since tomorrow´s a holiday here i´m spending time making some art; this is a test using the dining room floor and superimposing a n image of a bantam chicken. when i was a child i used to spend hours playing with or observing my grandparents´ bantam chicken. i even mothered a few orphan ones and i came to learn their body and sound languages so these animals are very special for me. i want to include the image of these chicken in my exhibition somehow, this is my first attempt at this...

http://www.printedmatter.org/catalogue/search.cfm

that was a nice surprise, i was looking for a piece by jenny holzer for my students...

i can close my eyes and see tato using this tool time and time again, i can even see him wearing his work clothes and see the whole setting of his work bench. tato loved making things, he was too much of a punk spirit to make them well but i loved his raw style and i actually think i´ve inherited it

i love the shape of the plane, the marks of use it bears and the wood its made of, i wonder what a modern version of this tool looks like...?

i took this photo in my last expedition to my grandparent´s house, i plan to reproduce this floor for my april exhibition, it´s the dinning room floor of my grandparent´s house. the dinning room was a very important space for our family, i have numerous memories of us sitting at at the table and the different discoveries i made around food... and this is all that´s left of that space together with some cabinets that i think would be great to convert into cabinets of curiosities for my exhibition.

i need to mark my spaces and i need objects that hold meaning to do this. moving/transitioning has not been easy for me; even though i 'came back to a familiar space' it seems like a different planet for me and i have felt so out of place... one of my ways of coping has been to try and make the space i´m living in (mom´s house) mine; i came back to a bedroom i had shared with a ten year relationship that did not end well and the space had so many marks from that part of my life... it was actually exactly like i left it and it felt like i was going back and not moving forward. it took me a while to understand i had to change the space, to realize it was weighing so heavily on me, that the objects in it had a very intense energy. at first i had no intentions of changing it becuse i had no intentions of staying in this space but i´m still here an i want to make this livable and positive for me while i´m here, while i find my own home.

the objects i have collected here represent simplicity, wonder and beauty for me. i have placed them on top of my grandfather´s library cabinet. i love it, it has a lot of shelves where my art supplies are. on top i have placed my beloved noguchi akari (given to me by my noguchi museum cowrkers when i left new york), a nest i found in the park, a jar of sea urchins i collected in the beach years ago, a jar with dried out orchids g gave me for mu birthday i think two years ago,  sea shells (i think one of my favourite things to do is go to the beach and collect treasures), an old medicine bottle (i love yellow glass and old bottles) i found in my grandparent´s house, and a a stone i brought from the well (at noguchi). on the wall i have placed an old painting i did about ten years ago and my petticoat from when i was maybe 2 years old. i look at that space whenever i´m distressed and i instantly feel better, and i recognize it as mine.

i find this little piece of clothing so moving and beautiful... my mom found it recently in a plastic bag among my grandma´s things, she had kept it all these years, who knows why... i plan to make some art out of it, i wish i could roll some ink on it and print it but that would ruin it. i´m thinking i might xerox it or make a stencil with it. possibilities...

2009, el museo del barrio, new york.photos: tanya ahmed

simple and beautiful, just like her...

it´s a work in progress... today, after an incredibly hard three weeks of non-stop work i did a bit of work. not making art makes me very cranky, making it gives me peace.

i have no idea where this piece is headed but it looked completely different an hour ago and i´m liking how it´s looking now. this may be the type of piece that will not exhibit but without which the good ones would not exist.

i really liked adding the mail envelope i had saved from g´s last book goody bag, i think ken robinson´s book 'óut of our minds' came in it and also freire´s 'pedagogy of the oppressed'. it probably will not look like an envelope by the time i finish with it though... and that´s what i love about this type of work, all of those layers and effacing previous ones in the same way the passage of time does to our lives and memories. maybe this type of work helps me deal with that, the passage of time scares me because i think i´m disintegrating with it. but maybe, like this piece, each layer has it´s own beauty, it had a life but a new one will conver it and have its own life. and so on.