This one is my favorite moon shot! These were my first installations at night, so I encountered new challenges in capturing the images and conveying the experience.
Lunar reflections.
Last autumn’s supermoon provided light for installations on the high plains.
Haze from wildfires hundreds of miles away clouded the views at Power Switch. I created this installation on the land art, with permission from one of the artists, Sue Sommers.
This image is one of 10 installation images I submitted to the Wyoming Arts Council’s Visual Arts Fellowship competition, and much to my delight and surprise, my work was selected to receive one of three awards! I’m still pinching myself a bit, since I’d applied several times before. This is an honor that one always hopes for but doesn’t dare expect. I’m very thankful to judges Pedro Vélez, artist and critic from New York City, and Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art at the Portland Art Museum.
Even though Wyoming is a sparsely populated state, lots of artists choose to live here and create. There’s freedom in the vast expanses of land and sky, and even though we live far from each other, artists from all over the state are connected. We connect via social media throughout the year and meet annually at the Wyoming Arts Council’s CLICK conference. It is an exhilarating weekend of workshops and networking. The Fellowship winners are announced at the conference, so this year I experienced the thrill and support of being congratulated by my friends and peers.
To make the honor even more exciting, the two artists who also received Fellowships are my good friend Georgia Rowswell, who creates stunning pieces of layered cast-off fabrics, and Susan Moldenhauer, an amazing photographer who has inspired me for years with her images and her curatorial work as director of the University of Wyoming Art Museum. In a couple of years our work will be exhibited together in the Biennial Fellowship Exhibition. Our work will be very complimentary and I’m excited to see how the exhibit is curated.
The exhibition curator will come visit my studio to select work, so I better get moving!
Late winter days in the West are wonderful when the snow has melted (even though we all know we’ll get spring snows) and the sun shines brightly. I find the light ochre color of the prairie grasses to be calming and peaceful as the warmth of the sun infuses the surroundings and my winter-chilled body.
Rusted and abandoned objects dot the vast landscape in the west. They harbor stories of the people who used them, and for whatever reason, left them in situ.
As with all my objects, I didn’t abandon these, but packed them up and took them with me so as to leave little trace of their presence at this site.
The series of three images just posted were taken on the shore of Lake Michigan, not far from Navy Pier in Chicago. My husband was attending a conference there and I tagged along.
It was a stormy day, the wind was howling and it was raining intermittently. Standing was a challenge, as was holding my camera still. At first I was disappointed that these shots turned out so out of focus, but the more I lived with them, the more pleased I was. They reflect the feeling of the day so much better than if they had been sharp.
They foreshadowed an upcoming storm in my life: three weeks after this trip I had surgery to remove a large tumor that revealed I had ovarian cancer. Three weeks after that surgery I had another (surprise!) surgery to drain fluid from around my heart and to test it to see if the cancer had spread. Thankfully it had not, and my diagnosis was stage 1, quite a lucky break since ovarian cancer is most often found at a later stage.
Nearly a year later, I’ve gone through chemotherapy and am returning to normal, but not nearly as fast as I’d like! I have no evidence of disease. It’s now a mental game to not let dark thoughts creep in, and most the time I do pretty well since I tend to be an optimistic person by nature. Every day is a gift and to be lived to the fullest and enjoyed!
