Hazelnuts

Last summer I tried to mud dye cloth. I was teaching an Eco-Art course for the local Summer Institute program and experimented with ways to paint red clay on cloth and make the dye permanent. I used these nut hulls to mordant the cloth; boiling the nut hulls and cloth together. I never got the great results of mud cloth in Mali, but the experiment was fun. Judy Dominic is quite the expert on Mali mud cloth and has tried many plants for the mordant. The plant used by dyers in Mali does not grow in North America. In addition, I certainly tried to make the process more speedy. Now, however, the hulls get a third life embedded into the clay of one of my sculptures.

Early June

Sorry for so few entries lately. Right now I am preparing for my summer teaching schedule. This includes classes for the UW-Eau Claire Summer Institute and SmART Summer Art programs. In addition to a fun art course for primary grades, I have added a new course called Eco-art. I will do a version for upper elementary and one for high school kids. So I am busy preparing my supplies and fine tuning the activities. While I am excited about including some clay straw building along with rust and mud dyed cloth, the preparation is overwhelming at the moment. The immediacy is heightened because this weekend I travel to Pittsburgh for my Aunt Dora's 90th birthday celebration.

The weekend was consumed with a pizza party we offered for our church auction. We have a wonderful brick oven out at our "farm" that my husband built for me when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005. I am fine now, by the way. It seems that building something that will outlast us was his way of coping with the news. This is a phenomenon I have witnessed in other couples. Now we get wood fired pizza and bread. How healthy! There is a wonderful mud and straw bird's nest full of new hatchlings inside the oven shed. I am anxious to see how big they grow this week.

Cassandra Tondro

Cassandra Tondro uses nature to decompose her images. She dances the fine artistic line between control and loss of control. Letting nature take its course she produces sublime textures on canvas. Of course, she exercises control of the final composition. These pieces are large and must feel otherworldly when you walk toward the real piece. See more of her “Decomposition “ series at her web site. Her blog shows some images of a new landscape series inspired by “An Inconvenient Truth”.