work, and the place where it happens.

This week is my last in the museum studio, so I am focusing on bringing a number of these smaller projects together. Someone asked me the other day if this was something I had done before, and the answer is definitely no. I am rarely offered the opportunity to do whatever I want, so I decided to try out some experiments during my time here.



Here is the space itself. I have spent the last two days cutting shapes out of the colored vinyl I brought along. On the floor you can see a bunch of clouds, both digital and analog, plus some cloud outlines. The bundles are simply strips of color, and the little trays are full of different sized dots.



















I spent the majority of three days working on one panel. The progress is below, in this order. I don't have images from the start, but at some point I became pretty discouraged with it and started to destroy it. This turned into an interesting exercise by itself. Later I went back and started over with the thread, using what I learned the first time through as a guide. The last shot is as it currently exists. This process of deconstruction and reconstruction is a classic studio problem. It is a good way to reevaluate what I have been doing, especially when I have no one else to sound ideas off of .























I have shots of some recent trips, including a great day on the island of Mors fossil hunting. I will update with that soon.
-me

1 word = 1/1000th of 1 picture.

I am kicking myself for not bringing my camera along for today's adventure. Plans changed in a hot minute this morning, so I actually forgot several things. Perhaps some words will do. Gregory convinced me to rent a car and come pick him and janne up in Billund tonight, which is about three hours away by car. They are returning from a short holiday in Rome. Driving in Denmark is like driving in the US, only when you request a subcompact from the rental agency they give you a brand new VW Golf TDI with manual transmission, by default. In the states I might have gotten a Daewoo, or a Hyundai if I was particularly lucky.

I had planned on spending the day in the studio, but I decided to hit the road instead. First stop was Lindholm Hoje, an Iron Age/Viking settlement outside of Aalborg. This place is really incredible. The focal point is an enormous burial ground with each grave marked with a ring/triangle/oval/boat of enormous stones. The entire thing was covered with a sand dune for almost a thousand years, so the stones were never used for modern architecture and the graves were never opened. I have become a sort of archeology nut in the last few years, and in the back of my mind I sometimes think about going back to school for it, so this was a treat. Check out the website here (which is unfortunately only available in Danish, as far as I can tell): http://www.nordjyllandshistoriskemuseum.dk/index.php?id=4
there is a great wikipedia entry on Lindholm Hoje as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindholm_H%C3%B8je

Right now I am sitting on a bench in the central district of Aalborg itself, which is a cosmopolitan city that ranks as the fourth largest in the country. It is beautiful and I am enjoying people-watching, which is one of my favorite things to do. More on Aalborg later.

As an aside, a popular activity on the coast of Denmark is to collect amber that the sea washes onto the shore in stormy weather. Apparently I have the eye. I won't be returning to the US as an amber mogul, but I have a tidy little collection that grows every time I go to the beach.

I have been in the studio a lot this week, and I have several good pictures that I have yet to edit for the blog. I don't often have several weeks of studio time to do whatever I want, so the reality is that I have been experimenting with some ideas that have sat in my notebooks for years. The focus has been these drawings using thread and pins stuck straight into the wall. They aren't made to last, because of course the only way to make more wall space is to destroy them. This, however, has become an integral part of my experience here; the destruction of these things has opened up a great number of new options I think. I still haven't finalized any plans for the next week, which will be my last at the museum. I will try to post about that more often.

So I have been alone a lot. For those of you that travel internationally by yourselves, you know what I mean. This is a real, true loneliness; I can't walk out the door and simply talk to anyone I want. I can't come home and be with my wife at the end of the day. When I have a bad time the only person who listens is myself. All of this leads to great introspection, and an emotional rollercoaster oscillating between absolute confidence and utter self-doubt. These are feelings I have at home as well, but they seem compressed into such a short period of time here. I will say that I have a sense of clarity I haven't felt in years. That is mostly a good thing.

There was a feature years ago on Myspace and also on early blogging sites that I really liked. You could set your status, such as "what I a listening to", "how I feel today", etc. Does anyone remember this? It seems so useful in hindsight. With Facebook the only way to figure out what someone is listening to or how they are feeling is to pick apart the cryptic lyric snippet they post as their status (I know, I am complicit). So...
What I have been listening to:
Bright Eyes, Cassadaga (this album takes some getting used to. it isn't what you would expect from this artist, but clearly he has grown up a bit)
Also, streaming NPR. I love the internet.
What I have been watching:
Live football (soccer...), Denmark vs. Senegal pre-World Cup friendly
How I feel today:
introspective. up and down. slightly anxious.

OK, to my valued reader(s?), I promise to do a bit better with regular posts.
Love, me.

what i've been thinking about

It's simple, but then it isn't.

Molecular structures:








Food webs (thanks Kristin):





the concept of Sacred Geometry:



International relations and economy (in this case, oil...):



Bubbles and foam:





Social networking:



Tessellations:

class trip, plus surrealist landscapes

I spent the early part of Wednesday in Hirtshals, home of the previously discussed Nazi bunkers. Gregory and I took a number of his students to the beach to try our hands at some collective land art projects, as a precursor to a larger project we want to undertake together next month. The beach at Hirtshals has great stones with sand in between and a beautiful layer of gray-green clay in the cliffs above, so we used those materials to build a small arch. The students gathered stones and embellished with smaller stones and mussel shells. It was a successful day, and they have asked me back for a longer field trip next week.




The lighthouse complex at Hirtshals is quite gorgeous. This stretch of shore is quite rocky and treacherous for ships of every size, and the lighthouse has been a sign of safe haven for a long time.


Gregory teaches at the boarding school in Horne. His students, like most teenagers, were difficult to motivate. However, once we turned their potential energy into kinetic energy, things began to happen.


We didn't invent the arch, but we built a quick little one on the second try! Gregory seems please.


It's no Andy Goldsworthy (http://www.rwc.uc.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/index.html), but it's pretty nice anyhow, and the idea can be scaled up with great success.


The real treat came later in the evening. Janice took Susumu and I along with two of Greg's boys to a really special place on the coast. The Rubjerg Knude lighthouse was built at the end of the 19th century, and began it's life in 1900. About sixty five years later a great deal of sand began to swallow the surrounding landscape, and the lighthouse was formally closed in 1968, though the surrounding buildings remained open and in use up until the early 2000's. The sand dunes surrounding the lighthouse are enormous (about 50 meters), and they rest on the edge of a pretty large clay cliff that tumbles down to the sea (about another 50 meters). It was really hard to get good photos that give an impression of scale. It was actually terrifying to stand on the edge of the dunes and see shattered remains of brick buildings that have tumbled all the way down to the beach below. For the urban explorers out there, the lighthouse is shut up tight, so unless you have a ninja grappling hook you won't be going inside. Too bad, right?



The scramble up the dunes was pretty tough. Little Keiran made it all the way up, then fell all the way down, then made it all the way up again, all on his own.


Denmark is a relatively flat country, so the top of these dunes provides a really incredible panoramic view. As always, it is a lot easier to understand the landscape you live in if you can separate yourself from it for a short while.


The dunes crawl move about quite a bit, as this is an extremely windy place. We lucked out: it was sunny and there was almost no wind.


Susumu packed a picnic of rice balls and fried cod, which was delicious and the perfect reward for climbing up there.


The lighthouse is really quite large (again, about 5om). I desperately wanted to get into the top and poke around a bit. The lower doors and windows are bricked shut.


You can see remnants of the destroyed buildings all around the lighthouse. When it became apparent that they would be ruined, the local authorities removed the roofs so that the sand could fill them up, thus making it a bit safer for people to walk about on the dunes.




These are pictures I found online showing the lighthouse as it was in the 1970s and 80s. Janice has lived in the area for over 30 years. She told me that she knew the last people to actually live in the buildings, and she and her husband Peter used to frequent a restaurant located there as well.








This is the proof that I was actually there. It was a very surreal experience. It's estimated that the lighthouse will fall into the sea in about 20 years, and there is really no stopping it. The same thing is happening to a 1000 year old church about a mile up the coast.