watch me blog!

Thank you LeBrie Rich (penfelt.com) for suggesting my brilliant blog title! And welcome to anyone who is reading this before I have officially announced it. And thanks to anyone who cares enough to read my little musings.

I started this blog with the intention of making a public record of the artist's residency I'll be attending this summer at the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia USA. I don't get there until the first week of June, but here I am writing already. I felt the need to have an introduction to the residency.

The Wood Turning Center is a museum and organization in Philadelphia who has a visionary attitude towards one of the oldest tools of the craft trade: the lathe. I applied to do this residency after my friend Kevin Burrus (www.pdxcontemporaryart.com/) did it a few years back. He had to convince me that even though I didn't already use the lathe in my art work, I was perfect for the residency because the Wood Turning Center is looking for artists who aren't necessarily using the lathe in a traditional way. (I buy lathe turned parts and alter them.) The opportunity to spend some focused time to see how turning my own forms and altering them will affect my work is intriguing to me, and apparently the Wood Turning Center thought so too because they gave me a spot in the Summer 2006 session. You can read more about the Wood Turning Center and the International Turning Exchange at their website, which is conveniently linked over there up and to the right of this blog entry.

The residency happens each summer during the months of June and July. They choose four artists from around the world, one of which is American. (that's me!!!) A fifth furniture maker is thrown into the artist pool, as well as a scholar and a journalist who will document the residency--part of the WTC's brilliant world domination plan to spread the word about the lathe. The other residents for my session are:

Marilyn Campbell, artist
Kincardine, Ontario, Canada

Dennis Carr, scholar
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut, US

Liam Flynn, artist
Limerick, Ireland

Vincent Romaniello, photojournalist
Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, US

Neil Scobie, artist
Lower Bucca, Australia

Jo Stone, furniture maker
New Market, New Hampshire, US

The next few weeks before I leave won't involve much thumb twiddling. I am working on my first public art commission for a hospital in Phoenix that needs to be done and shipped before I go. Images of that work will eventually make it onto a new section of my website on "public art" - with the hopeful expectation of more to come in that category. Oh, and there's a few other big projects too that I won't bore you with. Consider yourself among the lucky.

I feel especially grateful to Kevin for encouraging me to apply, Albert LeCoff, director of the Wood Turning Center, for letting me come play for a few months, my mother for getting me a plane ticket with her air miles, and last but not least the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland for giving me a grant to help me cover some of the expenses. This is my first artist's residency and I have many ideas already about what I want to explore. Perhaps I will let you in on that in a future posting, but I feel like I need to keep a few secrets in my pocket.

H