Three Generational Experiment

I'm home now a week after a residency week at the Sou'wester Lodge in Seaview, Washington for their Arts Week.

My proposal was to utilize the cabin bay attached to our lodging to create a blank canvas for my children to play in. I brought along paints, and home made salted play dough, fabric, a sewing machine, a metal detector, and instruments to play. My son got a new polaroid camera for Christmas, so I bought him a few new film cartridges.

I also endeavored to cook some recipes from our Warwick Family cookbook, one that I had not been through much before this proposal.  I have been working on a family cookbook as a legacy for my children, so it's been important to include some familial history.  To that end, we included my mother in our journey as a third generation, personally connected more to each prior author of recipes.

As we sit at home now I am thankful not for our quarantine, but for the planning for many more projects than we were ever able to accomplish.

We learned to do a rudimentary stitch while watching Alexander Calder's Circus

And painted together on a new easel made from a standard cheap one without the extended pieces and a spice rack for water holder

Over the last few years I have taken time to try and discover a thread in my life as a conduit for my work, seeking to know how biographical changes can affect my material choices and point of view

A major ingredient of this latest exploration has been to include food, and to see its relationship to my work from nearly the beginning

My senior thesis was a party catered with food that I chose, candies from local shops, and each opening since has had me the hosting disparate people, sharing food of interest to me at the time, and now I see the focus turning to gatherings, the sharing of a table, and the vanitas setting of the aftermath.  As part of our open studio visitation we made an orange-infused cotton candy with a chocolate and espresso double pavlova

The vanitas scene drew me for its focus on mortality, the end of a celebration exemplified in the leftovers.  Parenthood has amplified my awareness and inner turmoil around death, so exploring the vanitas in photography is most of interest to me