September 2010
1 post
1 tag
Back in Brooklyn & River to Creek
I’m in the midst of getting my head (& body, I suppose) back into the bizarre ecological niche that is North Brooklyn. I’m doing research for a project I’d like to carry out involving bioremediation and water from English Kills (the closest thing to a creek or river to be found in this neighborhood). After spending time at Signal Fire with some awesome activism-oriented...
August 2010
1 post
Signal Fire!
I just completed a week in the Mt. Hood National Forest with Signal Fire. This was a really unique & inspiring residency. More coming soon!
June 2010
4 posts
6 tags
Installing Chrysalis on Bedford Ave.
We had an interesting installation session for Chrysalis on Friday. Here are some shots from a bustling evening on Bedford Avenue. Documentation from the finished installation (video and stills) to follow!
4 tags
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
I’ve got plenty of summer reading to do. Still I keep looking around for more. Just downloaded this journal, via a tip from ecoartspace. I haven’t had time to read any of it yet, but looking over the article titles, it sounds intriguing. Check it out here.
Trade School on Kickstarter
Trade School has almost reached their $9000 fundraising goal on kickstarter. Only 8 days to go, and they need $1500 more! Check out their kickstarter page. Plus, there’s a neat photo from Andrea and my drawing class on their most recent update page :)
From kickstarter.com:
“A pan of Ellie Iron’s class, “Drawing for Pleasure and Relaxation”. Ellie led students...
Art in the Open, Philadelphia
It’s coming up! June 9-12 I’ll be working outside, on the banks of the Schuylkill River, as part of Philadelphia’s first Art in the Open festival. I just came across a nice blog post about the festival here. If you have any Philadelphia recommendations, ecological or otherwise, send them my way!
May 2010
2 posts
Great Fallings
After a week of hard work out in Paterson, Great Fallings opened successfully last night! I think my melting/dripping Passaic River water piece (“Proglacial Hydrating Structure”) ended up being a successful experiment. More documentation coming soon, but for now, here are a few photographs Dan snapped during the evening. More (and larger) on flickr.
Oil & Marshes...
This is a good (in a depressing way) article from the times on the wetland ecosystems being threatened by the oil spill in the gulf. For some reason I’ve got a particularly soft spot for grassy, marshy landscapes. I wish there was something I could do to help. Do they need someone to clean pelican feathers, perhaps? Sigh.
The article describes how normal, healthy marsh grass would recover...
April 2010
1 post
1 tag
Future Archaeology
I’m working on a new collaborative project. It opens next Friday, May 7, 7-10. Much circuit building and branch sculpting to be done before that! More details here.
March 2010
3 posts
5 tags
Noise pollution & Songbirds
I’ve been struggling with the effects of a ambient city noise invading my urban home over the past few months, but I’ve never thought that closely about what influence this might have on my avian neighbors (there are barely any in our current part of Bushwick!). Apparently, the constant noise from human industry and transportation affects birds as well, causing decreased ability to...
Sunday Morning Read...
I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Jaron Lanier’s new book “You are Not a Gadget” over Dan’s shoulder the past few days. Ironic, because this is just what Lanier, according to an article in this morning’s Times, describes as the trending habit in reading: “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a...
1 tag
Everglades Deal Slowed :(
Over a year ago, I wrote an excited post about a pending deal between US Sugar and the Florida Water Board- a deal that would have placed a massive amount of agricultural land into a preserve, aimed at restoring the flow of water through the Everglades. This plan had been heralded best and perhaps only solution for saving this dying ecosystem- the lack of fresh, clean water flowing through this...
February 2010
4 posts
Drawing at Trade School
Dan took some lovely pics while we were holding our workshop last night. It was a good experience, and gave me some food for thought in terms of future workshops and exercises.
This looks fascinating:
(via Dan) Jason Kottke points to a recent study on morphological changes in North American birds. Apparently wing shapes are beginning to change in response to changing habitats, specifically deforestation. I’ve yet to read the original post, which links to the original article, but I’m looking forward (with some trepidation) to following that trail. I would imagine that over the span...
1 tag
Drawing for Pleasure and Relaxation
I’m teaching a drawing workshop with Andrea Jenkins next Tuesday night at Trade School. The class has filled up (yay!) but we’re considering looking for other locations to teach it, probably around Bushwick. The workshop centers around the idea that reconnecting the hand, eye, and mind through drawing can start with exercises that relieve tension and build comfort levels. Learning a...
Out of school...
Sort of! I’ve finished my masters, but continue to go to school, because of all this fun alternative/free school stuff that is going on in NYC of late. I particularly enjoyed some classes at the temporary Trade School (Grand Opening) over the past week. There are still a few weeks remaining to get yourself some education for barter. Dan is teaching on February 12!
(Image ripped from the...
January 2010
2 posts
Watershed Closes Tomorrow
My MFA is almost complete! Tomorrow, January 18th, from 6-8, we have a closing reception in the gallery. Our thesis exhibition was written about favorably by James Wagner of Art Cat in a recent blog post. I like what he had to say about my work, especially his notion that it “addresses our ‘attachment’ to our environment, both the gifted and the corrupted”. Details about...
Disparate Landscapes: Charles Burchfield and New...
I spent yesterday driving around Los Angeles with Dan, his sister Jen, and her boyfriend Jonathan. We were out to catch the final day of two exhibitions: Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, at the Hammer, and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, at LACMA. We weren’t intending to see two landscape-based shows back to back, but I’m glad we...
December 2009
1 post
Upcoming...
The results of my stick/branch/twig gathering habits of the past year or so are going to be on view soon as part of my thesis exhibition. Dan and I are also at work on a web component for the show, which will live here eventually.
October 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Autumn Colors
We took an amazing trip to upstate New York this past week. Most of the trip was concentrated near the heart of the Adirondack Park in the Huntington Wildlife Forest, but we also stopped through Albany on our rainy trip home, where I gathered a spectacular mix of sugar maple, norway maple, red oak and liquid amber leaves. More about the trip to come!
Precipitation
It’s raining today in NYC. I’m sitting on the couch in the soft light of late afternoon, listening to the drizzle. I’ve been thinking a lot about water since I came back to this city about a month ago. Canals, storm drains, decommissioned water towers- infrastructure for controlling water surrounds us in urban environments. And here in New York, we also sit at the apex of many...
September 2009
1 post
Flyway is launched!
Dan helped me document my Schiermonnikoog Project. He did a wonderful job:
www.ellieirons.com/flyway
August 2009
2 posts
Gathering & Building...
This month has been extremely satisfying. I often spend early mornings out in the dewy forests and meadows of this island, gathering project materials (mostly dead sticks & branches). It’s very quiet, contemplative work, except for the moments when I startle a wild creature, or one startles me (generally a large Dutch hare or a panicked pheasant- they come bursting out of the brush as I...
1 tag
A small death.
There are swallows everywhere on this island. They swoop and flit from the early morning to past sunset (10:00 pm, currently). There are very few cars on the island but this little fellow managed to collide with one of them, just as I was passing on my bicycle. A friend picked him up and handed him to me. I’ve never held a wild creature so recently deceased. The tiny body was amazingly...
July 2009
1 post
Oh languishing blog!
I haven’t forgotten you! I just finished a really amazing week teaching acrylic painting and stick sculpture to an inspired bunch of 10-17 year olds at summer camp. Plus, I got to sleep in a tent under the pines, and saw the best milky way I’ve seen in years. Here’s a shot of some of the paintings the kids came up with…I was trying to teach them about abstraction &...
June 2009
2 posts
1 tag
The longest day of the year...
Summer is really here now- today (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway) is the Summer solstice, the longest day of the year! I’ll be spending this day of extended sunshine in a land of overwhelming verdure and humidity (I’m visiting a friend in eastern Tennessee, the land of kudzu). I hope to have some decent kudzu photographs later on, but for now, here is my solstice image: the sun...
1 tag
Sebastião Salgado's Genesis Project
I couldn’t help but feel quite skeptical when I first heard about photo-journalist Sebastião Salgado’s current project. This article, recently published in the New York Times, has piqued my interest a bit. Known for sociopolitically themed photography that chronicles the plight of the world’s poor and impoverished populations (and often criticized for romanticizing that plight),...
May 2009
2 posts
Thorn Forest by the Black Sea
Following is one of the stranger highlights from our Romania trip. At the end of the Sulina arm of the Danube River Delta, where it meets the Black Sea, we came across a spectacularly forlorn forest of scrubby thorn trees and river-worn garbage:
While the initial impression of the place was one of desolation and waste, this marginal-looking environment was actually humming with life. The trees...
The Delta, and a new exhibition
We are just back from a really special vacation/research trip to the Danube Delta in Romania. More pictures and thoughts from the trip to come! In the meantime, I’m immersed in installing my show here at DeFKa in Assen, the Netherlands. It opens tomorrow! Here is a bit of a preview, of the installation process:
April 2009
3 posts
Elspeth Diederix
I’m currently a little bit transfixed by the photography of Kenyan born Dutch artist Elspeth Diederix. A friend at Frank Mohr jotted her name down on a piece of scrap paper for me, telling me that her images were curious, a little strange, that I might like them. And indeed I do. She seems to be documenting through photography some of the phenomena I’m attempting to capture by building...
2 tags
herman de vries
My work has been changing since I’ve been here in the Netherlands, and as a result, my professors and friends have been mentioning artists that are new to me. One recent discovery is Dutch artist herman de vries (b. 1931), pictured here with his piece from earth (2007, earth rubbings on paper).
I recently had the chance to see this piece and others at the Kroller Mueller Museum (an...
1 tag
Masses from the Beach
The island of Schiermonnikoog is mostly national park, surrounded by mudflats sloping slowly into the North Sea. Buried in the soft sand along the beach, there are masses of organic material (seaweed, fish bones, shells) bound together with the plastic fibers from fishing nets and ropes. These lumps/knots roll around in the sea, gathering bits and pieces, until they wash up on the shore, where I...
March 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Mysteries of Migration
AEWA (The African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement) is an arm of the United Nations Environment Programme. Until this morning I had no idea such an organization existed. I was in the process of trying to find somewhere to buy bird identification bands (googled “groningen birds banding”). No luck with the bands, but I came across this article, The Mysteries of Bird Migration, on the AEWA...
1 tag
Gathering...
It’s really starting to feel like Spring here in Groningen. I’ve noticed birds of all species (crows, blackbirds, coots, pigeons, magpies…) beginning to gather twigs and sticks for nest building. The mysterious masses I’ve seen in the trees since I arrived here are coming alive, and growing!
I am also doing some gathering of my own. I’ve been riding along the...
February 2009
6 posts
evening sky
During the day, the winter sky here in the Northern Netherlands tends to be a dull, monotonous light grey. But that same sky, come twilight, takes on a new dimension. Often, as the sun sinks, folds, ripples and plumes come into view in the cloud cover. The deep blue tones at this hour are complimented by the warm orange glow of street lamps. In the top of this tree, a (to me, Eurasian) Blackbird...
A quote for today...
John Muir, writing on his treks in the Sierra Nevadas, and his wider understanding of the rhythms of the world:
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunshine, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth...
1 tag
Seeing Bruegel in Brussels
When I made my proposal to come to Europe to study, I argued that my interest in landscape justified my trip; I would see the evolution of Western landscape painting in the lands it had occurred in, and my comprehension of the subject would be enriched. At the time, this seemed like a bit of fluff for the sake of the interview panel, but I have to admit that yesterday, as I stood in front of...
1 tag
http://tinyurl.com/canary-project →
This is an interesting read from the Brooklyn Rail. The author hits on some important caveats in the art/activism combination, which I’ve been contemplating myself lately. Some of the thinking feels a bit muddled to me, but these are issues I’m muddled on myself, so I identify, to say the least.
Agrophilia...
…or “the love or horizontal spaces”, (according to J. Brinckerhoff Jackson)- it’s a love I need to nourish in myself occasionally. When my stores are running low, the verticality of Manhattan can give me the urge to hurry away to Brooklyn and climb up on a roof top. Now, for the next three months, I’ll have my fill of horizontality. Just a five minute pedal from my...
1 tag
Back in the (new!) studio
I started working again today, just a little bit. This is the new studio. So fresh, clean, and spotless, it feels like a space for quiet contemplation more than industrious creativity. I am rather in the contemplative phase of my production right now, so I don’t mind.
Tomorrow I hope to get out of the city on my bicycle and get a feel for the landscape out there. It’s supposed to...
January 2009
4 posts
132 Birds at the Museum of Natural History!
I recently received a lovely late Christmas gift, and in the process became familiarized with Jen Beckman’s project 20x200. I am now the happy owner of an editioned print of Jason Polan’s “132 Birds at the Museum of Natural History”. Fantastic, both the print and the project. It’s a nice idea- affordable art, exposure for artists, and for me, something new to look...
The Brain & Urban Life
Over the life of this blog, I’ve been contemplating (here & here) the positive effects natural settings seem to have on the human brain. It’s a concept that seems to lend credence to my need for plants, green space and open sky, and also lends a little extra fuel to my creative process.
This week, after returning to NYC from a few weeks of relatively rural life, I’ve felt,...
Contemplating tradition
I’m curious to see the Raqib Shaw show at the Met. Karen Rosenberg, reviewing the show for the Times (article here), describes it as underscoring the “conservatism” of the Met’s approach to contemporary art, but I’ve enjoyed their other shows in this area (Neo Rauch, Kara Walker) so I’m expecting to find something in this too. Rosenberg criticizes the...
December 2008
4 posts
Borderlands
We are in Los Angeles for the Christmas holiday. Los Angeles is an expansive city- of course in size, but also ecologically. When we lived here, we were in the flat delta region near the coast, where the great wilderness of the Pacific dominates the environment. For this visit, we are staying inland, in the foothills on the edge of another pseudo-wilderness, the Angeles National Forest. Here the...
Restoring the Everglades, A "River of Grass"
The NY Times has an article today about ongoing negotiations between U.S. Sugar and the Florida Water Board over the purchase of 300 square miles of agricultural land for restoration. Plans have been approved (barely) by the Water Board, but it sounds like there are still a lot of hurdles going forward (& the current economic situation is not helping things). If it happens, lake Okeechobee...
More landscape musings
This time a theoretician’s view- I’ve been doing some reading for an art history research paper:
Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both represented and presented space, both signifier and signified, both a frame and what the frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package.
-W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape...
The Future of Fish Consumption
Mark Bitman, who usually writes about food & cooking, has an article in the NY Times this morning on the pluses and minuses of aquaculture, and the potential for stable wild fisheries in the coming decades:
A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of Fish
November 2008
3 posts
Thanksgiving in Bushwick
We have some California decorations to add to our Brooklyn Thanksgiving this year:
My mom brought us a beautiful collection of California foothill buckeyes and acorns- hard to come by in the streets of Bushwick. They make a nice compliment to our bowl of upstate apples and pears. I’m off to make some cranberry sauce and contemplate my thankfulness.
Soft Fascination vs. Directed Attention
I am still mulling over the ideas from that previous post, and thinking about how they apply to my practice as a painter. After a full day in the studio today, it seems that I am working on one painting of each type in my studio right now. Just begun is a bold black, gold and red scene, with architectural details, strong contrast, and heavy perspectival shifts. Its companion (pendant?) has a much...