Sunday, January 30, 2022

Only One Semester To Go!

There was a summer residency, my third semester, and a winter residency. Now I have one semester to go and a final residency in June/July when I will graduate! Where did the time go???


Grad school books. I've read about 90% of them. Guest artist works,
faculty works, anthologies, fiction, lyrical nonfiction, poetry, and critical studies.


Residency memories:

Winter 2022 those of us who were in person at the school 
were able to participate in art workshops!

Where it all happens in Portland - Pacific Northwest College of Art (@ Willamette University)



Winter 2021 on Zoom



2021 Graduate, my friend Janna                                My buddy Russell

2021 Summer post-graduation karaoke

JP!



One of many dinners at cool Portland restaurants



Molly, bonafide best roomie ever






***
SNEAK PEAK!
My thesis, "Blankets"

 

B L A N K E T : noun : a large piece of woolen or similar material used as a bed covering or other covering for warmth. Etymology : Middle English (denoting undyed woolen cloth): via Old Northern French from Old French blanc ‘white’, ultimately of Germanic origin. A blanket can be made of woven acrylic, knitted polyester, mink, cotton, fleece, silk, and wool. Synonyms : cloak, cover, cover-up, covering, curtain, hood, mantle, mask, pall, penumbra, robe, shroud, veil, wrap.

White covering 

for warmth.

 

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The earliest memory I have of death isn’t a memory. It’s a fluid thought-image of white walls and curtains, a sterile hospital bed with white blankets, my Grandma Ethel, my mother’s mother, and a specific moment that I was given to say goodbye. Is it real? I’ve shaded it out and erased it so many times. I wish I had a better sense of it because I was almost ten years old. I know for sure that when I saw her body later in a casket, despite her familiar white wig and silky turquoise blouse,  I couldn’t understand why her lips were formed into such a thick, tight pucker. 

I also think I have an older thought of her husband, Homer, lying in a bed of pale, thin white sheets in his home. I felt special because I was tall enough as a toddler to help him move his limbs to keep his muscles from atrophy. Easily the bones moved, the muscles hung heavy.


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When I fell in love with my husband, Dan, I visited him in Chicago and stayed at his apartment, in his room with a small window next to the bed where he hung blue Christmas lights and ran a fan. I loved lying in his bed of soft, worn-in blue sheets. Later, I confused my memories and began to believe that my grandfather actually had been cocooned by blue sheets.

In college, I created a sculpture to represent these confused memories; a shelf covered in those blue sheets and white polymer clay bones. The fabric hung from the shelf, even, with some of the bones cradled in the draped folds.


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Mary Martha (Hendricks) Hodel || Circa 1965, 1980

 

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As a child in church one evening, the pastor dropped the lights and showed a film on a projector screen. There was a cemetery and a person raised from a grave; shot up quickly to the sky, bound for heaven. It was sending a soul to heaven to await the resurrection. That body speeding, upward hurtling through the air terrified me.

 

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After her death but before the doctor placed a sheet over my mother’s body, I held her hand–the hand I had known all my life; admiring how it felt and how it had held my hand, the nesting and the pressing of the soft pads together. I tried to comfort my mother, kissing her cheek and caressing her forehead. I was 36 and she was 69 but I had become her mother by helping my sister with caregiving. I touched her body, a body no longer having warm blood or breath. Her skin was cold and purple but I kept telling her in my mind that she was beautiful. If I thought/said it to her enough times, didn’t it make me a better daughter than I felt I had been? The truth was her eyes were paused in a yellow pale gloss, her scalp exposed without her wig-only partially covered with feathery patches of short, white hair, and her mouth slacked, revealing an absence of teeth, only gray gums.



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