Swimming with the Stone Fish

After my adventure to the lake last weekend I’ve had fish and fossils floating through my mind. I felt inspired to take out my extensive collection of all things rock: geodes, crinoids, fossils and other random stone treasures. I had a very nice time sorting my collection, since that brings a sense of order to my mind and my work. It’s something like spring housecleaning, except that you don’t need to discover all the places your boys marked up the walls or left scraps of food someplace out of sight. The natural result of such an endeavor was that I decided to launch into a weaving that included various fossils and crinoids. My new Stone Fish piece is taking shape! As I sorted my crinoids based on size I really enjoyed the spectrum of colors. There’s a lot of geology happening in southern Indiana, whether you notice it or not. When it’s all laid out in front of you the range of red, brown and sand tones on the rocks is amazing. It’s kind of like people or flowers I suppose. You can start with the same basic design, but depending on much light they get, and how much rain falls on them, and who their neighbors are, you can see a lot of variation. Anyway, in my world of deciding on composition for a weaving, contrast and comparison took center stage. I pulled out my boxes of yarns in complementing colors for the project. Out came my light brown and sand tones, then my earthy greens and oranges. The stone and the yarn make the ultimate contrast: the old and the new, the inorganic and the organic, and the hard and the soft. To my husband the fisherman, one is more like a sinker and the other more of a dry fly.

With the materials and composition ideas in mind, the weaving process itself is also very Zen-like. The colors flow as they undulate into the background, very much like the layers of soil and rock in the surrounding hills. The crinoids line the layers, but now they’re wired into place instead of being deposited in an organic sea millions of years ago. Cozying up to the yarn probably reminds them of their organic origins long ago. It’s amazing what bubbles up from your subconscious as you weave! To create the stone fish I pulled out some fern fossils that Rudy Turner, a microscopist at Indiana University gave me. The fossil patterns, set on their side, look a lot like a fish skeleton set into a flesh of sandstone. I like that feature for creating the body. I’m still looking for the perfect fish head, though. I spent an hour or so yesterday scouring the Jackson Creek bed for a perfect fossil but I’m afraid I came up empty. The boys chased water striders, minnows and crayfish through the shallows, while avoiding the leeches and garter snake they came across, so it was a good day overall. For the fitting end to the day, my husband carried out my morning wish to have a fish dinner. He brought two frozen Mahi Mahi chunks back to life with a marinade of ginger and balsamic vinegar, plus a little garlic and honey. Very tasty! Thank goodness not every fish is destined to be a fossil.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Thoughts of warmer weather…

We’re back in the icebox in southern Indiana after a nice warm-up last week. While my frozen toes understand reality, my mind is off in warmer places. I finished my seashell piece, but with a twist that took even me by surprise. I had very carefully laid out a pattern for the large shells, designed to create clear movement as you visually took in the piece. Then my inner child quickly surveyed the piece and clearly demanded: MORE SHELLS! I watched as she grabbed a handful from my ‘shells with holes’ bag and proceeded to dump them on the piece. I gave her a healthy snack to settle her down a little, and while she was eating I arranged the shells a little. I loved the idea of having a little chaos in the front, and yet if you look carefully you can still see the underlying pattern and flow. Now there’s a metaphor for my life with kids! Or maybe the feel of the piece just captures that little depression in the beach you find where all the shells collect at low tide. There’s usually a cute little beat-up seastar that didn’t handle the surf well. That’s the metaphor for my husband.

A lot of other new or commissioned art is also coming together in my studio, and some of it will unexpectedly be on display around town this month. I got word from Jean Kautt at Bloomingfoods (she organizes the Blooming Arts Series) that the February artist had a family emergency and couldn’t hang a show. I have a few new birch pieces (birches, beaches—I’ve got to branch out), plus a few ‘previously shown’ pieces that I’ll hang at both Bloomingfoods locations. The show will be called “Thoughts of Warmer Weather: Water and Sunshine”. The east side store will feature ‘Water’ and the west side will be ‘Sunshine’ in case you’re wondering. I won’t show my new ‘Home Grown Tomatoes’ commission piece, but after adding the last little cluster of tomatoes it looks warm, happy and yummy. This weekend I’ll complete the attaching and call it done. I’ll also be at Wonderlab this Friday as part of their “The Science of Color Series”, doing a kid- and adult-friendly community art project. We’re going to build a large Eastern Tiger Swallowtail mosaic out of wine corks that volunteers have been painting for the project. Stop on by and share in the fun!

Finishing pieces also means new beginnings, and at the moment I’m struggling to decide which piece to launch into next. I have several ideas swirling around in my head, and basically I’ll just wait to see what the weather is like Monday to decide which color palate I need to work with. The first piece will present a chameleon, sitting on a fernlike compound leaf. The second will feature a sand crab on a beach pocked with crab holes. Keeping the sand out of their living room carpets must be quite a task—I’m sure there’s a great market for rugged sand crab vacuum cleaners. The third piece hits a little closer to home, to be called something like ‘The Transplant’. It will show a section of earth with a freshly dug hole, ready to receive a geranium with a severely overgrown root ball. If you’ve ever bought a flower that’s spent a little too much time at the greenhouse with abundant light and fertilizer you know what I mean. It’s going to be a little painful (for everyone involved) to break up the root ball and get started in a new environment, but you know it’s both necessary and the right thing to do. I think about my own transplantations that way, whether it was my move from Ontario to Bloomington, or whether it was my move from world of science into the art community. I owe a lot to the gardeners along the way, and I know that with a little light, water and fertile ground, anyone can blossom!

Until next week…