At the Women's Studio Workshop
722 Binnewater Lane
Rosendale, NY 12401
2 hours from the GW bridge, between exit 18 and 19 on the NYS Thruway, in the Shawangunck mountain range near Mohonk mountain, between New Paltz and Kingston....
I spent 18 days of day and night creativity between magic and wonder.
I returned from being artist in residence at the Women's Studio Workshop to face taxes, bills delivered late because of 9/11 with due dates expiring during my absence two 3- foot high piles of mail and 144 plus e-mails!
I worked from 9 am or so til midnight with breaks for lunch and sometimes for dinner and time off to wash clothes from Sept. 17 to Friday October 5.
I created about 25 pieces in paper-- shields, spirit houses, soul armor, because I was compelled, driven, by the external as well as the internal need to make good and healing manifest in some way. I am grateful that I could turn some of my pain and fear into art, transmute it into a bit of healing. The weeks away were incredible... focused, intense. I was so into it.
I shared the artist apartment
with a woman artist--- bookmaker from Australia---
whose book, Speaking the Stone, inspired me to find/speak stones, make stone shields/talismans, wrapping stones in flax, gently, in one layer,feathering fresh pulled, just couched sheets across the stone.
Well, my work mode is late morning to all night. Patricia, the Australian, somehow awakened at 5:30 am (sigh)...after I had gone to sleep about 2 - 3 am.... so I would awaken at 7:30 am and my work mode became rock around the clock often in the studio from 9:30 am to midnight.
I brought my wok (and coffee grinder and juicer and muffin pan and griddle and herbs and spices and 5 bags of garden givings LOL! )
I had to share the 1000 ft papermaking studio with an Americorps young white woman from Memphis.
Most of the souls were light and bright and left me room to manifest my joy.
Every room was equipped with a boom box and the one in the papermaking studio was the best with a CD,Tape, or radio option, streamlined and blue, fitting neatly into the window sill, which became the place to sort and stack CDs and tapes.
I adorned the studio with my gele lady shrinkies and glass woman beads on the light pulls. I put shield drawings and blueboard molds up on the walls with no-stick painter's tape all along my workspace. I collected tin cans from recycling and filled them with the dying drying treasures found on forays into the surround.
After office hours, I might be blasting and dancing between the umpteen foot long worktable and the vaccuum table--- or to the vat where I would pull sheets of flax.
WSW Page 2