w y l y a s t l e yk a i r o s
Posted on August 20, 2012
This coming Friday morning I am heading to Smoke Farm in Arlington, WA. I will assemble dozens upon dozens of scarlet stones into a snaky sketch on a cobbled jetty. I collected the stones (with tremendous help from Scott Schuldt – thank you!) over three visits this summer. I dragged them home, felted them into their bright, new
merino skins and cannot wait to share them with the Lo-Fi Festival goers this weekend.
For those who have never been to Smoke Farm, it serves many populations, but for my interests I can say that it’s nothing shy of Heaven. It’s my Happy Place. What I love specifically about Smoke Farm is the loafing shed where artists of every medium gather to work, eat, plan, plot and do nothing. I love the gigantic tree house, the tree swing, the meadow, the long stretch of the cold and clear Stillguamish River that flows steadily through. I love the abactors’ hideout, the long galley kitchen, the cabins, the vegetable patch and the fireside conversations/debates. When I spend time at Smoke Farm, I spend good time. Every experience there is a significant deposit in my creative stash.
Lo-Fi is a mostly annual festival held in August on the farm. This will be my second year to be a participating artist. In coming up with a project for this year’s theme, Farm Time, I thought immediately of the rocks that are EVERYWHERE on the farm but particularly of those that make up the rocky beaches and jetties. Rocks are the perfect measure of geologic time, of course, and could say so much about the farm in those terms, but what about the time spent there – life time?
r o c k s k e t c h
To engage in rock play on the beach is surely one of the most ancient of human pastimes. Standing at any water’s edge, we are profoundly compelled to engage with the rocks. We build with rocks, use them to dig, skip them and listen for the bloops different sizes make in the water. This is quality time. This is Kairos – the kind of time for which I named my piece. Wikipedia says this:
The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.[1]
Just by being at the beach (and for me especially at Smoke Farm) and playing with her rocks, challenges get resolved, questions get answers, sadness is released and shifted, triumph is celebrated and humbled. Weariness is deposited and joy springs up. It’s this kind of time I am interested in spending at the farm.
I hope you’ll join us if you can. I’d love to spend some time with you.
-Wyly
tie one on
Posted on August 13, 2012
I have had amazing experiences teaching/facilitating at Gage Academy this summer. I normally work with very young people and have enjoyed engaging with older kids who identify as artists and bring lots of experience of their own to the studio.
The first workshop was a weeklong class in Kinetic Sculpture. In the mornings I had middle school aged kids and after lunch high schoolers. Most students tackled design issues around physics, materials and aesthetic with considerable grace and turned out some elegant works. A few students chose not to engage with the assignments and did their own thing. That’s certainly allowable. Disappointing, but okay. I was not allowed to photograph inside the studio, but this automata was one of the three projects I taught:
We also made mobiles and a gear project where the kids got to incorporate drawings into the project. Most of these kids named drawing as their preferred medium and therefore the gear project was the most popular.
On Fridays in August I am facilitating a Teen Art Studio at Gage’s Capitol Hill location. TAS hires professional artists to come into Gage on weekend evenings to share information and projects based on a given theme or process. In August I am showing kids images, giving history and sharing processes on how to make guerilla art. We are using yarn, fabric and hand-made felt and other materials. I just taught the kids to crochet and we put our pieces together in a single tag
y a r n b o m b
and yarn bombed a stairwell at Gage. We’ll see how long it lasts…
Next week we will talk about style and aesthetic in terms of designing a motif that students will then use to develop an individual, sewn tag. I will encourage them to take their tags out in the world and photograph them. With their permission, I’ll post their images here next week.
-Thanks for visiting.
w y l y a s t l e y 