Tuesday, June 23, 2009

sustainability

except for the last photo, these were all taken of a museum display from when they had an exhibition on silk. i took copies of the Japanese photos part of the exhibit too. it's interesting to see how certain things don't change despite the technological advances.

anyway, despite what i said in the previous about the pins and human actions being brutal, i'm more interested in how we as humans could coexist with nature, and how we utilize resources without being wasteful. (i do think traditional sericulture is good for sustainability for that reason.) i'm glad the Field Museum and other institutions keep specimens of creatures so we can enjoy and learn. my little photo project is going to take months, but travelling around the world in hope of finding these creatures would take more than a lifetime i'm sure... (and if i had my way, i'd rather not stuck in samsara for too long, thank you very much. :P)



















































Monday, June 22, 2009

Field trip


Had my appointment with Jim, one of the insect curators at the Field Museum, on Friday. What a nice and helpful guy! And what an incredible collection! It was quite amazing to see all the rows of rows of shelves that reminded me of library stacks and knowing in each, there are hundreds of specimens. I wish I had the time to go through all of them. As it was I spent about 3 hours there, and photographed about 15 trays of specimens - a small fraction of the ones I'd like to go through for this project... Apologies to Jim, who has to escort me to and from the space, for the upcoming pestering! :P


So here are the first photos I "processed" in Photoshop, taken with a nikon 60mm ("Bob" - no, I don't name all my lens, just this one, which started jokingly and stuck.)

One thing that struck me as I was looking at the trays is the incredible beauty and equal brutality of the pinned insects. It was almost surreal. (The other was how amazing these scientists' brains must be, to contain all "faces" and the strings of crazy long names.) With that in mind, I made the colors more vibrant, like how they would look when they were alive (some, over a hundred years ago). I'm fascinated by the pins and the patterns that showed obvious human arrangement. I like how they emphasize the beauty and brutality of life and death, and human's interaction with nature.





(dunno why this is underlined - technical glitch - not emphasizing content...)

Found an on-line site that sells live cocoons and eggs!! I wanted Ios (featured in this group of photos) but right now they only have luna moths. It seemed luna are easier to rear and possible to do so indoors anyway. So now I have to see if I can find sources of food nearby (which would be "fun", since I can only recognize gingko trees). My mom's promised to get me 7 cocoons for my birthday. The real gift is she's going to help me take care of them and manage the cats! Happy birthday to me!!










Sunday, June 14, 2009

Pupae



While the 3rd (and currently final) batch of thrift store dollies are drying and their hair conditioning, I started on the next project: felt pupae.

As I'm sewing these pieces, I remembered hemming pants when I was young - like 10-years-old-young, or maybe even younger than that. There was this commercial tailor in the building my grandmother and I were living, and she'd get pants from them to hem. I remember sitting near the floor with my grandmother and great aunt, and listening to their conversations while we sewed. Whatever money I earned was mine to keep, I recall. Even before the fashion dept. I knew how to make patterns and sew, because those were simply skills a girl should have.

Having to work for pocket money stopped when my mom came back from Paris, and I started getting allowances instead. Then, my free time got filled with lessons and extra-curricular studies. In contrast, when my grandmother's teacher told my great-grandfather she, too, would make a good teacher one day, he immediately withdrew her from school saying girls didn't need to know so much.

It's interesting, looking back, how values change as societies evolve, and what girls/women are supposed to do, and what skills are valued, etc... I wish I remembered all the stuff my grandmother and great aunt talked about.

Anyway, still 37 of these to go. Oh, goodie!

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Strange Orange


Yeah, a few of them are not quite Barbies... There's actually an Olsen twin doll in there. Don't know what I'm doing with it yet...

Here they're cleaned and waiting for the hair treatment to work...

Finally scrubbed out all the Barbies I got during the last 2 trips to the Salvation Army over the weekend. Whew. Now I just have to rewash some of the ones I got during the first trip and then I can start the next piece.

It's strange and also quite interesting, how things often connect, sometimes most randomly and unexpectedly...

The other day, while brushing out the hair of one Barbie with pink and orange streaks in her hair, I got this song running through my head. It was one I'd heard a long time ago and I knew I wouldn't be able to locate the CD. So I turned to the trusty 'net. While looking up the song (Rêve Orange by Liane Foly), I found a title to a book: Vivre l'orange by Hélène Cixous. Looking up Professor Cixous (who founded the center for women's studies at the University of Paris VIII, and is one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory), I found Roland Barthes, a french literary theorist whose books I had bought a few years ago when I was researching narratology for my mom...

I'm sure all this stuff is going to get tied into the moths somehow... I guess I should dig out those Barthes books which I had never got around to reading and start! Meanwhile, here's the song that started the process:

Rêve orange. Plus rien ne nous dérange.
Je pose ma tête sur tes mains,
Sur ta peau d'ange.
Rêve étrange, j'ai soufflé sur ta frange.

Rêve immense de ton regard intense.
Dis-moi à quoi tu penses.
J'ai si froid.
Je voudrais plonger dans tes bras.

A quoi tu joues ? A qui tu souris ?
Si loin de nous, tu dors tranquille.

Rêve azur. Des fleurs poussent sur les murs
Et les arbres murmurent ton nom.
Je suis sûre que t'entends leur chanson.

A quoi tu joues ? A qui tu souris ?
Si loin de nous, tu dors tranquille.

Rêve orange, j'ai soufflé sur ta frange,
Posé ma tête sur tes mains,
Sur ta peau d'ange.
Rêve étrange, plus rien ne nous dérange.
Rêve orange, plus rien ne nous dérange.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Rice Bowls

In Buddhist tradition, a woman named Sujata offered Sakyamuni a golden bowl of rice while he was meditating under the Bodhi tree. He divided it into portions that sustained him through his quest for enlightenment. (kinda reminded me of the Jesus and fish story).

Today's Buddhist monks own very few material goods, one of which is the begging bowl. They rely on kind-hearted people to fill their daily bowl.

I read somewhere, in Tibetan Buddhism Lama drink from cups made from skulls, like wrathful deities were supposed to have done, to remind the faithful the frailty and transcience of life.

Here, the skull-like bowls made of silk stripping filled with resin covered pupae drew from these ideas. My ancestors relied on the pupae as protein for their meals and the silk for weaving. The life of a silkworm and the seizure of the farm reminded me that life is brief and nothing is certain or permanent.


silk bowls


Bowls made with silk stripping - from the cocoon before de-gumming. Now I don't remember if it was in Joan Livingston's fiber class or in Gillion's accessory design class that I learned how to work with and make wool felt - not much different here using the silk and patting and molding it around a ceramic bowl as form... Sometimes looking back, I'm really glad I didn't go to FIT...


Yeah, okay, I definitely need a studio or learned how to work with a feline assistant or both. I think the stripping still smelled like moths cuz he tried to run away with the packages and then later with the bowls (even took one of them apart while it was drying). sigh.

Beondogi

On the same trip back to China when my grandmother smuggled out the silkworms, she also brought back a large bag of brown stuff that upon closer inspection looked like bugs. She explained they were from the silkworm cocoons as she prepared to fry them up for dinner. I flatly refused to eat them. Then seeing how my grandmother and greataunt and even my cat was enjoying themselves, I tried one. I remembered it being crunchy and slightly nutty and not all that bad; but I'm pretty sure I only had one.

Now, years later, at the Korean grocery store (just north of Belmont on Kimball), in the canned meat section, I discovered Beondogi. The can said something about bird feed, and it's super high in protein but low in everything else that's supposed to be bad for you compared to red meat... The Koreans though eat them boiled, as snacks with beer. This guy explains it quite well and quite humorously: http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000398.php

Anyway, here are the poor silkworm pupae, who gave us humans their all, literally, and 2 cans' worth, before they went into the oven:



Here are they, after baking (back to crispy, and yes, I must admit, I had a few, for old time's sake), and covered in resin - getting ready to be part of the next piece ("Rice Bowl").

Counter Point


In researching Saturniidae, looking for the balance to the bombyx mori: wild vs. tamed, I found another moth: Automeris io. In a convoluted - fitting all my concepts - way, it's perfect. The most obvious being the io moth is a brightly colorful, vs. the colorless mulberry moth, and the catepillars have spines that release poison when touched, the exact opposite of the soft velvety harmless mulberry catepillars.

Io was the name of the prietess of Hera, a naiad who was seduced by Zeus and turned into a cow. According to Ovid, Hera had Io guarded by a hundred eyed monster. Through adventures of mythical level (haha) including a stay with Prometheus (the poor bloke who gave fire to humans and was condemned to having his liver eaten by a giant eagle every day), Io became human again, gave birth to Zeus' kids, married a king, and was an ancestress to Hercules.

Io is also the name of a Maori god - infinite, who is everything yet absolute nothingness, encompassing Positive and Negative, always existing without beginning or end, the double spiral... (http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~dominic/io-writn.html) The way I read Io religion, ignoring the Maori culture-specific terms, the belief is almost Tao Buddhist!

Finally, the moths themselves: the females have reddish brown wings and body parts while the males have yellow wings (with bluish eye spots) and body parts - Orange AND Lemon! Seriously, how perfect is that?

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Moths, moths everywhere, not!



Researching mouthless moths, I found this really cool site with some really awesome photographs (like the one above) of different ones that were found on the Fermilab campus: http://tdserver1.fnal.gov/peterson/tom/Moths/Saturniidae/Saturniidae.html

I contacted Tom, the engineer who took the pictures, hoping to learn more and maybe to pick up a few dead specimens. He was very kind and shared tips about finding them. However, apparently, like most wild creatures, they're not as easily/frequently seen as they once were...

Somehow the knowledge brought back a childhood memory. One kinda freaky at the time. I was, I don't know, maybe 8 or 9, and my sort of surrogate grandmother took me with her to an island trip. We were staying in a hostel style facility, and I was sleeping on the top bunk of the bed when someone decided to turn on the light. I screamed, I think I did, or maybe I just opened my mouth and no sound came out, I can't remember... On the wall, right next to me, were moths, or butterflies, whatever they were, there must've been hundreds filling the entire space...



"I think these (particularly Cecropia and Promethea) used to be more common. The caterpillars were easy to spot on small sandbar willows and choke cherry along streams and fencerows back in the '60's through '80's, but I seldom seem to see them anymore." - Tom Peterson, Fermilab