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Marge Piercy, “When a Friend Dies.” The Moon Is Always Female

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making art is just like showering………can’t get up and do it, can’t stop when you’ve started. you want to crawl out of your skin if you don’t do it often enough. everything in the world is the exact same

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in the space between myth and memory, i will meet you there by me. a series of quilted and embroidered panels exploring childhood grief, folk art, and domestic craft for one of my studio courses. i was inspired by my polish/scottish canadian grandmother's and her mother's domestic textiles from the early to mid 20th century. made from an assortment of fabric scraps, quilt batting, thread, and plastic buttons. the five panels can fold into a book or unfold into a long hanging wall pennant as they are all connected by two lines of vertical stitching.

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honestly i dont need therapy i need a machine to go into my body and manually stretch all my muscles and crack all my joints and then i need the machine to go into my brain and deep clean it with soapy hot water

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Fall paintings

I'm trying to paint every weekend but i might switch to winter paintings now.

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What Resembles the Grave but Isn’t

by Anne Boyer

Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually; sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!”

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Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

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Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. August 1922 featured in “Diaries,”

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Barnard Bulletin, New York, November 22, 1938

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I’m about to finish my second reading of Our Wives Under the Sea and my god, I love this book so much. The way that the first line is “the deep sea is a haunted house” and the way that the book ends with them in what’s, essentially, a haunted house. The way that the plot builds and builds to “every horror movie ends the way you know it will,” and the fact that the ending begins with “so here’s what happens, obviously”. The way that that not a single word in the entire book was wasted

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sincere apologies to anyone trying to interact with me about anything other than what that gay angel and demon have going on

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Let's be honest, reading books and buying books are two completely different hobbies.

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Grief gives no fucks about linear time or capitalist notions of productivity, corporate wellness or respectability and for that we admire her. It comes when we lose something, when we miss each other, when we lack or yearn for connection. Grief recognises that something is missing, be it a person, an animal, an object, a relationship, a friendship, an experience, a desire. We can grieve things that never have been and we can grieve things that haven’t happened yet or might never happen. We can grieve parts of ourselves. Acknowledging the absence of something we need is healthy. The fact that we have no space to do so is not.

Aisha Mirza

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little sketchbook scraps

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An important part of making art is just not doing anything. Just letting weird stuff percolate. Absorbing more or less useless information and then pinning it onto a cork board like a terrible alcoholic detective but with no thread, just things pinned to other things and most of the things are just two word phrases like ANCIENT CRAB and DIRT LABYRINTH and MEAT CASTLE that don’t mean anything. Just moving through the world, making nothing, eating bread, having prophetic dreams and letting insane thoughts build up and up and up until they can finally crystallize into something that exists outside of your body and you can enter a blissfully thought free phase of your life where you just get to glue small objects to other small objects for 18 hours straight 

Unfortunately the other part of making art is actually making it