I’ve been sick recently….this came on as my work switched to full time. Finally I have a salary in a job that I am good at. I am the Teen Program Coordinator at Concordia Place, a non-profit that is predominantly a sliding scale daycare for children but also has teen programs that pay students to learn craft, business, and culinary skills.

I wrote in my journal that going full time feels like a small death. I think I’ve gotten used to dedicating more than 20 hrs a week to studio work/organizing shows. Now, for the sake of stability, I will have to negotiate my time. I am good at scraping for time or at least finding an hour in the day to be in the studio.

Let me back-track for a second….I found out I did not get into the one grad program I applied to in Switzerland. As a result, I got real SENSITIVE and started questioning if I really wanted to stay at my job. I started applying for other jobs that just had better titles, paid more, and were full time. Then I got an offer from my job for a full time position the same week I came to my boss saying I applied to xyz jobs. (I had been trying to get a title change and go full time for a full year and they had been reluctant). Funny how beauracracy works.

Now, after reflecting for a bit, I feel like I’m meant to stay in Chicago and go to grad school here. It’s funny how life can guide you and how opportunity/the lack of it is ALL subjective.

As a gift to myself I signed up for a metalworking workshop through CIADC. I want to make floral sculptures, coat hooks, and things to fill my future home! Maybe a coat hook that looks like a pea vine!

I am also participating in Pollinator (an online artist residency for peer-to-peer learning) for the month of May. This opportunity will be good at helping me stay in the studio and keep to my goals while I’m transitioning to #fulltimelife.

🌸

Other than that, I thought I’d share a time an old friend said to me, “ontology recapitulates phylogeny, meaning that the growth of an embryo is a replay of its evolutionary history. I see the same thing in objects like that green pepper or trees or flowers: their final shape is a map of how they've grown!”

Everything around us has a long, prismatic evolutionary history! I talk about this with craft all the time, sometimes the history is all there, in front of us, located within every object!

Today, objects don’t map the evolutionary history of their materiality & politics (but the design/form is easily traceable). It’s fun to ask how my water bottle got in my hands and how I came to kiss my lips to it every day. The metal ore, polymerization of particles, mined quartz, underpaid Brazillian labor, the large ships, buried remains of small marine organisms, and underpaid Chinese labor all compressed into one object…. and this object found me for a little while.

Loads of Love,

Christina