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.
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.
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