Einstein claimed that the most important thing you have to decide is whether or not the universe is a friendly place. Well?  Chickadees, roses, summer? But then, barbed wire, cancer, jail?  We see one side or the other. But really, it’s both, side by side.  It’s light and shadow.  It’s funny and serious.  It’s open and secret.  It’s war and peace.

Re: The Storyteller Series:  Isak Dinesen says “All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.”   The little figures (often dolls) in the Storytellers’ pockets hear the stories, are the stories.  The stories are always part of the storyteller, like art is always part of the artist, like we are all always part of the world.

Re: Globes:  The globe obsession is coming back to me.  I think this now qualifies as a lifelong passion, especially when you think how I hugged my globe when I was a kid, and put it on top of the pile of what I’d save in case of fire.  That and my doll Jimmy.  I still love the wonderful roundness of a globe.  I cut out the continents not just to distinguish it from a basketball  but to use the globe as a vehicle for those contradictory things about life in the world. Negative/positive. Connected/separated. Inside/outside.

Re: Bronze:  “Everything looks better turned into bronze” says Barry, one of my fellow-sculptors who casts bronze at Pratt Fine Arts.  He is so right.  The globes in bronze.  All my favourite found objects.  My own sculpted images.  Such a satisfying transformation.  I love the processes of clay and wax and plaster and sand and the lovely metal itself, hot liquid, heavy solid, and with the watery translucent surface.

Re:  Mice:  I have on my conscience some of the ways I’ve dealt with mice.  I ask forgiveness of the mouse energy, and agree to use mouse imagery in my art, to expiate.  Tiny mice are cast in inconspicuous places.  Way inside the elephant storyteller.  On all the globes. Mice are so tiny, so hiding, but powerful too.  Powerful enough to set the armies in motion.  In Us vs Them: the Mouse Wars, the armies gather. But how unfair – armed soldiers versus innocent babies?  In every war, each side sees itself as persecuted victim.

Re:  Elephants:  So big.  So powerful.  A healing image for me.  But did you ever hear Denis Lee’s poem about the elephant?

Willoughby wallaby woo

I don’t know what to do.

Willoughby wallaby wee

An elephant sat on me.

Willoughby wallaby wash

I’m feeling kind of squash.

Willoughby wallaby woo