Before the green curtain descends

Making the most of my dried specimens before summer’s green curtain descends. I adore horsetail. Here is just a few of the reasons why:

Modern horsetails first appeared during the Jurassic period.
The group is now almost extinct, but one genus survives: Equisetum is the only living genus of horsetails.
Horsetails are native on all continents except Australasia and Antarctica.
Horsetail was one of the most important plant groups in the Palaeozoic era.
They are seen in the coal measures of the Carboniferous period, and some were trees reaching up 30 metres.
They are vascular plants that reproduce by spores and not by seeds.
The name horsetail came because the branched species somewhat look like a horse’s tail.

dried horsetail stems (Equisetum)

In praise of shadows

I am still feeling my way into workin on black. Playing. Experimenting. Trying to coax light and shadow to bend to my artistic vision. I am having fun.

Hiding in plain site

Look at all that color! I picked all of these budding stems today on a one-hour walk along Grass Lake with my best friend Kristin. If you weren’t paying attention, you could think it’s still all gray and brown here in Minnesota. But not at all! I love that I can still be astonished walking my same trails every year :-)

collection of early spring buds: cottonwood, dogwood, red maple, pussywillow, unidentified, red elderberry, forsythia, dogwood, cottonwood

frozen in time, temporarily

I dried this stem last fall. We were still in the apartment then. I didn’t have a basement or a garage to stash drying botanicals. So I used a corner of my closet. It was one of the perks of losing everything in a house fire–empty closets!

dried pink coneflower

When in doubt, make a circle

After years of making simple assemblages with found nature bits, I have literally circled in on the circle as my favorite composition. This should not have been a surprising realization– there is nothing more harmonious than the circle. The symbolism of a circle is well known: unity, wholeness, oneness, eternity, infinity, cyclicality, the divine, and on and on. I wasn’t thinking of any of that when I was making my earlier works. I was just pushing my subjects around until I saw something that pleased me. And what pleased me, more often than not, were circles–wreathes, crescents, oculi, mandalas, concentric circles, tangent circles, overlapping circles, spirals, rings, halos, ensos. Circles made me calm. They made me happy. By centering the eye, they seemed to somehow center my nervous system too. All hail the cirlce!