This Blog is a Bog!

Feb 2, 2023.

A bog is a “wet muddy ground too soft to support a heavy body”. As the world seems hell bent on making everything virtual, I’m reminded of a trip to Cricenti’s bog, curated by my mom - the naturalist. Inside the bog there was a wooden sign encouraging us to stay on the wooden plank paths because if we were to step off the path onto what seemed to be firm ground, we might end up like a moose, reported by the sign, to have slowly sunk to its death somewhere in there. As a young child - that imagined bodily surrender was as virtual as it got. All matter is food for something, somewhere, sometime. I feel like that moose with respect to the metaverse. So I’m sticking to the planks of matter, namely featuring the seemingly endless metabolism of the soft mud that forms nearly everything I love.

The purpose of this bog is to celebrate 2 decades of work using Winogradsky Columns as artistic medium. In 2023, I’m initiating a collaborative method for art making: explicit gifting. All artists are gifting all the time, so I don’t mean to muddy the waters here with some silly declaration. Rather - I genuinely believe that this mud offers us deep insight into what it means to be alive on planet earth. It is my greatest hope that we can reclaim the eco (our home) from the false science of economics by witnessing the material transformations in these simple and spectacular ecosystems. That by observing microscopic life in a finite system of soil, water, and sunlight, we might imagine a diverse and equitable method to balance the rights and responsibilities of being alive; I call these miniature landscapes: mud paintings.