Female bodies were weak bodies. My body was not weak. I was strong. I had immense capacity.
Female bodies were targets. There to be viewed, groped, harassed, and assaulted, female bodies belonged to people with power. My body wanted power. I learned to fight and to disgust. I could burp louder than a man, eat just as much and knew how to kill with a well placed hit to the jugular. I wore my camo pants and flattened my chest. I was no one’s girlfriend: I was a comrade.
Female bodies were ill bodies. They bled, got sick and stayed in bed. My body was not a sick body. I could push through any pain, fight through any illness. I found my physical limits and challenged them. I leaned into pain.
Female bodies were subservient. Made by God to be “help meet suitable” they were weaker and more susceptible to sin. I was born under the authority of a man.
There was nothing I could do about that.
I told God he had made a critical error when he made me a woman.
Wasted opportunity.
Much later, in the violence and ruins of a crumbling belief structure, I came home to my body.
I memorized the breastplate of St. Patrick while on my way to the International Christian Youth Group in San José. I carried the ancient prayer in the side pocket of my camo pants along with traditional Gaelic songs, ballads of middle earth and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot.
I worked hard to unite what my unschooled mind knew about science and what I knew about Christian ontology. I knew Jesus was true because I understood how the space time continuum functioned on earth.
I knew that I moved in the intersection between the 3rd and 4th dimensions and that all life was only a shadow of the real. In a spectacular union of theology, medievalism, romanticism, and Eurocentric idealism, I came up with a formula for how to know if something was true. If it felt good, it it was beautiful or held a hint of what the German romantics called Sehnsucht, it was core to reality. In other words, it was a “shadow of truth” suspended in space and time for eternity.
Aslan is Jesus is King Arthur is Aragorn.
If you couldn’t see it, you weren’t looking hard enough.
“Today I put on a terrible strength invoking the Trinity confessing the Three with faith in the one As I face my Maker”
I mumbled the words as the bus headed south to the city. Protection against the supernatural forces that tore at my soul trying to disrupt my task as a spiritual warrior.
I left the compound in Costa Rica when I was 18 to discover what kind of warrior bard God had called me to be.
I surfaced as an ordinary human somewhere between cups of tea and chopping onions for supper at L’Abri.
I pulled her from the kiln yesterday. What a moment. 13.5 months in the making, 2 years of an idea peculating, and she has finally made it into existence–all to be shattered in a performance in a few months from now.
This makes me so happy.
I think a very helpful and formative part of an art degree is the time pressure you are under to produce ideas, refine your craft, and generate finished work. It hones in your skill, helps you build stamina for deadlines and pressures, and forces you to sharpen your vision into a singular focus. But I think these same qualities can be unhelpful, and at times I think I have to un-learn these habits and learn it’s ok to slow down enough for an idea to surface.
I would never have produced this pot in a university.
I learned how to make it, how to mix glazes, and I was exposed to some of the traditions, ideas and methods of pottery making. But the amount of time it took this pot to surface in my psyche and practice would not have met any deadline within a course, or perhaps even a degree.
Let me walk you through what is in the creation of this pot…
1985
I am born on a small apple farm in Georgia… just kidding. I won’t go all the way back 😉
2016
November, midway through a semester of art classes I realize I do not want to be an art teacher. I want to be an artist. I scramble to sign up for the remainder of my foundation year and choose the only available materials class that works for my schedule: ceramics with Grace Nickle.
I dislike ceramics. I had early life exposure to it and have pegged it in my mind as a bit tacky, mostly functional mugs and chunky figurines. Maybe some porcelain paintings of portraits and flowers. Boring. But I sign up for the class thinking at least its an easy A.
2017
My mind is blown. Grace Nickel introduces me to a world of clay that I had no idea existed and my art life will never be the same. I build my first narrative vessel about moving 35 times in my life.
2018
Travel is fun
Way back when we gathered
Official
Ass-thetics
check out that surface
Artist
wo
wo again
I learn clay can be performance
wo wo wo
Through the encouragement of the Clay Club and funding from SOFASA I am able to attend NCECA in Pittsburg. My mind is further expanded with the potential for clay. That summer I am given an Undergraduate Research Award and spend my summer mentored by Grace Nickel. Part of this award includes a studio all to myself and access to the entire clay barn. I develop my material and ideas about chaos and produce a work that I consider my first actual work of art.
2019
NCECA is in Minneapolis and I can’t not go. I take in Djinnaya Stroud’s presentation on Daisy Makeig-Jones’ Fairyland line. There are many amazing things from this lecture I still think about and will probably make it into future blogs, but relevant to this post was her summary “takeaways.” Specifically her encouragement to “draw from your own visual landscape” (23:49) I begin asking myself what my own visual landscape looks like.
2020
I graduate during the upheaval of a pandemic and slowly decompress after the intense stress of a degree. I begin hand building a vessel to practice my clay skills.
It takes months.
I also begin to work out a symbolic “knot” I use as a metaphor for chaos. Applying this to the vessel with slip and sgraffito, I land on what feels like my “visual landscape” that I have been pondering for a year.
I stumble into a “moon jar” by Akiko Hirai on Instagram. I fall in love with the way she does the surface of these jars. I plunge myself into researching her practice. In doing so I learn about the Japanese aesthetics of Wabi Sabi. I feel like my own aesthetic leanings have come home.
I find a glaze recipe attributed to Akiko and replicate it. The first fire of the vessel with Akiko’s glaze is less than ideal. I re-glaze the vessel and fire again.
Yesterday I pulled what I feel like is my first vessel from the kiln. It’s been a long journey to get to this moment and I have a long adventurous road ahead.
Anyway, I just wanted to share a little history of what all went into this particular pot.
Last night each artist presented about the work we have done over the past year for Rural Arts Mentorship Program. Brenna encouraged us to make a short video about our work. It was a great way to condense my progress and ideas around my work into a short introduction. I am nowhere near complete, but by now I have a really good sense of the direction.
Jessamyne Polson was my closest friend in Costa Rica/ Alexandra Ross/2021/digital photograph
Jessamyne Polson was my closest friend in Costa Rica. I don’t know what normal teenage relationships are like, but teenage friendship in isolated zealous Christian expat communities in the mountains of Costa Rica was intense. I was an isolated unschooled American expat living on a family compound in the Mountains of San Isidro de Heredia. Jess was a homeschooled Canadian MK living with her family in the missionary compound a forty minute walk away.
We entangled each other in the webs of our primary social circles and forged our own tangled friendship. She was my closest friend and comrade against the constraints of family, but she was my fierce competition when it came to establishing my social identity.
Sometimes I think about what my relationship with Jess would have been if it had been safe to be friends. I play the what if game.
What if I had seen examples of healthy relationships?
What if it had been safe to be intimate?
What if we had lived outside a patriarchy?
What if it had been safe to inhabit my body?
What if it had been safe to be vulnerable?
What would friendship look like in that context?
I try to imagine our friendship in that context, but I can’t. It’s an impossible task for my cynical imagination that only knew one reality.
I play a reverse game what if game:
What if you only see abuse of power in relationships?
What if intimacy is used to control?
What if you believe women are the cause of human ill?
What if you believe your body is sinful?
What if any vulnerability is exploited?
What would friendship look like in that context?
I can tell you.
You come away with intense moments of beauty, and painful moments of regret, and a shit ton of dissociation.
If you’re lucky, you meet a friend who, throughout the tangled web of life, is resilient as fuck and can cut through the knots of teenage friendship and see its core intention.
Jessamyne Polson, you are one brilliant, beautiful, resilient woman.
Cultivating a daily practice is possibly the most challenging thing I am trying to accomplish with my art. The only thing I do daily is have a cup of coffee. I don’t even sleep everyday.
I am tackling a giant multipiece linocut. With over 150 individual pieces and measuring 42″ in diameter, the only way completing this by July is possible is with a daily practice. Everyday I sit down and carve 1 to 3 pieces, and little by little I make it through the work.
I have set out an impossible task for myself. I might as well go find gold fleece.
I have tried really hard to keep my work in frontline crisis and trauma training separate from my art practice. I dislike it when I am at work and people find out I am an artist and jump to the conclusion that I am or want to be an art therapist. I also don’t want the goal of my art practice to become my personal therapy. I want a clean lines between art, work and my personal life. This time, I want nice clean orderly boxes.
But these days my trauma informed training is seeping pretty heavily into my art practice. Working so closely with my personal narrative I am applying all the skills and tools I know from my frontline training on myself as I piece together my past. My intention of cultivating a daily mindfulness practice coincides with my attempts to cultivate a daily lino carving.
In the mentorship program Brenna walked us through goal setting and “habit stacking” as a way to achieving goals. I drink a cup of coffee everyday when I wake up. I stack a mindfulness practice to that. I stack a linocut practice to my mindfulness practice.
In this way, my daily linocut is stacked together with my coffee and my mindfulness. This has an unintended effect of placing my art practice into this nebulous realm of the personal and therapeutic.
Exactly where I didn’t want to it to be.
But exactly where it has to be.
Good thing I am practicing nonjudgement observation. I am mindful of the tension.
Folks, I have been sitting on this big announcement for a while now, and I am SO excited to finally be able to go public with The Public!
Together with my dear friends and husband, we are starting a microbrewery and art gallery in Steinbach, Manitoba! Based on the idea of a public square, we have designing a place where you can meet up with people, view the work of rural based contemporary artists while you drink beautiful craft beer made onsite!
Along with a gallery for viewing work we are also bringing The Tiny Galleryon board and it will travel around to rural towns with a reproduction from our main gallery.
I cannot even express how excited I am.
There is a shit ton of work to do, but for now, I am just so proud to be making this announcement!
You can follow the adventure on Instagram: @thepublicbrewhouseandgallery
This past month I participated in an online group exhibit titled, Momentum. Last week we had our online opening which consisted of a zoom panel hosted by artist and professor, Sarah Fuller. A week prior to this Dana Kletke, Co-Executive Director of MAWA interviewed me about my work in the exhibit.
It is my first exhibit experience that has included not only the opportunity to craft a group curatorial statement, but also to experience both a panel and an interview specific to the exhibit and my work. What I now know: I really enjoy the process of making work coupled with conversations about process and ideas. I love how both the process of making art and the art itself brings this expansive capacity to conversation and allows viewer and artist to experience, view, and talk around ideas within the art.
As a new experience, this feels like such a generous “art world” tradition. Every artist should have the experience of exploring their work with safe, curious, interested viewers. What a thing.
Though, now that I am reflecting on all this, it occurs to me that I should credit the organizations of MAWA and MAN (such an unfortunate acronym) for being safe, positive spaces for artists to talk about their ideas.
The exhibit and the interviews have been really helpful as part of the Rural Artist Mentorship Program. I will write about my participation the program soon, but I just want to just to mention this exhibit and interviews on my blog. Momentum lands as a mid-point in the mentorship program and, as such, provided a fantastic opportunity to forge and small body of work, and fine-tune the ideas, complete them, document, and then communicate about them.
I grew up saying grace at every meal. It stopped making sense to me when I was 8 years old. I had made the PBJ, not God. Why would I thank God for something I clearly did?
Fast forward 28 years and I am nearly full circle–except now before I eat, I thank the bacteria, the soil, the lichen, the rocks, the trees, the water, the clouds, the wind, the sun, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe…
Look slower/ 35 mm/ 2019 Hunt Lake Trail
It is mind blowing to me that what I put in my body has taken literal eons of time. Life that emerged, lived, adapted, thrived, reproduced and died in timescales and quantities I cannot fathom.
One day for Earth is, well, a nice symbolic token. A gesture, or perhaps more cynically, a political and late-capitalistic ploy, to momentarily redirect our attention.
When it comes to grappling with the complexities of it all, the beauty and pain of the story, and the sheer weight of the earth in this particular time and space–I think the topic doesn’t need a day.
Print has not connected with me since 2018 when I took a print class. It is odd because in many ways that print class sent me on a trajectory into my current interest in emergent order. I began the class as an angry environmentalist. Through the process making the 3 assignments over the semester I realized the earth and eco systems will adapt, but humans might not. But that’s another blog.
1: “Grassland” my first print. read: humans and their goddamn laws. 2: “What we call home” read: Manitoba is home to many if you could just fucking look. 3: “Easter” read: oh shit, whether we acknowledge it or not, we are part of the ecosystem.
As you can see, it is not a far stretch from my final print “Easter” to my URA project, “Old Order, New Order.”
Old Order New Order
And now look where I am!
Photography, clay, and assemblage have connected with me. But since summer of 2018 I have felt like I have struggled to produce a good print.
I have been thinking about what it is that has not connected me, and last week I came to the conclusion that I let go of working big and that it is time to go back.
Now print is beginning to emerge in my head again. I have some ideas on where I need to go with this. No more small prints on their own. My small prints will be based on larger prints.
I am picking up where I left off and am dusting off my giant lino from the summer of 2018. I always felt this could be more.
I envision this being one giant zentangle-like linocut. It will take me a while. Within this there will be a combination of Celtic knots, swirls, and my chaos knots. Within these will be little illustrations of my past. These illustrations will be lifted into the documentary style screen print for each root ball. So the screens will be a series of 12 prints with the hashtag, #thisoncedefinedme. The larger sections of the print will be printed onto my containing vessels. It’s all making much more sense to me.
I love it when there is a breakthrough after years of wrestling. Note to self: sometimes go backwards to go forwards.
I hope you’re following, but if you’re not, the main point is: I’m going back to big.
Alexandra Ross 