Hyperkewl: Relics Project

Placing organic materials, including the dirt and brick pictured here, in my reliquary.

In addition to working on Altar for Women, I have also been involved with Hyperkewl's Relics Project. According to the project statement written by Rosemary Barria,

"A walk will take place in Fall 2012 in various cities, such as Chicago, Kansas City, and Lima to place reliquaries created by people in community.

People were asked through facebook, email and by word of mouth to fill a provided reliquary with relics.

A relic is traditionally important to many religions, including to Buddhists, Christians and Hindus. They are typically remains of saints, bones, and pieces of clothing or other objects, placed in a church, a temple or shrine. Pilgrimages are made to them to give honor or to receive magic from them.

Hyperkewl re-appropriates the power of reliquaries beyond traditional religious context and asks the participating to place their own magic inside and to gift it to a place of importance to them, regardless of what it is. Each participant leads their own walk and decides if a ritual or some other delivery is appropriate.

After the walk, a map will be available online for the community to revisit these reliquaries. Each reliquary, becomes a new point on a map from where our special experiences are acknowledged.

We are re-accessing our environment and imposing our personal relics. This is magic."

Hanging my reliquary.

Adjusting my reliquary.

My reliquary in place and still unfilled.

Each participant was either created from scratch or was given a blank form to use as the basis for a reliquary. After the reliquary was completed to the specifications of each artist, then each artist could fill his or her reliquary with relics. I, of course, chose a tedious and time-consuming process, which gave me time to reflect upon family, home, safety, and the importance of having a place to call home.

I wrapped and wove string around my reliquary to create a safe space to fill with relics from my past. It occurred to me that every place I've lived has its own special blend of materials, so I chose to relocate bits and pieces from my first home to my parents' current house.  My Safety Ne(s)t acts as a sieve to sift organic materials from my first home into the stuff of my parents' current home. By doing this, I am hoping to compress the organic materials of the two homes from my childhood into one space.

Placing my relics in the reliquary.

I carried my materials from my old house to my parents' house in a red bowl I recall from my childhood.

Green maple leaves from "my tree."

  

Here's what I said about my project:

Home is a powerful symbol. For me, the word evokes comfort and safety. Home is more than the family that resides there; it is a location, a geographical and sentimental coordinate that exists outside of linear time. Although my parents, siblings and I moved from our first home 20 years ago, "the old house", its goings on, and the land on which it was built still feature often in our conversations, my thoughts, and certainly in my dreams. 

For my reliquary, I relocated organic elements from the site of my first home to the land where I grew into adulthood. These materials include the following: brick, grasses, dirt, bark, twigs, leaves from "my tree," and flowers that still bloom, despite my mother's yearly inattention. The materials I gathered are now nestled in a netted nest-like structure, not only for safekeeping, but also to be filtered through the gaps between the woven strings, picked up and re-utilized by animals, and to eventually join the site of my family's current home irreversibly. 

I look forward to following the progress of these relics, as they wear and blow away. I expect them to leave stains on the structure of my reliquary as time passes, just as home has shaped and molded me over time.

Alison L. Miller

Below are images of the final piece:

The star-shaped opening occurred as a natural result of my weaving technique.

I was so excited to find flowers in bloom at "the old house."

I know this post is photo heavy, so I'll call it a night. In another post, I will highlight some of the other participants' reliquaries. They are all incredibly personal and beautiful.

What relic would you put in your reliquary? Where would you place it?

Alison :)

*My awesome mom took the photos of me, and I took the rest.

Experiments in Light & Motion

 

When I showed my brother these photographs, he asked me if I had ever looked at light drawings (or camera paintings). I had not, but now I have. This type of experimentation is quite old, although I discovered it independently through play and thought. As much as I wish I had originated this way of working, I did not.

 

That does not negate the experiment nor falsify its results. When I started working this way, I was thinking about the camera - how it allows light in over time and how the motion of the camera can distort light. Light can be smeared or dragged or pushed or pulled along with the the camera as it moves through space and time.

 

The camera was attached to my hand. It became an extension of my body, like any other hand tool. While working this way, I thought of the camera as a pencil or a paintbrush, and even as a hammer or a saw.

 

The light was the lead or the paint, the nail or the board. This is not a new analogy, but I came to it on my own through an interest in tool use, repetitive motion and mark making.

 

I slid my camera from side to side, I pushed it and pulled it, I wove it in and out of space, and I traced invisible patterns in the air. I even whirled like a dervish, and felt just as inspired.

 

I couldn't or I wouldn't sleep, as I considered new riffs - how a little more time and little less light might change the results of an unvaried movement; how a slight variation in my repetitious path might affect an unaltered exposure to light and time.

Each result led to the next set of parameters, a new Eureka!

 

I found scratches and smoke and squiggles and lines, even atmosphere and emotion or a digital reality.

 

Light filtered by by space and time, impressions made by hand with the assistance of a sighted machine. A pseudo-science made sincere through rules and regulations, computations and escalations.

 

If this, then that - not nearly as predictable as anticipated.

 

 I am excited to make marks using the camera as my drawing tool, an extended emotive roving eye taking in light and pacing through time. I may at some point reverse roles and draw with light onto the still canvas of the camera lens. 

 

As long as my body in motion is part of the process, I am willing to attempt the reverse - use light as a pen and time as a penetrable plane.  

What types of creative experimentation have you engaged in lately? Have you modified or developed a recipe? Have you written a story in a nontraditional format? What have you done to allow the epiphanies to flow and let the mind take you where it wants?

Alison :)

Project Time

I have been scarce during the past week. Here's why:

Yes, I mistreat my yoga mat by employing it as a knee and bum pad when I'm working on art projects. I like to spread out on the floor when I'm working, and hardwood ain't comfy. And those "scraps" on the mat are actually individual blades of grass.

 

I've yet to add the subject to this background. The image is glossy due to the combination of magazine paper and Mod Podge.

I have been working on my latest cut-paper collage. These pieces are incredibly time-consuming, and they keep both my brain and my hands active, leaving little time for some of my other favorite creative outlets - meaning blogging.

Anyone seeing this piece who is mostly familiar with the work I did in undergrad or grad school might be surprised. My undergraduate work was process-oriented, primarily monochromatic and lacked narrative - aside from its conceptual back story. I "discovered" narrative during grad school, but the majority of my thesis work was digital, dark in subject matter, and the narratives were applied with a light hand. Its making was still very much inspired by process, specifically the processes of repetition and tool use (meaning anything from a pencil to cyborg-like additions).

I get real pleasure from making up colorful scenes like the one above.  I am definitely inspired by a folk art aesthetic, children's art and quilting. This work is still very much tied into labor-intensive processes - from finding the perfect colored paper in magazines to cutting the right shapes  (usually many of them!) from the paper. If I could do these collages easily or quickly, they just wouldn't be as satisfying. Figuring out how to express the idea of an object existing in the real world through cut paper is a challenge I enjoy. Creating "grass," for instance, is a good example of what I mean. In this piece, I am using long individual blades in the piece above, while in other pieces I have created grass quite differently - sometimes it needs to be short or choppy or windblown or ragged or... you get the idea. 

I get to tell stories through cut paper, while also exploring texture, color and shape. These pieces are so fun to make, and I could see myself expanding this way of working in several different directions.

Thanks for taking a look! Come back for updates - I will definitely share the finished piece. What are you working on these days? I would love to see...

Cheers,

Alison :)