my greatest achievement

Yep. This is it.

Toothbrushes.

I am working on a project for my sculpture class - I'll talk more about that when I've done more work on it. For now, I had to de-bristle sixteen toothbrushes, and I ended up having some fun with the bristles. So, here is a ball of approximately 16,000 toothbrush bristles:

Something I hope to one day soon revise.

it wasn’t the first time I saw you,
the first time I looked,
really looked.
it was like
skidding on black ice,
but not skidding,
only the fear of skidding.
or like tiptoeing
over the cracks
in a sidewalk,
or walking barefoot
over tangled branches.
the first time I looked,
really looked,
it was like
getting lost without a map,
but not staying lost,
just the fear of staying lost,
only,
I really was lost.

Paper tree

For my sculpture class, I attempted to create a tree entirely out of paper. I had wanted to work with a fairly realistic scale, rather than making something miniature, and the sculpture ended up somewhere in between.





I began the tree by taking cereal boxes from the recycling shed and rolling them into cylinders. I stuffed the cylinders with newspaper, and attached them to form the skeleton of the tree. I then tore newspaper into strips, twisted them, and wrapped them around the skeleton. This created an interesting texture, which I then paper-mâchéd over with brown paper bags.

The tree did not turn out exactly how I had wanted it to. I think that trying to use such a large scale inhibited my ability to pay attention to smaller details. In any case, I'm satisfied with it. It also has a pretty convincing shadow.



Once it's a little warmer and more of the snow has melted, I'm going to bring it into the woods and lay it down amongst some dead trees. It does sort of look like a dead tree. I'm going to take pictures of it there, and then leave it to decay.

Knitting With Paper

I'm taking a sculpture class this semester, and our first assignment is to build something entirely out of paper. Currently, I'm working on creating a small tree made primarily out of newspaper and brown paper bags. It's nowhere near finished, but I'll post photos when it is. Before I began the tree, however, my first idea was to experiment with knitting:



To do this, I tore newspaper into long, thin strips and braided them together to make a cord, which I then knitted. It was somewhat tedious, but the result looked pretty cool.

This is going to be a good year. I know it.