Where's my mold?!

     Nope, nothing yet... maybe it would help if I didn't keep checking every few hours.

Orange Pekoe teabag

Banana

Coffee grounds

Left over sandwich

     In the meanwhile, I'm trying to learn about image stacking and depth of field stuff with my new camera (Sony Nex 5T). I'm going to turn into one of those people... you know, the ones you see at gallery openings everywhere, standing in front of the largest piece, sipping wine and nibbling all the cheese... and talking about Monet/Manet, and about aperture and lighting and Nikon vs Canon, blah blah blah.

    Anyway, I'm still getting the hang of the basic functions of the camera (I've never owned anything except point and shoots before),  but I'll definitely need to improve on the DoF if I'm going to capture the scenery.

Antiques and Walmart

     A huge thank you to the lovely and ever helpful Mr. Frank, for loaning me this beautiful antique microscope! You have no idea how excited my inner nerd is!

Oh, Walmart!

     As someone who uses her own shopping bag at grocery stores- who recently ( and shamelessly) gave a lecture to the cash register clerk at a Houston supermarket about all the plastic bags they were using,  I was feeling a bit concerned and guilty with the amount of packaging paper Walmart had been stuffing with my order of household necessities (well, I wasn't going to lug around washing detergent and fabric softener)- which they sent in four (really, Walmart?) boxes over four days. It's a lot of paper. The paper has been folded and set aside for now, but while playing around with the microscope, I think I might have found some use for it before it goes into the recycling bin:

 

Moss and Lichen

      Let's see if anything comes out from this idea.

     BTW, when I said I replaced real content with cat photos, I wasn't kidding:

Thanks Ernie!

ALOHA FROM OREGON

A beautiful sunny day, instead of cold, grey and damp!

      As some of you may already know, it has been an epic journey of tears, nervous breakdowns, planes and paperwork, but here I am, at the Sitka Center of Art and Ecology for an artist-in-residency program. I'm still in a bit of a daze that I actually made it here, but I'll need to get over that soon.

     So what am I doing here? I was told I could do anything I liked, which freaks me out (in a good way). The area is fairly isolated and I don't have a car, so I can't go procrastinate in a local bar too often. 

     My introductory show and tell presentation was last night. I don't think I was very well prepared, so I just replaced real content with a few photos of Kali (my cat), which worked, kind of, I think.

Look at that little ecosystem!

     I'm forming a vague idea for my project, which I will have to later rewrite to make it sound all thesis like, because I'm surrounded by smart people. I'll be walking around with my camera, taking photos of moss, lichen and mycological life, and I'm growing mold in my studio, which, at the moment, is like watching paint dry. Perhaps I should just leave the samples in the fridge, and forget about them, like what normal people would do? The overall concept is to investigate our relationship with these lifeforms, using metals as the medium of expression. It will be narrowed down eventually, but for now, I'm quite happy to be all over the place. 

    Quite a few people were enthusiastic about my proposal ("My daughter had a pet slime mold! I'm so excited for you!"), so thank you all for the moral support! I'm glad I'm not surrounded by hypochondriacs.

     I am eternally grateful to Sitka, and all its lovely people that make it happen, for giving me this wonderful opportunity to be a citizen-scientist-artist. If you are in the area, feel free to drop by and check out the progress of the work!