Flights and Finals

Sunday, June 26

So concludes the Burren College of Art experience.  As I go back through all my photos I might revisit a few key points in my posts, but from here on out, it's continental Europe on the go!  I'm currently sitting in the Dublin airport, reflecting on the mad dash that has been this weekend.  Thursday was our final exhibition and bar-b-cue WITH veggie burgers!  The two Roberts took on the title of co-grillmasters, to add to their already impressive resumes.  (Bus driver / AV guy / sculpture studio trainer / sink declogger / art supply shop-runner / groundskeeper / camera, bicycle, car and copier mechanic, and librarian / photographer / bartender / G5 lab expert / cafe assistant, respectively.) 

Also, Joe and I realized partway through the picnic that we matched almost exactly.

The show went beautifully, although none of us had any idea how formal the evaluation was - before the exhibition opened, we artists were all exiled from the gallery while a panel including the dean, the president/co-founder of the college, a guest artist, our TA (a fine arts PhD at the Burren) and the local ecology and environmental science expert and founder of the BurrenBeo Trust went around to each of our displays and discussed them privately, and then called us in one by one to present our work and conduct an interview with the panel, after which we were all banished again, and they collectively decided our final scores.  Nerve-wracking!

Here are a few people's final products:

This is Joe's sculpture - one of the ubiquitous rock walls, rendered out of painted bottles.

Mahla made art books - she cut out overlapping circles in the pages, and then passed out each page to a different member of the community, asking them to write about their experience with the Burren.  Then she bound them such that you could see snippets of people's handwriting in the layers of paper.  Super cool.

Lily welded a hollow tree stump out of found rusty metal objects, then placed it out in the landscape and photographed it, to comment on the way human intervention has shaped what we view as natural over time.

Rachel identified similarities to human body shapes occurring naturally in the rocks, and did a series of drawings representing these formations.  

On Friday, I cleaned out my studio, returned my books, booked my flights and bus tickets, printed out the requisite paperwork, got a formal statement from the school verifying that I am a student in the EU (for discounts on trains and stuff), and washed all my clothes (really - I did laundry!).  Then our new friend Stuart, who does traditional woodworking, came over to our house with his tools and showed us how to make wooden spoons, and Mahla (my roommate) made us all a fantastic Shabbat dinner of matzo ball soup and homemade challah bread.  This is the spoon I made:

On Saturday morning, I packed up my big backpack and shoulder bag, my poster tube with my final project, and a box of all my art stuff and extra things to ship back, caught a bus to Galway, changed buses, and headed for Dublin.  Once here, I found a post-office to ship all my shit, an out-doors/camping store to buy a tent and sleeping bag (on clearance no less!), a super nice hostel right near the bus stop, and two Australian dudes who, despite their incomprehensible accents, made great company for navigating the pubs.  

(Here's the front of the hostel - nicer than a lot of hotels, and only 14E a night with sheets, internet, and breakfast included!)

Now I'm in the airport, and we have come full-circle.  Stay tuned - next stop: Amsterdam!

Free wheels and Feuchtigkeitableitend

Entry from Monday, June 20 (with a little backdating magic)

It has been quite a week.  Tobi and I have been camping in the woods near the school since Thursday, as a fun excursion, and some well-needed space from a few of the housemates.  We took some backpacks and groceries and found a tiny clearing in the dense bushes at the base of the mountain next to the school.  In the mornings, I have breakfast (banana and PB or granola made into oatmeal, and coffee) walk to the studio (about 10 min.) come back to the tent for lunch (brown bread with sun-dried tomato paste, sauteed spinach, avocado slices and melted cumin gouda cheese - go, go mini campstove!) back to the studio, then go hiking if it's nice weather, or if it's raining, hang out in the tent and learn German. I now know how to conjugate "to be," "to have," "to eat," "to speak," and "to go" and such useful expressions as "where are you from" (von wo kommst du), "what time is it" (wie spät ist es), "you're one to talk" (das sagt der richtigen), "now we're even" (das ist auf gleichinder gerechtigkeit), "I speak no German" (ich spreche kein Deutsch), and "moisture-wicking" (Feuchtigkeitableitend).  In the evening we go for dinner and pints at one of the many pubs in town.  It's pretty ideal - even the extremely intrusive thorn bushes and stinging nettle patches serve the useful purpose of keeping wandering hikers out of our little camp.  

This is it, as seen from the "path" coming in.  Can you spot the tent?

Here it is again, from the other side, once inside the clearing.

And here is a demonstration of how to get around when you have horrible blisters from running 4 miles barefoot on gravel roads, by our resident German:

Saturday was the AnPost Tour de Burren 160km bicycle race.  Ever so cruelly, my knees and shins were so bad from running that I could barely walk, let alone ride a hundred miles.  Have you ever seen the heartbreaking combination of incontinent excitement and intense desperation that possesses a golden retriever on a leash when someone throw a tennis ball just out of reach?  After watching 2500 cyclists flood the streets of our town of 250 and not being one of them, I have a deep and personal understanding of exactly what that golden retriever feels like.  

I managed to keep the wailing and gnashing of teeth to a minimum long enough to take a few pictures.  

In any case, Tobi left this morning to go on a canoe trip through the fjords and lakes in Sweden.  As it happens, he gets back to Munich 2-ish days after I leave the country.  Unfortunate timing, but I'm still way excited to see Germany on my own!  

In any case, today marks the first day of the last week of the first month of my trip (aka, I only have 4 days left of school).  I'm a bit shocked at how quickly it's gone by, but then again, I'm only halfway through my travels!

Street signs and Studios.

I just realized that I have yet to post any pictures of my studio, and it is rad, so here you are.  (Robert the store manager / bus driver / groundskeeper / tech support guy / man of a zillion hats had moved all the extra furniture into the unused half of my space, so I put it to good use.)

So I went from working in a glorified storage space, to being the proud occupant of a studio with a couch/bed, wraparound workbench, full-length mirror and coffee table.  Redecorating win!

Also, I have been collecting pictures of interesting or entertaining street signs.  Here are a few.

 "Please run over pedestrians here"

?

Or, if you'd prefer,

Or just look back and forth several times.

 "EVERYONE.  Go this way regardless of what color your shoes are!"

 "Please leap here."

"Please refrain from leaping over pits of fire in pursuit of the seagulls."

Your guess is as good as mine here.

Hostels and Hen nights

Every city and county in Ireland has a nickname.  For example, Armagh is called the Cathedral County, while people from Carlow are the Fighting Cocks, from Cork (from whence we Mahonys originate) are the Donkey Eaters, and those from Donegal are the Herring Gutters.  The more contemporary nicknames are not as creative, but perhaps clearer.  Dublin is the Big City, Limerick is Stab City, and Galway is Party City.  This weekend, I went to Galway.  I took the bus out with my lovely housemate Caitie on Saturday morning.  We found an art store, and yarn and food and buskers galore.  She went back on the bus that evening, and I stayed overnight in a hostel just off of Eyre Square.  It was super fun, and I met a whole load of Canadians, and befriended a backpacking physics major from Germany named Tobias.  The rest of the housemates joined us on Sunday afternoon, and we all walked around exploring together before sharing a cab back to Ballyvaughan that evening.  We brought Tobi back with us so he could see more of the countryside (instead of just the big cities with train stations) and now he is camping in our yard.  Galway was fantastic - almost all the central streets are foot traffic only (Fußgängerzone, my new favorite word in German).  The following photo is directed at Kent Van Note, and is unfortunately NOT the hostel I stayed in because it was full.  But I almost stayed there, so... good enough.

What they don't tell you, is that when they say "Party City" they mean specifically bachelorette parties.  Here they call them "Hen nights" and Galway is apparently the one single destination for every girl ever about to get married, ever, to get ridiculously drunk and embarrass herself and her future children.   Literally the entire city was swarming with herds of women dressed in ridiculous costumes, sashes, tiaras, glitter, and cowboy hats.  Every fifth female you saw was wearing a banner reading "BRIDE" with the other four masking their resentment with a maniacal will to be celebratory.  The ladies weren't the only ones partaking in the shit show that weekend - we went for pints on Saturday, and grabbed a table at the top of the stairs.  We were about halfway through our respective Guinnesses, when a young man sprinted up the steps, promptly vomited all over the floor, and proceeded to fall down in it.  Needless to say, we relocated.  Excitement!!

Shortcuts and Sheepdogs

I have a new friend.  An elderly border collie has taken to guiding us home from the college.  There is a "lovely little shortcut" that was recommended to us by our professor, in case we want to walk home instead of taking the bus.  "Fairly clear path," he said. "You can't miss it," he said.  The weather has been inordinately pleasant lately, so walking seemed like a fine idea, and we all liked the sound of a lovely and fairly clear path.  The route unfolds as follows.  First you walk down the back road for about a half-mile, then you turn onto a gravel side road bordered by the occasional farmhouse.  So far so good. (This is where we met the dog.)  Then you climb over a low wall, and shimmy the length of a cow pasture, trying not to touch the electric fence, or agitate the cows who are very unsettled by the presence of the American art students intruding on their field.  Next you go down a wooded path, with a beautiful view of your own feet, as the clear space is about 4 feet tall, and requires some severe hunching.  Then you climb over some boulders, fight your way through a gauntlet of thornbushes, climb a few more walls and bother a few more cows, and finally empty out onto our road, just past the school and the field.  If it hadn't been for this dog's saintly patience, we might very well still be wandering around amidst the cows.

Also, this is a picture of our house, as seen upon our epic return home.

Frisbee and Fucus

My housemate Rachael is the smartest person in the world.  She brought with her the holy grail of long, temperate days in a sleepy rural village full of fields:  she brought the regulation-size ultimate frisbee disc.  The elementary school in Ballyvaughan is just down the road from our house, and for a town of 250 people, you have never seen such a soccer field.  Big enough for 4 standard pitches, it is perfectly level, with depressions along the edges for water runoff.  The short grass is cushioned with an extra layer of the same moss that carpets everything here, making barefootedness delightful.  Naturally, frisbee has become a regular occurrence for me and my classmates.  Unfortunately, in the process of trying [failing] to do pull-ups on the soccer goal, I dropped down unevenly and hurt my ankle, which means that running has been verboten since yesterday.
Sans running however, the extra time has been an opportunity to flesh out my project a little better.  Our assignment is to create an artistic response to some issue or aspect of the Burren landscape and its ecology.  We spent the past week on tours and lectures, learning as much as humanly possible about the various perspectives surrounding the place, in condensed format.  My project is based on the idea of the Burren ecosystem as a set of relationships.  Every piece of a landscape has a function in relation to the others, forming levels and sublevels of cooperation and co-dependence, all the way down to its cellular and chemical  composition.  All together, the relationships converge into a perfect symbiosis of form and function.  The human body is based on a similar structure of relationships.  Cells form tissues, form organs, form organ systems, which execute their functions perfectly to keep us alive and running (or limping, as the case may be). We alter the appearance of our bodies all the time, interrupting these relationships and forcing them to adapt to our modifications.  The same is true when we modify a landscape.  Historically, colonially, humans have viewed the land as a "New world," a blank slate, a canvas to rework and manipulate to our heart's desire.  So, going a step further with the idea of ecosystem = body, my plan is to make rubber-stamp prints of the less-appreciated members of the ecosystem (algae, fungi, lichen, moss, and unwanted "weeds" and "pests") and use my skin as the blank slate, tattooing (temporarily, mom) the images on myself block-print-style.  One of the alga that I'm using is called a Brown Wrack, scientific name, Fucus.  I find this almost as good as the little birds that my TA works with, called Great Tits, and this has been more detail than anyone cares to know about this project, so... the end.

Sweaters and Soft days

My predetermined goal of acquiring a big wooly Irish sweater has been realized.  There is a neighborhood craft fair on Sundays, and one table is run by an old woman with a jack russell terrier, a 4-year-old granddaughter, and a pile of sweaters that she knit herself, by hand.  Her name is Ann Rebecca, and she lives here in Ballyvaughan.  This is us (blurry picture)

Meanwhile, something truly unprecedented in the history of Ireland has occurred.  I believe it is called "sun."  'Tis true!  All weekend, we experienced actual sunny days.  People were actually sunburned.  From too much sun. But fear not, gentle reader!  Order has been restored, and we can all breathe a sigh of familiarity at the return of the default "soft day" (an Irish term for the freakish lovechild of rain, wind, fog, mist, cloud cover and altogether shitty weather that has inspired so many of the fathers of classic poetry to slit their wrists).