Photo transfers of Civil War Soldiers onto decaying stumps. Inspired by the grave-like stumps found in the Arb.
Michigan Piece 1
Michigan Piece 2
Growth: a Parallel between fetal and root developmental stages,
Interests in the Nature:
- the feeling of fresh air taken into my lungs
- being able to close my eyes and imagine that this world was created for no such things as buildings, politics, media, hunger, poverty, etc, to exist. They are gone for the moment, that temporary moment of urban silence, that is then filled with nature’s beautiful voice
- leaves rustling
- birds chirping, flapping their wings
- water running, trickling over rocks
- the smell of dirt and moisture, especially after a rain when it fills the air
- wind bowling through a field makes me want to dance around in circles
- being greeted by the most unexpected of friends; chipmunks, deer, squirrels, a small bird
- even though the ground is made of dirt, nothing feels dirty. I actually feel the cleanest outdoors, fresh and alive
- the feeling of different plants, leaves. Some are soft, furry, others hard and crunchy, bumpy, some smooth, some retain warmth while others are slick and chilled. Its hard to think of trying to recreate these feelings out of synthetic materials
- the colors of fall, I want to paint them. At all time they are bright and vibrant, even in the rain. I like to close my eyes on a sunny day looking up at the sky so I can see a deep blur of red from the blood that is circulating in my eyelids. Its so vibrant just like the leaves can be
- I like trying to fabricate it natural objects out of other materials. But I like putting a very natural look to them, tarnishing them a little, as if they had spent some actual time outside.
- Its secrets, you never know what you’ll find, what hidden surprises are right under your feet
- Its age, a tree can live hundreds of years
Events/Experiences:
-Driving Up North to Little Traverse lake is one of my favorite drives I used to take many times as a child to stay with a good family friend on the lake. Autumn was the best for driving. As I stare out the window a mix of orange, red, yellow and brown fill the glass panel. How do I capture that, reach out and grab it? Or frame it in a still? I feel this is only something my mind can do. Once we arrive, I love nothing more than stepping out of the car to kick up the leaves from under my feet to watch them fall again. The ground is blanketed with leaves, no pavement in sight. There is always a smell of burning leaves in the air too, its comforting and warm. It fills me with life when I breathe in deeply.
Even the winter had an amazing drive. Nothing but a white blanket with green pines peaking out from underneath as we drive through a “winter wonderland.” It can feel like we are the only humans on this earth, everything else is silent and the only voice heard is the hallowing of the wind. I miss putting on snow shoes and flopping around through the two feet worth of snow across the lake. I hate being cold, but I always forget that I do when I see how beautiful the frozen lake looks. At night the stars are so bright that they light up the snow with a glowing blue, making it easy to see right across the lake. I hate that living in suburbia we cannot see the stars like this. Instead we have to rely so much on electric lights to guide us places since the buildings height and polluted air covers the natural light we were given. Apparently it wasn’t enough for people.
-July in the North Carolina Mountains. Every year we take a trip to some place in the Smokey Mountains, usually off the Blue Ridge Parkway, like Blowing Rock. We hike all day and wander around the small town at night. I love the feeling of escaping. There aren’t many lights on once its late making the stars incredible. We’ve stayed in this one specific wooden cabin multiple times just outside of town, up a large hill. Its great just walking out on the balcony and seeing nothing underneath but a large drop covered in vegetation and pines that stretch back up and over the mountain peaks for miles and miles. When it’s slightly foggy it’s the best. The tops of the mountains peak out over the misty clouds that hide their massive bodies. It is hot in the mid-day sun and sweatshirt weather at night, just the way I like it.
Hiking through the trials and climbing the peaks touches another part in me. It’s the physical strength I exert to reach the top destination that excites me. I work my way all the way up, step after step, feeling heavy and drained, occasionally getting scratched by a branch or tripping on a slippery but once at the top, I get my own shot of nature’s caffeine when I see the beauty surrounding me. Its what makes life worth living at that moment. Accomplishment, I worked hard to get there and I am rewarded.
-Another great memory was from last summer (2009) while driving through the parkway we stayed on this one homestead, ranch-style hotel. There was nothing but a large pond and then great plains behind it for a couple miles and then the mountains. I hiked for a couple hours with my sister, we drove about twenty minutes away first, all the way back to view our place of stay from the planes. It was incredible, we felt like we were on top of the world, standing there looking back where our mother was sitting in a rocking chair, appearing as small as an ant. The wind was blowing our hair back and the sun was just about to start on its way down for the afternoon sunset. I want to be standing there right now…
Later that evening, my mother and I walked around the pond as far as we were allowed before coming across a “beware of bears in woods” sign in front of us. Up until that point it had been mostly field in front of us. The sun was almost set at this point and the flyer flies were lighting us all around us like magic. I began to dance ballet (something I used practice growing up) and felt so graceful in that very moment. I felt like we experiencing something people only read about in books, something so fantasy-like that I couldn’t grasp what was really happening around me.
I love that about nature… its ability to seem so unreal at times. It makes me question reality. Is this world of school, meetings, errands and work the only reality? Is nature no longer part of that? Have we separated ourselves from it so much that we have recreated the definition of reality? Or is nature still the true reality and we are just living someone’s fantasy of chaos? Why can’t nature be my reality all the time? Or would it lose its greatness if that were the case? Would I lose my appreciation for it? I find it hard to believe I would since I can spend a month in a foreign country (Madagascar), sleeping in a tent and still cry on my way back home to my current “real world.”
- My childhood back yard; wooded land full of black berries, birds, acorns, jack-in-the-pulpits, and chipmunks. There was a nature trail that we could walk through, with sub trails that split off of that. There was one specifically that I used to travel down with my two boy neighbors and brother, and far off into the trail (or well the trail was more like a barely recognizable path at this point) there was a set of fallen over and cracked trees, probably from lightening striking down, but to us I it was an old Native American hut, abandoned years ago. I was the new Native Princess and my brother the evil settler coming to claim our land. Rocks and small bark pieces were our tokens of exchange and blackberry stew was my remedy for my Indian warrior neighbor when hurt from battle. These woods were our playground. Even though I had a small swing set directly on the line between my lawn and the woods, the red slide only help our attention for so long until we disappeared down the trails while my mother wasn’t looking. She had to get a cowbell to ring just to get us to come home for dinner ever night. I miss this place of fantasy and make-believe. Thinking about these woods again, makes me question reality.
Interests in the Environment:
- children’s lose of playing outside, and the detrimental health effects it leads to in child development
- climate change, the change in weather due to global warming and the disastrous affects it has provoked.
- pollution: our inabilities to recycle, even when we have the choice to… for some reason it becomes a choir. Why?
- Localization and eating fresh. I’ve definitely cut back, but stil l need to improve, on the amount of packaged food I buy. The produce station has become a new harbor and eating fresh is something I find extremely important for the health of us as humans and the environment. I like to know where my food comes from and what’s in it. Changing my diet to follow this has even made me feel better physically! I have more energy and feel fit and healthy, where as before eating processed goods would play with my blood sugar too much or make me feel heavy and drowsy. I tell myself, “hello, there must be some natural connection to the environment and agriculture in that! Nature is subconsciously saying something to us if we feel that much better after eating right.”
- urbanization and habitat removal. When my dad’s house was built at age 8, we were one house of a small subdivision surrounded by large fields that I used to hunt snakes and collect rocks in (yes, I still have my rock collection under my bed at home). It’s where I learned to dirt bike. It’s where I had my very own tree house (more like three large wood planks nailed unsafely to the tree with four large studs as my means of reaching it). There were marshes and a large swamp that I would catch frogs in, and leave my window open at night to hear the bullfrogs. Its where I found my pet snapping turtle that I raised in my room for 6 years until my dad thought it was too bug and would bite my finger off (I know now that you shouldn’t just remove animals from their habitat, but as a child I wasn’t aware of its affects.) I watched this turtle grow over the years as I feed it guppies from the pet store, who’s little heads it would rip off with its claw and eat the rest of their translucent bodies. I watched deer frolic around and bunnies peep up in and out of the grassy fields that were taller than me by the end of each summer. Across the main road at the mile-long entrance of our sub was my elementary school friend’s grandmother’s house, who had a barn and horses that we would ride through the fields and woods in behind the barn. But that old house, mansion, plantation-like house, caught fire one night. The barn has been remodeled to hold golf carts and where there was once a house is now a country club and those fields are now green turf. Chauncey Billups now lives in the gated community of the golf course, and Eminem had a house about a mile away. Besides Sherwood Forest (a Christmas/gardening store), then next place to purchase anything was about a 20-minute drive. Now it’s just a 10-minute bike ride from my house and I’m at Kroger in the strip plaza. My once small sub is now giant and one of the most popular in my city. There is only one small strip of field left, lucky directly behind my house (once you cross the basketball courts and parking lot to the pool they put in), but its kept cut short at all times throughout the year. The deer and snakes have disappeared and I constantly find turtles smashed on the pavement from cars hitting them. What has happened here? My dad and I sit and wonder sometimes about how incredible fast the area we live in was built up from nothing to the definition of suburbia in just a matter of a couple of years. How did this all happen so fast, right under our noses! No one asked us if we wanted this. I don’t care for the tanning salon, the Bank of America, the family portrait studio, or the blockbuster, or even the Kroger to be at such a short distant convenience. I want my play ground back. I want to see the animals that surrounded me constantly to come back to say hello. I want my childhood lifestyle to return. If urbanization can happen so rapidly here, where else is it happening like this in Michigan, in this Nation, in the world?! Its too fast that we are booting out the animals for our own 5-minute drives of convenience. I hate that word now… convenience; it’s just another way to say “hi, I’m a lazy American. I’d rather look at the back of a brick building from window instead of a marsh just so I can get my coffee on time in the morning,” (literally, part of my sub now back up to the back of the shopping center. How pissed would you be living there and then they put that up!). Well if there is anything I’ve learned, and although I know I guilty have sub come to it here and there, convenience to humans, is a complete and utter inconvenience to nature. We are the most disrespecting creatures on this plant and I need to see it change. I need to make a bigger impact myself, and I need to show other’s they can do the same.
- Biology; I love learning what things are made of, how they are formed. I like sticking things under a microscope because I see the cell formations as art
- Ecology; growing up near the Clinton River and having spent so much time in it, I find wetland ecology extremely interesting. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to take a class in it yet but am dying to do so.
epresent our birth months. I also looked at different Michigan nuts. One of my favorite pieces that I've made so far is this walnut shaped locket that holds a jingle bell inside. I thought about the idea of continuing with this locket theme for the women, creating the outer shell out of metal, and placing the actual inner part of the nut on the inside. Even mixing the nuts up... where each women has a specific outer shell and her daughter holds the real inner nut of her shell inside her own outer shell. For example, My grandmother would have a walnut locket, my mo
ther would have a chestnut locket, but hold the inner walnut inside. Thus, my sister and I would have a different outer-shell nut, with the actually chestnut held inside from our mother. These are just some ideas... but I like the idea of having something open and close with a surprise on the inside, and I like the idea of connection through the pieces.Ana Mendieta has been a large inspiration in my mixed media and installation work over the past year. She is widely known for her performance-based art and photographic documentation of using the body figuratively to create outlines or imprints, but is also seen using it as a material to be deformed or manipulated. I am captivated by her ability to use the body as an investigation in order to formulate her work: a way to discover cultural and self-identity. When researching their life, it is clear that past life experiences have influenced her use of the body as a medium/tool in her work.
Mendieta was born November 18, 1948 in Havana, Cuba. At the age of thirteen, she and her older sister were exiled from Cuba under Operation Pedro Pan for her family’s opposition to the Castro regime. She studied a wide range of conceptual and performance based art practices while earning her BA at the University of Iowa from 1964-1969. Afterwards, she proceeded to earn a MA in Painting and an MFA in Intermedia (a new art form at occurring in the 1960s, which consisted of inter-disciplinary activities that occur between different genres). Throughout the next fifteen or so years, Mendieta produced work throughout the United States, Cuba, Mexico, and Italy, that investigated issues of feminism, gender and cultural identity in a manner that put her work into its own category, “earth-body art,” as she consistently mixed together the two popular 1970’s movements of “earth art” and “body art.” At the age of 
thirty-six, she died from a tragic fall from a 34th-floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York.
Mendieta used her body as her focus in her work. Her body became both her subject and her material as she used herself in a series of explorations of the issues mentioned above. Documented through film and photography, her performances often involved her naked body intermingling with the earth, such as her most notable, the Silueta Series.
The Silueta Series involved Mendieta imposing her body onto the earth as she either extracted her silhouette from the sand that she then filled with blood, molded it out of mud, outlined it in seaweed, or even completely covered herself from head to toe in dirt and mud to blend into the bark of a tree. These silhouettes exhibited her interest in ancient cultures as she intersected them with the theme of gender and cultural identity.
She was also extremely well known for her works that involved transformation of her body as she reconstructed herself either into someone else to play with the idea of gender transformation, or into something else as she tested the limits of her body by pressing, constraining, molding, or cutting different areas of herself. Many of these tests were reflected in the deformation of her face or other body parts, causing her to become virtually unidentifiable. These pieces are her most striking to me. I am fascinated by the way she can test the limits of her body, physically and mentally. I like the idea of molding the body, seeing through documentation the ways it can be transform
ed and manipulated. I find 
myself wanting to somehow do the same to my body in my own work, thus coming up with the idea to have some possibility harm and constraint. I like that she takes her mental pain and presents it to the viewer through a physical manner, adding a new level of depth.
One of her strongest pieces reflecting the loss of identity was her Untitled piece, also known as Body Tracks, which involved her standing face to face with a white sheet that hangs against a 
wall. Her arms were raised above her head and stained in blood. She pressed them against the sheet and then silently slid down into her knees dragging her stained hands and arms along, leaving markings of her blood that reach all the way from the starting point to the floor. I’ve drawn much inspiration from this piece in my own previous work that also dealt with identity loss. What I found most interesting about the piece was not the final outcome, the stain left on the wall, but the process in which it got there. The way that she used herself as the tool to expel paint against the wall in a means of self-discovery, almost a manner of meditation, was inspiration for me to look at my situation from a new perspective and find answers to my own questions throughout the process of creation. It is this act of discovering that I am hoping to encounter again through my I.P. project. I also enjoyed how her performance raised so many questions from the viewers. It is the silence in the space that she performs this act that makes it so powerful. The silent abstraction being created speaks loud enough. It makes the viewer ask questions, like “Why?” “What does that mean?” and “How do I relate?” Some may have felt they could identify because they have gone through those same life experiences, while others
who haven’t are at least motioned to recognize that these situation exist. I hope to draw the same reactions from my viewers.
It is obvious that Mendieta’s work was much influenced by both her exile as a young girl, along with the issues of femininity and gender identity that were of popular interest in society at the time. In writing about her Silueta Series, she expressed that she had been “carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence.” Before her death in 1985, Mendieta was awarded the Prix de Rome and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which are two highly esteemed awards. She had undoubtedly left a great impact on the art world, as we see artist today continue to reenact and draw inspiration from her work, myself as one of them.
