notes on making and not making

Maybe that's how to start this. Maybe that's a false start.

I want to be making art. I need to be making art. It's like needing to eat. Or more like needing to talk. I need to get into this urge I have for materials that are significant just because they are what they are. Like rotting wood, and rusting metal, and Doris Salcedo's work with bones inlaid in pieces of furniture. Yeah. No symbology, no metaphor: just material to sight, I guess. Keeping it all preverbal. Skipping that nasty language.

I think that's why I can really only handle abstract art, in the end. Texture can win me over to figurative things sometimes, or the story of its making can do that too -- like Magdalena Abakanowitz and her crazy small studio beginnings. They're bodies but not bodies; they're charred flesh but they're bronze; they're resin-soaked fiber but they're just burlap bags ... Yeah, she's okay with me.

And what do I want to be making? Objects. Which sounds like sculpture. But really it's more like objects. More like mobiles, and tiles, and cyanotype'd full body portraits that have really blurry lines, and knitted things.

What does knitting have to do with all this, really ... is it tied in to what made me want to make only functional ceramics? Maybe.

And then there's installation, which honestly, is how I see everything I want to make. They're not transferable.

Maybe I need to use the tape inside my old video cassettes. Maybe the material can be its own thing. The passing of a medium. A repurposed medium. That also happens to come in really long strips ... that could be knitted ... like long scarves of cassette tape, inside shorter tubes of knitted silk/mohair that are really open and light-colored ...

And what about the tape being black and shiny, but being able to project multi-colored image? What about that?

Also, other ideas:
1.) fabric, probably scrim, soaked full of starch, molded, and hung in mobiles
2.) hanging said mobiles outside, taking lots of photos
3.) selling photos? Really? That doesn't sound like me.
4.) selling the mobiles ... sounds safer.
5.) knitting socks
6.) knitting tea cozies
7.) knitting a hat for Noah as fast as I can. He's sick, and he lost his only hat, and it is very very cold.