Artifactual Communication

Recently, I heard a talk about Artifactual Communication. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the stuff on your desk, or the way you decorate your locker or your home communicates information about you. The word artifact makes sense to me because essentially I accumulate, covet and adore artifacts. I've been carting around my Grandmother's collection of match books for ages. She collected them on trips she took and at weddings she attended between the 1960s and the 1980s (I know because she wrote on the back of each one). I often wonder what those artifacts say about me, and I guess I know that their presence means I have a hard time letting go of the past. I like simple objects from the past that were often used and cast aside without thought. I like objects people touched and fiddled with everyday. Perhaps she sat in a church hall listening to the toast to the bride and she turned the match book over in her hands. For me, it is like holding on to a moment from another life. My desk at work clearly communicates that I have children in my life. I am continually curating a little art display on my hutch. I keep most things at eye level. Some art stays up for a long time and changes jobs with me but some only lasts for a few days and then is replaced by a newer piece. I surround myself with it to keep the children in my mind but also to have a chance to catch glimpses of their inner selves that I'm usually too hassled to see. What do you surround yourself with? What's on your desk?

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I entered August without you.

I won't visit you this month. You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you. I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still. We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue. Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision. They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped. Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

The tiny little lie

"What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love." Lady Gaga "There's a robot. Do you see Mama his big eyes? He's a tall Robot and he is right over there." Do you see him? Have you seen him before? I was pleased to realize that I could. When I was about 6 or 7, I occasionally used to lie on my back at the foot of my bed and stare up a patch of stucco on the ceiling. Repeatedly and for what seemed like ages at a time, I would stare up at a cluster of tiny peaks of stucco that I could see with my 6 year old eyes was a little village inhabited by little creatures (half human, half smurf) marching around it. It was animated enough by the tiny shadows cast by those t...

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