Women are the gateway:
Guardians of the heart,
Keepers of the hearth,
Weavers of the womb,
Sisters of the moon,
Healers of the bones,
Holders of the tomes.
Women are the world.
When I learned that my creative friends were coming together today with a benefit auction to support artist Heather Jean Skawold’s (@Callunajean on instagram, and of DellamorteCo.) mother in her fight against Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer, I thought that the very least I could do was give it a signal boost over here at Unquiet Things. I lost my own mother to cancer back in 2013 and know the feelings of frustration and helplessness that families, friends, and loved ones experience when someone beloved to them goes through such an ordeal. Anything you can do, even the smallest things, are helpful in keeping those feelings of hopelessness at bay…and if you are supporting a worthwhile cause, well naturally, that’s even better.
Elle of Chase & Scout jewelry (featuredpreviously at Unquiet Things) shared the following with me about this wonderful endeavor…
“@Callunajean has been sharing posts about her mother who had just been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, including sharing posts of shaving off her own hair in support. For those that don’t know @callunajean, she is the art director for @dellamorteco and the artist and designer behind @saintcalluna. When Calluna posted about her mother’s diagnosis, another friend had just wrapped up a benefit auction on her IG and I was in the process of putting together a milestone giveaway – I realized I’d much rather do something with true impact. I asked Calluna if she’d be comfortable with it, and we decided to try it out. Calluna and I reached out to our own friends in the community whose artwork resonated with us and I think we have put together a fantastic package.”
Starting now, just place a bid in comments of this instagram post (I’ve already bid, come say hi!) and they will be accepting bids through Saturday night. The highest bidder will be contacted with an invoice, and once paid items will ship via fedex ground with signature. The donation will be made to Ovarian Cancer Research Fund Alliance.
Donate to a worthy cause and bid to win a collection of art you’ll love for life!
From the “man I wish I had a time machine so that I could travel back to 2013 and know about this artist and his works at an earlier time but I guess it’s better later than never thanks to instagram user @siobhan.waters bringing him to my attention today”: the hypnopompic works of Kustaa Saksi
Kustaa Saksi is a Finnish artist and designer, based in Amsterdam, and a master of graphic storytelling through patterns, textile art and installation. Hypnopompic, a collection of eight limited edition jacquard tapestries, are woven from mohair and alpaca wool, cotton, and synthetic materials such as phosphate and metallic acrylic thread and were inspired by a member of Saksi’s family who suffers from hypnopompic hallucinations – a state of sensory confusion leading out of sleep, when the state of awakening gets mixed with the dream world into a surreal reality. On another level these surreal landscapes also refer to optical art, as Saksi explains: ‘The vivid textures and colours create new, radiant, psychedelic worlds.’
Through his medical research, Saksi has managed to link the state of ‘hypnopompic hallucinations’ with a view of the history of art and design. ‘I refer to scientific studies of the subject in my search for inspiration,’ he says. ‘The hypnopompic state has also been affiliated with visual delusions caused by migraine. These graphic patterns, designs and textures are thought to have contributed to the traditions of ornamentation, mosaic and textile.’
Saksi’s works have been exhibited at Victoria & Albert Museum, Cooper Hewitt and San Jose Museum of Art as well as galleries in New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Singapore, Berlin, Madrid, Milan, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Lima and Tokyo. Saksi has produced commissioned artworks for companies such as Nike, Issey Miyake, Ferragamo, Lacoste, Marimekko and Swedese.
I know I am a little late to the party on this one (how did I not know about this?) but Austin folks, you are in for a treat! Our friends at Recspec Gallery have curated a group show featuring new interpretations of the long-standing tradition of the bookplate. EX LIBRIS is a collection highlighting the work of 22 artists, and will be on display through June 9th, 2018.
We’re big fans of the work The Creeping Museum does, both their supporting of artists and the arts, as well as their giving back to the community through their efforts. Read more about past Creeping Museum exhibits and shows here, here, and, here.
The artist herself will be in attendance at the Garden of Grief installation, to talk about her work–which focuses on the ongoing themes of loss and mourning, intertwined with the compulsion to protect the relics left behind by the dead. Additionally, Megan Devine, author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand and Coleman Stevenson, creator of the Dark Exact Tarot and author of Breakfast: 43 Poems, will be attending the event for a special “Porch Salon” conversation about grief as it relates to the themes of Rebecca’s art: Megan will be talking about the importance of sharing our stories of loss, and Coleman will be reading a poem inspired by Rebecca’s work.
If you’re in Portland tomorrow night, I can think of no better plans than to stop by and see Rebecca’s beautiful, heart-snaring works, and to listen to the artist and the various guests share their experiences and stories. And if you do, fill me in, for I wish I could be there with you!
I am excited to announce that Unquiet Things will be featuring an in-depth interview with Rebecca Reeves later this autumn, so please remember to check back at that time! Until then, fill your eyes with her hauntingly thought provoking art at tomorrow’s Garden Of Grief.
The heart wants what it wants, and sometimes it makes spontaneous decisions to purchase something kinda weird that it has been subconsciously been looking for, for a very long time.
To back up, just a bit: it’s true that instagram can be kind of not great for me (and my wallet); I’m always finding beautiful jewelry or makeup or other frivolities to fall in love with, and with which I desperately desire to fill my greedy hands. But then, when I peek over to see what @phantasmaphile (the luminous witch and wise woman Pam Grossman) is up to, I am always reminded of the things my heart wants….and these things usually have nothing at all do to with that itchy need to continuously fill my hands and closets and shelves with more More MORE.
This thing in particular, if you go by Amazon’s listing, is a “Dewi Rice Goddess Flying Hanging Mermaid Lady“, and I remember seeing their weird, wild likenesses flying from the ceilings of a store in St. Augustine, Florida thirty years ago. I’m sure I didn’t have the money to pay for one at the time, and I probably couldn’t have articulated to my grandparents why I even wanted it, I just knew that it looked beautiful, felt magical, and belonged close to me. I had forgotten all about it, or so I thought, until I saw a little carved wooden lady in one of @phantasmaphile’s instagram stories earlier this week. Her unblinking, expectant gaze immediately sparked this recollection for me, and over the next few hours my mind drifted back in time, to when I was eleven years old, wandering idly through a gift shop, trying not to break anything, and finally settling upon the first time I locked eyes with this representation of something far older and more wondrous than the tourist baubles I had expected to find.
What Pam shared in her instagram stories wasn’t the same exact thing I held dear in my memory, and I wasn’t even sure how to go looking for it. However, my Google search for “carved wooden mermaid flying goddess” eventually lead me to this Dewi rice goddess, and to be quite honest, I am not even sure if this if she is the right one. I think the flying mermaid goddess in my memory held a mirror and a comb, and now that I look again, I think mayhaps I purchased the wrong one. Too late to second guess now!
Well, but I mean, really, is it? I could always get her a friend…
Dewi Sri is the Balinese goddess of rice and prosperity and is believed to have dominion over the underworld and the Moon. I am not sure where or how she becomes a mermaid or a winged creature, but hey, she’s a goddess. They do what they want.
It’s a funny thing when you set out to track down and procure for yourself the things that have been haunting your dreams for over half your life, isn’t it? Are they at all the way we’ve perceived them when we finally get them? My goddess’ wing is not cut the right size for her wing slot, and so it sits a little crooked. I suppose that gives her a jaunty sort of charm. She seems to think so, if her arch smile is any indication. And she may already be bringing bringing me prosperity! She arrived yesterday, and just today we finally closed on the sale of my late grandparent’s house. Coincidence? Well…it was scheduled before I even ordered her.
What does your heart remember, and long for through the years? Did you eventually receive it/retrieve it, and was it all you had dreamed?
I don’t think I have the words available to share with you my intense delight regarding the arrival of the newest member of my ghoulish menagerie, brought to uncanny life by the wonderfully talented hands of Han of Handsome Devils Puppets. But I am going to give it a try….
I have long loved the writings of Sei Shōnagon: her elegant lists, her acerbic observations, her beautifully intimate and wonderfully catty diaries–all of her anecdotes and opinions and inner dialogue, from the excruciating minutiae of everyday life, to the exquisite poetry she composed connecting and expanding these trifling, fragmented instances to the broader aspects of lived human experience; these strangely random and tangential stories have informed and inspired my own writings for many, many years now.
Translator Meredith McKinney writes in her intro notes to her translation of Shōnagon’s infamous Pillow Book, “she so engages us because she engages *with* us, we meet her eyes across 1000 years,” and I think that assessment of her ability to connect with us, now, today, through vast stretches of time–a totally different time than that in which she lived– is so eerily and excellently spot-on.
Sometimes, though, I can’t meet my own eyes in the mirror after reading a selection from The Pillow Book. McKinney further writes of the “spontaneity and intimacy” of Shōnagon’s writing, that “…draws the reader into a warm complicity, even when we find ourselves appalled at her frequent snobbery and occasional cruelty.” Shōnagon is basically a Heian era Mean Girl blogger, you know? And as someone who considers themselves to be “a very super nice person”–probably too nice for their own good– it is this mean streak that appears throughout her beautiful, clever writings that fascinates me endlessly.
Is that weird? I don’t understand the mindset of the mean. Except…I suppose…when I do. I can be rather scathing in my own thoughts about something I didn’t enjoy, or someone I don’t care for, and I must often remind myself that while cleverness is an admirable trait, cleverness can often come at the expense of kindness…and even if I didn’t say whatever means-spirited thing aloud, I still thought it. Or wrote it. Even if no one saw it.
And perhaps Shonagon thought that her writings, her pillow book, would never see the light of day? I don’t know. So while I started this rumination up on my high horse, with the statement that I find such cruelty and unkind thoughts alien to my personality…perhaps in exploring it a little, Sei Shōnagon and I are more alike than I would care to admit, and it is less a fascination with behavior foreign to me, and more that I am recognizing a kinship.
There’s not a great deal of imagery to be found with regard to Sei Shōnagon, and so we took some liberty with her appearance, adding some subtle, gothy touches to her sweeping robes, instead of what otherwise might have been a more brightly colored ensemble. I think she is utterly, gloriously perfect, from her lips and brows and inky cascade of hair, to the tips of her tabi-socked, be-sandaled feet, I am awestruck at the thought and research and inventiveness that went into her creation.
Shōnagon wrote of “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster”, and the rare beauty of this marvelous, hand-sculpted, one-of-a-kind piece of art is most certainly at the top of my list of such things. Thank you, Han. She is amazing, in the truest sense of the word.
During a conversation with my baby sister sometime this past week, I confessed that when this business with my late grandparents’ estate is over, my grand plan was to fake my own death and run away forever. I was only half kidding.
I want to be done with these responsibilities. With obligations. With meetings and phone calls and relaying information back and forth and second-guessing my every decision and feeling like a failure because I’m not doing it right, not doing it timely enough, not doing it the way someone else might have done it. I want to walk away and never look back and never ever have to think about this again. Faking my own death and running away to be a hermit in the mountains, without another human being (or a telephone) for hundreds of miles around, sounds super appealing to me right now. I want to disappear so that they’ll never find me. And maybe then I will finally have a chance to properly mourn.
Rosie Anne Prosser, A sunless world
It was with a head heavy and churning with these sorts of thoughts that I discovered the photography of Rosie Anne Prosser via her flickr account late last night. A photographer and storyteller who describes herself as a “Mountain Goat raised in The Black Mountains”, her melancholic landscapes of lonely cliffs, secluded thickets, and remote paths, the focal point a lone figure, cloaked in mists and shadows with her back to both the camera and the viewer, enigmatically, introspectively, and perhaps even a bit defiantly gazing off to somewhere else, entirely…
Well, I’m having difficulty articulating how it made me feel. It was just one of those serendipitous moments when you find something you needed to see, just when you needed to see it. Each and every image tugged at my heart and seemed to echo back to me everything that I am feeling right now, and my soul whispered to me in a language tinged with both misery and hope, “I want to go to there.” I don’t know that I can say more than that.
For now, though, you can tell them I was last seen climbing into these photos. I will immerse myself in solitude, silence, and still, sunless days. Please don’t try to find me.
I only learned about the Pirelli Calendar just this year, so I hesitate to refer to it as something along the lines of “a hoary old institution” ….but when researching a small feature for Haute Macabre this week about their current 2018 all-star, all-black cast, I saw several decades worth of white faces and white bodies gracing the publication over previous years. I then realize that the last time the calendar had an all-black ensemble was in 1987. That’s 30+ years ago. Yikes.
Photographer Tim Walker and stylist Edward Enninful (British Vogue’s first black editor in chief) envisioned for 2018 a new and different take on Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, Through The Looking Glass, and they have given it a vibrant, powerful new treatment entirely populated by beautiful black models, musicians, and activists who cavort and contort through the story’s madcap, marvelous world.
This week at Haute Macabre: an extensive interview with Adrienne Rozzi of Poison Apple Printshop, wherein we discuss her art and its inspirations, as well as, her great passion for knowledge and truth. It’s rare when the subject of your interview actually makes *you* feel special and amazing, but Adrienne is one such rare, remarkable soul.
Thank you for your candor and your genuine, generous nature, Adrienne.
I don’t think I have the words available to share with you my intense delight regarding the arrival of the newest member of my ghoulish menagerie, brought to uncanny life by the wonderfully talented hands of Han of 
