for my mind to contemplate these pieces and the time that I was giving indirectly to the recipient of the thing I was making, but the joy of doing this work with others (as opposed to working in solitude and trying to achieve the making of something completely distinct from other artists) was something very real and amazing to experience. I started to teach knitting and sewing classes around Echo Park and Silverlake, and fell in love with the craft community that started to grow there...

I ran from Art to find refuge in Craft.

Craft saved my sanity and my life with its thread, its fabric to touch, to count, the giving of oneself into a project.

I believe that CRAFT can help ART become the exhuberent expression of being alive and community that they both embody.

DIY because there is never a reason not to. I grew up making zines, making bands, making a culture of ones own - Punk Rock made it possible to envision a life that you could create with your own hands. We didnt need outside validation to be our own real thing. . I almost feel the same way about going back to school - more on that topic later.

Whether or not I end up back in school or not doesn't really matter. More than anything its a framework with which to think about all these things, and make sense of craft.

D-I-Y M-O-F-A-R-T-S-N-C-R-A-F-T-S !!!!!