Thanks so much for such a wonderful experience! I was inspired and impressed by everyone in this class. Just to hear you all talk about each persons art was such an education. I now look at art, especially transformative art, with a new appreciation and a new language. Art that used to confuse me or pass me by now holds a place of intrigue and respect in my life. I loved that all our installations were so unique and held such a wonderful array of experiences within them. Thank you all for your honest and very caring comments and encouragements during this class. I really enjoyed spending this time before my final project in your department. I hope to see you all again, whether through your art or another creative realm!

Cheers and Appreciations!

- Colleen

I have lived my art this week... I am a transformed, destroyed, and emerging new being as a result of this project. What an interesting week!! I went to Tilden on Sat. afternoon to collect some sticks to make the final pieces for the installation. Came home and spent a few hours putting them together before heading to bed. Little did I know that I would wake in the morning transformed. The sticks turned out to be old dead poison oak shoots. My face and arms were of another world. To make a long story short, I had to go to the emergency room twice in the following 3 days for medication and steriod shots. This is the first time that I have been even slightly able to do something productive this week, and even now I am heavily sedated with benedryl... What a project - I plaster myself, prepared to put myself on display and then end up transforming my actual body into a painful, horrible, swollen blister - whew... Will be interesting to process this when I get my head on straight... but for now, bed and dreams...

"Movement, change, light, growth & decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials & weather, the earth as my source. I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just the material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within & around it. When I leave it, these processes continue." - Andy Goldsworthy

Wow - it has been an amazing week of plastering! It is such a weird process to make myself and then put myself together. And each morning when I wake up, I see myself sitting on the table, a little more complete than the day before. Today, waking up, there I sat, completed - with an expression and gesture of awe and amazement in my position. When I walk through the room "I" am sitting in, I sometimes forget that it is just a plaster form. It sometimes startles me, sometimes makes me smile, sometimes gives me a lift, sometimes makes me proud. My roommates have had similar reactions - enjoying coming home from work each day to find a new part has been attached. Amazingly, they haven't even minded the mess the process made. In fact, one of my roommates said she was so glad that I did it at home so she could see the whole thing.

What a great metaphor for relationships!! It's amazing how much people just like to be involved in the process of growth - sometimes helping, sometimes just witnessing. They appreciate it and are inspired by it. There is no need to even be afraid of the mess it makes sometimes (of course I have really good roommates!) It's just been so nice to have the whole day to create and then to have my friends come home and enjoy the process with me!

As much time and detail it has taken (and it's been rather a lot of both) - it has been an amazing process. I am very interested now in the showing of myself to you all ... and then to the community. Kinda scary, kinda exciting, kinda wonderful!

BEFORE...(yes that is a tortilla bag)

DURING...
AFTER...don't be jealous..

Oh daylight rise! Atoms are dancing
Souls, lost in ecstasy, are dancing.
I'll whisper in your ear where the
dance will take you.
All atoms in the air, in the desert,
They are all like madmen, each atom,
happy or miserable,
Is Passionate for the sun
of which nothing can be said.

Rumi