squash

I've been thinking, over the past week or so, about what to submit for this year's Art from the Heart show. (Because I always do things to deadline and not a day before...

...which isn't a choice, necessarily, but it is how I operate.)

The first year, I did three HUGE macro photos of mushrooms. They were the best that I could do, my camera, the forest.

But they didn't sell and I couldn't afford, the second year, to spend as much money on printing/framing.

So I changed my focus a bit and did what felt like a triptych. The images were scans that juxtaposed household objects with some natural counterpoint.

Pink ribbons and Manitoba Maple seeds.

A tiny ceramic crucible, face down, and half a stinkhorn egg.

And they sold, which doesn't mean anything except that I had proof that one person liked the images.

This year, I was a bit torn. I had a few scans I really liked, but nothing that felt balanced as a trio. I had a handful of good macro pics but I didn't want my images, as a group, to (only) shout: REALLY BIG MUSHROOMS.

Because not everyone grooves on mushrooms the way I do. (The silly fools...)

So I found three images, scans AND photos, that seemed to be on speaking terms. And I made M process them when he should have been renouncing anything work-like, because I'm like that.

And now I just have to get them mounted. Hopefully I'll have time to get them mounted in time for art drop-off day, but if not, I can always get M to do it again.

While I fret.

(Poor M!)

* * *

Oh! I almost forgot. This was one of the scans that didn't make it into the final three.

But I liked it enough to post it here, so...here's its provenance:

The squash is from the Roland Pumpkin Festival, which I attended every year with my dear friend Tessa when I was fancy-free. Now I go every year with M and Aa and always hope to spend some time rubbing shoulders with Tessa and her various initials.

The cufflinks are from M's infamous grandfather. That I never met. That I think I would have liked, most of the time, and thought was deranged the rest of the time. Which is only a feeling, based on meeting his sons and co-mingling genes with his grandson, but...

M's mum passed these to me, knowing my enjoyment of heavy frippery, with a lump in her throat.

And the ladybug carapace I found on my bedroom floor, the beetle having hidden somewhere on my person or on M as it tried to find somewhere warm for the winter.

chivied

Provenance: M and I are up to our elbows in last year's garden, the coiling vines of my tomato plants shattering into garbage bags. Crisped strawberry leaves come away in handfuls, revealing sleepy ladybugs and wizened turds. In the beds along the house, clumps of chives have sprouted in their corner, with singletons appearing where my lettuce will be, where my mint and red-veined sorrel will be. As I pull the volunteers, combing tiny clods out of the roots and putting them aside, Aa comes up behind me. She has dirt on her upper lip, her (pink) hat is askew, but she's excited by the plastic frog she found in what she's calling her 'area.' When you live next to a house with seven kids, a fair number of volunteers wind up in your yard. This spring's tally? One large Dora ball, one large-ish fluorescent yellow superball, and the frog.

skinned

Provenance: A mid-winter shop, the aisles full of what-can-you-expect, and I notice a grocery clerk stripping Spanish onions of their outer skins. He's emptying twenty pound bags into the bins, his fingertips lined and re-lined with onion skin, his breast pocket filling with white fragments. He's already filled and tied off one produce bag, which I gesture towards. He thinks I think it's a bag of onions, so the contemplative look on his face shifts into a species of dismay until he realizes I want the skins and NOT the onions, at which point he shrugs. The mushrooms from a dollar store browse, the small sharp representations perfect for a February. Imagine cookies made from these cutters. (Imagine the forest.)

reading material #2

reading material or more SH notes

* * *

O, the desecrated copy of Jane Smiley's latest new-to-me novel, read over an afternoon when anything else, any other text or idea, seemed oppressive. O, the moment I tucked myself under the trees and the mushrooms just. spread. out.

Oh stupid purple prose. Oh idiotic poison ivy on which I apparently kneeled in order to get at the benighted fungi.

(Heh.)

SPORE PRINT!

scan: still 2

* * *

Provenance: The crucible from a box in Aqua's small events room, the one with the gold lame wallpaper with Chinese characters on it. The box from a relation-in-law, twice-removed, of Kelly's, its contents mostly from kitchen cupboards and buffet compartments. I'd been looking for props for one of my window displays and pulled out a few items. When I took them downstairs, Kelly related their provenance and offered me anything I wanted from the box, props aside. The top layer was country - goose - ceramics but underneath there were a few lovelies. I keep the crucible next to my desk and find myself testing it's impossible strength, its cool clang, when at my computer. It rests in the middle of my palm like an egg.

The stinkhorn eggs from the mulch heap at the head of the one of the paths. You smell stinkhorns a few feet before you spy them, their heads coated in a slime which attracts flies...need I mention that they are VERY post-coital once at their full growth?

M excels at sniffing out stinkhorns. I'm not sure what that says about him...

In years past, stinkhorns appeared in the fall in the sunny reprieves after stretches of cool weather. This chilly spring obviously presented the right conditions, because a few mushrooms emerged. By the time these eggs made an appearance, summer's heat was blaring most every day, so it was unlikely they'd fully develop. Or at least that's what I told myself when, a week or more after I spotted them, I picked them. But that's only half true, because they also were sort of puffball-y and I didn't know for sure until I got them home and sliced one open...

scan: moving 2

* * *

Provenance: Three images of the first morels I ever found & guiltily picked in a muddy patch in the forest. We found them after a week that alternated rain and sun like a clockwork mechanism. Nearby there were several clusters of oyster mushrooms on logs that were so luscious, so wet and engorged, as to be obscene. Not wanting to crush the morels in my bag, we gently put them in the breast pocket of M's shell and walked on, the mushroom lump beating against his chest. Later I read that seasoned mushroom hunters prefer onion mesh bags so that the spores can be accidentally/deliberately spread as you haul the meaty handfuls out.

scan: violet

* * *

Provenance: The violets from my bathroom African, an overgrown thing salvaged from the office of a colleague of my mother's after he left town. The cleaning woman, knowing my mother always worked late, appeared at her doorway, unable to throw the leggy green out. The eggshell from the shout M made, spotting it in the middle of the path in forest a week ago. Species unknown. The chrysalides are from the painted lady caterpillars M was given - a strange perk for a photographer, but there they/we were. The butterflies mapping my fingertips after weeks in a jar in various forms...

scan: pinked

Provenance: The Black Ash seeds from my in-law's back yard, sticking up like fingers from the grass. We set Aa to picking them up & threw handfuls up into the breeze just to see them whirl before putting a handful into a ziploc and tucking them into my bag. The ribbon saved from Aa's birthday party this year. It's been floating around the living room since. Aa will pick it up and shake it occasionally to see the curls tumble.

scan: moving

scan: still

* * *

When I lived in South Korea, I kept a scrapbook. I'd been given a large journal (hardcover literary novel large) from my aunt, who remarked that she couldn't wait to read it when I was done.

I was aghast on many levels. I mean, someone not-me reading my journal? Or, more horrifying, having to construct a 'public' journal? No. Oh no.

So I collected scraps and started pasting things in, covering up as many of those horrid lines as I could. I also started making three dimensional things flat, mostly through force of will.

In addition to subverting my well-meaning but nosy aunt, it also was my first move away from the Word, which was necessary, given the fact that I lived in a space where the only English words I heard were my own and that of my colleagues.

I kept my bits of paper, my glue sticks, and dull scissors in the main drawer of my bureau. And I would just shove things in as I found them until I couldn't not start a new page or add to an old page. It was an itch.

I liked the glue cheap and the scissors dull. It was too decoupage-y, too collage-y, to trim the images too precisely or to cement them in place. The images that worked themselves loose were as much a part of the effect of the whole as anything else...

I added to the book over the fourteen months I was in Korea and even for a month or two after I returned home. And then it was done.

A few months later, Prairie Fire asked me to write an account of my stay for an issue of travel writing they had in the works.

Feeling anxious about my submission (alongside that of Karen Connelly and David Bergen!) and following a whim, I carted my heavy heavy scrapbook to the Prairie Fire office one day.

And was shocked and pleased when, a few weeks later, they asked to scan one of the pages for the back cover of the issue.

But I digress. Today, doing laundry, I saw the leaf/dried mushroom on the table next to the washing machine. And they seemed to be a cluster.

The itch. (All the walks in the forest, the bark and moss and mushrooms. The six years of kitchen gardens, the spadefuls of things we dug out of the ground around our 1904-built home.)

The itch.

Having scratched, I turned to the bird's nest M brought me the other day. Having read the story in the Winnipeg Free Press about the drowned peregrine chicks on the 13th floor of the Radisson hotel after Friday's all-day deluge, I suddenly knew I'd be putting water on my new scanner.

M yelled when I told him not to look at what I was doing, one of my daughter's sippy cups in hand, but I did it anyways.

So there!

So, there...

scan

* * *

These images are what happens when you find yourself just slightly harried at the end of the growing season and neglect to harvest all your tomatoes (or, if I'm being honest, even to pull them out of the ground once the growing season is over)...

I'm not sure of the props but needed something to balance the wizened and overwintered tomatoes/strawberries/spiders.

(The tomatoes are for B, who cannot have such anymore. Oh, and the spiders are for H.)

I've also been thinking of doing an urban nature series, like the mushrooms that grow at the fenceline next door and often get stomped by neighbourhood kids before they get very big or the lily of the valley in my yard that persist in ones and twos despite the gravel that lines their designated spot.

I would have kept the lily of the valley, as they are among my favourite flowers, but came out of the house a month or so after moving in to find a member of the neighbourhood green team (i.e. a teenager) going at them with a weedwhacker.

He'd been assigned to trim the edges of the stand of vacant houses that our house used to belong to...and had no idea a) that anyone lived in our house and b) of the difference between a dandelion and a lily of the valley.

Green indeed!

A midnight image when I should be working on other things.

(Mama got a new scanner!)

spore PRINT

* * *

These two pieces are part of a project I've been contemplating over the past few months. In the name of identifying the mushrooms that I photograph in Assiniboine Forest, I've been collecting samples for spore prints.

I say in the name of, because it's a handy justification, should I be asked what on god's green earth am I doing...but I am more than capable of enjoying the mushrooms without naming them.

So what is it, then? I think...that making spore prints is another way of making images from mushrooms, of letting the mushrooms make images themselves.

But that's just part of it. I also found myself coming home with pockets full of showy bark. And spent willow galls. And seeds in fluted wrappers.

And I was uncommonly happy when I found a set of wooden trays only an inch deep in which to layer all these, well, layers.

So we'll see where this goes. In the meantime, here are a few images that the house drug in.

The feather I found on my front walk. The pine seeds were shed by the cones I mound in a bowl around Christmastime, my only nod to seasonal decorations. The keys I resurrected from a drawer, tucked there after the locks they fit had been lost or broke, because they're such...objects.

FLEdged