Ideas and current projects

I've never been one to ever be bored: I always have plenty of ideas. My bedroom wall is filled with bits and pieces, sketches, and notes from things I'm working on or will start soon. The problem is to finish what one starts: this plagued me throughout art school, where a series of short assignments don't always seem to add up to anything bigger.

Working in science is a little different: here, everything has to add up to a bigger goal if it is done right. My biology mentor investigates a number of aspects of plant morphology (particularly of the mustard and bulrush families); one of my art mentors retroactively documents events in her past; and so on. In my case, it's been harder to figure out what this "big picture" is, being on this balancing act between science and art.

I'm fully convinced that science and art are essentially the same thing (If you're doing it right, at least) and so I won't try to divide what I do into either category. (The exception to this is science writing, which is a very specific, very tight, and often difficult style.) My current projects are something like this:

The Brassicaceae Project- An examination of pollen morphology and size as affected by microscopy and preparation techniques. This is a required part of my science degree, and an intense introduction to publishable science writing. It's also reinforcing my desire to be an independant 19th Century Gentleman-scientist when I grow up.

The Book Project- The fiancé's 1100-ish page physical chemistry textbook is a wee bit too much for her to carry around all day, she told me. This class is two semesters long- unusual with college. "All right, my love" I told her, "I can take care of that." Flash forward to me cutting the cover and spine off, cutting the block (the stack of pages in the middle) into 4 convenient peices, and stab binding endpapers and loose pages back onto it. I used to work doing book repair at an institutional library, so this is nothing new to me. Currently, I'm covering them in gold and red Sari fabric (whoohoo sale at JoAnne!) and will get them back to her before the semester starts again.

The Autographic 4x5 Project- Back in July, I stopped at A Certain Antiques Shop and picked up a Kodak Autographic Junior 3A. Autographic film was a great idea at the time: that a part of the film be written on through the back of the camera, to have notes, or dates, or autographs. The camera was very large by today's standards, and fits a 4x5 film holder in the back. I'm in the process of making it into a fixed-focus 4x5 camera, with the advantage of not having to make the two hardest parts of the camera: the bellows and the ground glass back.

The Independent Study- As a way to stay in the Whole Art Thing and maintain my sanity, I'm taking a small independent study (ART 59somethingorother) working with science images to make alternative process prints of "conditions associated with death, decay, and destruction." This will be one of my outlets this semester- I hope it doesn't become too much of a distraction. I have all-hours access to a scanning electron, transmission electron, and laser-scanning confocal microscope to do this. And speaking of SEM:

The Watch and The Etching Plates- A couple minor projects: a reflected laser image of a pocket watch mechanism. This is more difficult than it sounds because unlike most microsgraphs, anything that isn't in focus doesn't show up. I'm working on a way to register several hundred exposures together, but it's harder than I thought. The etching plates are a minor project looking at printmaking etching plates under the SEM.