Artist in Residence

When one has hearing loss, it is often difficult to discern the direction of the source of a sound, and whether it is coming from near or far. These are essential clues in helping to identify a particular sound. Due to these difficulties, I sometimes feel foolish when I hear something and make a remark about it that seems way off base, to my conversational partner. This is why I hesitated to say anything about a remarkable sound that I have been hearing every morning here at High Mowing, when walking past the gym on my way to breakfast. I wondered whether it was an owl, going, "Hoo! Hoo!" (On the other hand, perhaps it was Johnny One-Note practicing his flute, or a squeaky wheel on the air circulation fan of the gym.) Yesterday I screwed up my courage and asked my fellow student Jennifer whether this was, indeed, an owl. No, it is the call of the delightful mourning dove! Jennifer was able to point out one of these beautiful birds to me, as it stood calmly on the road, and she can even play its call on her pentatonic flute! I find the bird enchanting, and found this photo on Wikipedia. Jennifer kindly drove me to Keene yesterday, and I was quite excited to finally see the charming place that will be my home for the year.

One of the treats of this three-week summer intensive term has been my clay modeling class. We began our work together by modeling a perfect sphere. We passed our spheres from hand to hand to compare them, and then transformed them gradually, using pressure from our hands, into tetrahedrons (four surfaces, all equilateral triangles). Sometimes the hand knows more than the eye, and I particularly enjoyed forming my tetrahedron with my eyes closed. By exerting pressure on the points of our tetrahedrons, they gradually became octahedrons. Next step: press carefully on the points of the octahedron, to make an intermediate shape on the path to cube-dom called a cuboctahedron--all squares and triangles! Final step (only one of my classmates was successful in accomplishing this feat): press on all the points to gradually create twelve perfect interlocking pentagons--dodecahedron, ta-da! Plato introduced the world to the mysteries of the five platonic solids, which are fun (and easy!) to make out of paper or card.

New project: we each made a half-egg shape out of clay; then spent most of the two-hour class period blindfolded, adding little bits of clay to build up a face on our shaped bases. (That time my hand didn't seem to know as much as my eye!) And here are two more of my sculptures, the first one exploring convex and concave surfaces, and the second one expressing a twisting, out-reaching gesture inspired by driftwood. Can you tell I'm having fun already?






This week's message for your soul:

To bear in inward keeping spirit bounty
Is stern command of my prophetic feeling,
That ripened gifts divine
Maturing in the depths of soul
To selfhood bring their fruits.