Every year, Mel and I make grand plans for our garden. We aim to plant, compost, mulch, water, weed, and toil in the soil until we have created Eden around our home. Needless to say,[…]
Elephant Bell Totas and the Humbled Artist
Elephant string decoration India I typed the words into Google image search and began studying pages featuring photos depicting the folk craft item like the one that had caught my attention at the Indian restaurant[…]
Dreamcatchers Made from Plastic
“Why do we have a bag of plastic lids?” “When I was teaching classes, I used them to make spindles and as paint pallets.” “Can I throw them out?” “I don’t want to say yes.[…]
Sashiko, Boro, and Wabi Sabi
Kate: What are all these clothes sitting in this pile? Mel: They all have holes in them. Kate: Are they to be thrown out? Mel: I guess. I don’t want to throw them out. They[…]
Retablos
I hold my breath as I open the scary dungeon room door. This creepy room at the very back of our basement has become the repository of every item in our home that we long to forget. It[…]
Contemplating Death and Consumer Guilt
Bauxite is an aluminium ore and the world’s main source of aluminium. Many years ago while I was a guest in Guyana, locals made sure to make me aware of a bauxite mine owned by[…]
Expanding an Old Project
Back in the days when I had a MySpace account, I started producing digital photo collages of and for all my MySpace friends utilizing their profile photos. I continued this artistic exercise after I (like[…]
Bedtime Stories for Privileged Children
My home, probably like many areas across the United States, still suffers from the effects of a long loathsome legacy of racism. Back in 2009, I started collecting statements people said to me and particular[…]
Dia de Muertos: Paper Mache Skulls
She often waited for her husband to leave the house before she embarked on such experiments for this very reason; to spare him the anxiety of the chaos she sometimes created. White spots flecked the[…]
Round One: Cakeway to the West
Team Egan-Freeman-Schwartzmeyer-&Timms set out this morning to hunt down some Cakeway to the West cakes now scattered across our good city. We didn’t quite reach my goal of 30 cakes, but we still had a[…]