I am on week two of a month-long residency in Oracle AZ. Too many thoughts crowd my mind to write well, but I am aware of a few threads that go through each day.
One is the lovely discovery that I am so very NOT alone in my love of bones. Bones are everywhere here, real, ceramic, aluminum...I add my paper vertebrea to the pile with delight. The desert makes skeletons of everything with ease, and I am witness on my daily walks to the stages of decay of the many cacti here. Of special interest to me is the lace-like infrastructure of the prickly pear. It is simply beautiful, and I have gathered samples, of course.
Another vein of thought has branched off of the bones...the phrase "of what remains" keeps rolling around in my head...the pod after the wind has taken the seed, the comb and nest once the colony has moved on, the burl of a fallen tree...and I'm starting to mix these images in my head...combining two "remains" that are an unnatural duo...
I have begun a couple of these projects, we'll see how they turn out. One is a large white pod that I am covering with the gorgeous grey mottled paper made by wasps for their nests. Another is a bone...a circular bone, into which I will build the combs of a hive. A nest protects a pod...a bone protects a hive. My fantacy biology.
