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!