Life is a journey of self identity as we are constantly negotiating, inventing and reinventing our sense of self. This past year for me at Goldsmiths has been in many ways an exploration of my own identity practice. It began with the very first class. My professor wrote these two words down on opposite ends of one wall of the studio we were in:

She then drew a line between them and asked us to reflect on where we fell on this spectrum. We proceeded to discuss first as small groups then as a class where and why we positioned ourselves at different spots on the line. Some felt they were clearly one or the other, most felt leaning toward “Teacher” and I think only one leaned primarily toward “Artist”. This wasn't suprising as our MA (called Artist Teachers and Contemporary Practice) is primarily made up of teachers who are looking to return to their art practice. What I didn't realize at first was that “Artist-Teacher” was an identity acknowledged and perhaps in part legitimized in the UK by the government who came up with a professional development program called ATS, the Artist Teacher Scheme in 1999 to promote and support artists who teach and teachers who wanted to continue or get back to their practice. My MA course at Goldsmiths is one of about ten like programs in the UK that partners with a contemporary art museum to offer this kind of MA.

This year began with a questioning of where I am but has also included a 'claiming' of this new identity as an artist teacher. First I was given a self-portrait assignment for my “Revisiting Practice” class that was exhibited in a group show with my classmates. For this I created two works. The first was a piece called “I look at you”. I took the photograph that I had recently self shot for my university ID card and in photoshop reduced the resolution to blur out the image in stages until I had one with only color and no identifyable shapes. I blew these images up to six 20x30 inch posters and starting with the blurred out image I placed a poem I had written of the same title on each image. The image and poem each reveal self as they are read from left to right, or in this case as I've posted them here from top to bottom.

(The second work was even more personal and I will share it along with the other project I've mentioned that I did called “Mapping Me” in the next blog post.)

Click below for the full artist statement for this work: 
I look at You: Self Portrait Artist Statement

We bought the food for our Mexi-Grill fest today. It's a three day process of preparation. Four actually, because Carrie already began soaking the rice and beans in water with a little apple cider vinegar yesterday. She does this because we learned through working with our holistic health counselor/nutritionist Andrea Ramirez that soaking like this especially for beans helps release the antinutrients and enzyme inhibitors they carry as their way of protecting themselves from predators — and also brings out the most nutrients they naturally hoard until you soak and “trick” them into starting the reproduction process thereby releasing their nutrients.

Tomorrow we will cook most of the menu and Sunday, before and while our guests arrive, I will do the finishing touches on the cake I'm making and grill the veggies and chicken that has been marinating overnight. It will be a fairly small party and the guests who are coming don't know one another. They are each from different groups/connections I've made while living here the past six years. One is an artist friend, one an art teacher/work friend and the others are a family that Carrie and I met through a sort of non organized local “new mommies” group. So the attending guests represent three parts of my identity: artist, art educator, mother. Interestingly these are probably the strongest parts of who I am (although not neccesarily in that order). 

This year I've spent a lot of time 'exploring my identity' as an artist and art educator (above is one of my Art Jrnl pages sketching out ideas for my "Mapping Me" self-portrait project). These explorations have included art therapy, art making, research and writing. But on a very practical every day sort of level I haven't made art everyday nor have I taught at all this year. The one and only thing I have done on a daily basis is my practice of motherhood. I never realized how much being a mother would connect me to other mothers and parents in general. I guess I just assumed that since kids are so unique there wouldn't be such a comraderie or feeling of shared understanding between parents but so far in my mere two plus years of being one, I found parenting to be a universal bond that people from all cultures and walks of life belong to. 

There is a shared 'gone through the ropes' sort of bond, but also a shared deep understanding about the kind of euphoric love that you get with loving a child you call your own. A woman came up to me today while I was sitting with Gryffin in Barnes & Noble who was making her first Lego 'tunnel-shed-tower'. She had that sort of “i just have to say something” kind of energy and said “aren't they just so cute? I have toddlers myself, my husband is with them and just dropped me off to do an erand...but they are just so cute, aren't they?” and I smiled and agreed with her in that knowing parent-to-parent sort of way. And she was being especially cute, bias noted, as she called out the color of each Lego before placing it saying “then the green one over here” and so on. I took about ten photos of it and am only slightly embarrased to admit that I thought about how successful an architect she will be someday.  Maybe then she'll be able to stand still when I try to snap her photo next to her work...but for some reason I doubt it.

When we moved out of the apartment we are now back in, it was three months after Gryffin was born. Then we had a sort of potted planter garden which fell to neglect. I hastily cleared it out and put some of the remains around the side of the house. Now two years later, not even remembering I had done this, I found an overgrown mess of weeds and vines climbing up the water drain, but in the mess I saw that despite this area getting little to no sunshine, our thyme plant was thriving. 

I was so inspired I harvested a bunch and made some Thyme Garlic herb butter that I'm planning to put on the steaks I'm going to grill up for my father's birthday. 

Another funny thing happened last week too. You might recall seeing the basil plant I bought for the sauce I made at our first Sunday dinner. Carrie and I noticed a small green caterpillar on one of the leaves. We immediately showed it to Gryffin who adores and knows by heart the book by Eric Carle. To our delight we soon realized the caterpillar was using our basil leaf to create it's cocoon and in less than a week it turned into a beautiful yellow bu'fly as Gryffin calls it. We have now moved the plant outside so the butterfly can fly away when it's time, but it's a lovely thought that my sauce making is continuing to nurture long after our Sunday dinner.

I've begun an inspiration board, which is actually the back of the door to the garage that's in our kitchen. I thought it would be a good place to put up pictures I find in the recipe magazines I like (Sunset, Cooking Light, Martha Stewart Living & Whole Living etc). And this week I was able to get all the eVites created and sent for the final four Sunday dinners. They are going to be a Mexican Grill Fiesta, A Farm to Table & Favourite Brew Party, A Potluck, and we'll end with a Wine & Mystery Party. The first will be held this Sunday and I'm trying to think of ways to make the cooking both easy but also interesting and fun. Fortunately most of the menu Carrie and I can cook on Saturday.

Draft Mexican Grill Fiesta Menu

Carrie's spicy Spanish Rice (as seen on our Recipes Page)

Burritos with Grilled Mexican style Chicken, Roasted Veggies and all the fixins

Vegetarian Slow Cooked Black Beans

Mexi-style Tuna & Elbow Macaroni Salad (cold)

Homemade Peach Iced Tea with Orange Slices

Spwater (Spa Water) with Lemon & Cucumber

Coconut Cake with Berries and Cream (as seen in Martha Stewart Living this month)

I like cooking in general, but l love cooking for people I care about. Making handmade gifts or getting someone the perfect gift for them has always been a way that I've shown others that I love them. Food is a gift of nurturing. What I've been calling “Good Food” here which is also in the title of our book “Good Food from the Farm” is food that comes directly from the earth with little to no human processing. When I share this kind of food with others it becomes an even greater gift: We nuture our bodies while honouring the earth. Here I'm combining an earth honouring practice while feeding my own giving needs and creating a gathering of others who I'm interested in being around. I'm acknowledging that my interests and passions for cooking and sharing good food are worthy to be considered part of my art (and life) practice and as new and sometimes uncomfortable as this (shift in artistic perception) is for me, it also feels right on a very deep and 'of course' kind of level. 

I have so many ideas that I want to explore and feel compelled to explore that I don't know where to begin and what's worse – I don't know how to talk about the ideas without them being sounding too essayish. That's not what this blog is about. So what is it about? It's about my research and my practical experience with, through and about this project. It's also a diary of my process. So where am I right now with all of these ideas? I feel very scattered. I feel I have too many things I want to read and yet I've just re-read one teeny tiny article that I must have sped read this year because I got so much more out of it this second time it was almost as if I barely scratched the surface initially. Uh oh, just thinking of this article my mind goes again, launching into theory and critique and essay verbiage. Stop it, stop it now and come back to us Stacey. Whew, that was a close one. So this time, instead of looking for the best quotes to use in my essay to support my theory, I read the article to see what the author was talking about. What a concept. I still enjoyed her ideas about walking as part of her practice to both stop and be present in the world and connect to herself, but I also noticed how much she quoted other theorists. In some paragraphs she had nearly every other sentence attributed to someone else. Of course she's not alone in this kind of writing, since I've read loads of articles this year with this same style. But what resonated most with me were the personal words she shared about her own experience. Even in the writing we do as art educators, it seems we've bought into a system that minimizes the value of our own voices. So in this blog I'm taking some writing licence...and sometimes, for my own needs, like I did somewhat in the last post, I'll need to write with that essayish sounding verbiage (you know, the one where I write pedagogy at least five times each paragraph—pedagogy, pedagogical, pedagogue, pedagogies...there now that's done). And other times, like I did with this post, I'll do some sort of stream of consciousness style writing and go off on some rift without citings or any “theoretical underpinning/positioning” whatsoever. And maybe, who knows, I'll throw in some surprise writing styles just to keep it fun.

The Sunday Dinner project is part two of the research I began last fall. Whereas these dinner events will be a practice and experiment, if you will, in connecting to others, I began my research on the self. My focus was the idea of valuing the self for the artist-teacher. The artist-teacher is both educator and practicing artist. While many of us have explored the self through art making, valuing the self in pedagogical practice isn't often supported in the educational systems which we work. With the current economic crisis where arts funding, resources and programs are in jeopardy, I feel that now more than ever, it is essential for the artist-teacher to place self at the forefront of pedagogical practice so that our teaching experience can be a sustainable, rewarding, learning exchange between ourselves and the students we work with. Put simply, in today's teaching climate, if we don't value and care for ourselves, who else will?

So how do we begin? What does valuing the self look like? As an artist-teacher, I think that value of self means caring for the self, connecting or knowing the self and finally sharing the self with those we work with (teach).

Taking care of myself is something I constantly struggle with and perhaps we all do. The great thing about taking small steps in self care however, is that even the smallest step brings self awareness and makes you hungry for more. Eating nutrient-dense, locally harvested, non-processed foods is something my body craves the more it gets. Growing up with a large Italian family, I have an innate desire to share good food with those I love. So where I began last month with our 30 day challenge to eat healthier for myself and my family, I'm now looking to extend outward to share food and in turn reconnect with the community of friends that I have been apart from for a year. It's much more than just the sharing of good food, but that is where I'm choosing to begin.

Photo: Detail of my “Mapping Me: Past, Present & Future” 2011 project featuring part of my “past” identities and family heritage.

Yesterday we went for a walk around Dennings Point with our good friend Katie who showed Gryffin how to pick wild wine rasberries. Katie, a raw food chef and owner of Sweet Mama's, asked me about my ideas for this project, and in talking with her I realized that I want to articulate the journey I've travelled this past year which has led me towards working with the ideas of the self and community.

The short albeit arrogant sounding answer is both simple and profound: I can (call it that) because I am (and I'm an artist). I could also argue here that I'm an artist because I call myself one, but that's getting into another discussion.  The long answer is something I hope to both demonstrate and flush out through this blog, my art and pedagogical research and through the dialogue that is created and exchanged both during and after each Sunday dinner event.

Nicolas Bourriaud famous for coining (and writing his book about) the term “relational aesthetics” (or relational art), wrote in the 1990's that "...the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist." I like the idea “ways of living” as if, here through my work, through this practice, I am creating a preferred way of life for myself. And as an artist who is also an art educator, I am beginning to see all of my creative, that is to say 'creating' acts as part of my practice as an artist. Through my experiences at Goldsmiths, (internationally known for it's progressive art school) and through the work of artists I continue to explore like Andrea Zittel, Rirkrit Tiravanija,  and Fritz Haeg I feel contemporary art has given me this licence to realize that for the past decade, my art work has been and is a pedagogical community practice. I will go into more about this in coming posts, but in general, I've realized that although I've continued to create work in fine art photography and design, more of my creative time over the past few years has been spent making connections to and with other artists in a variety of ways including developing artist groups, community art projects and events. Each of these connections have included teaching and learning where I have acted as facilitator and have co-created learning spaces for artists and the public.

With this project, I'm focusing on the idea of sharing good food and recreating a sense of familial community with those I call dear friends, while at the same time looking at how these dinners which represent and actualize my connection to others are also a realization of my self. It is a very personal project and it brings up many questions I want to explore such as:

Who am I? 

What is art?

What is community?

and where am I positioned within all of this as an artist-teacher-researcher-writer?

I grew up next door to my grandparent's house--the house in which my mother grew up with her five brother's and sisters. [Pictured here is an old photo with my grandfather on a lounge chair and grandmother standing in the background in the doorway].  Nanna and Pop Pop had a long history of making their house a home for our extended family and I enjoyed every major holiday and many Sunday dinners with aunts, uncles and cousins around the dinner table. The adults sat in the living room and a card table was added to the dining room table for a 'kids table'. Each meal usually consisted of the same basic thing—homemade pasta, sauce and meatballs with a side of baked chicken pieces. On special occasions a birthday girl or boy could request ravioli's which were my grandmother's specialty. She made them quite large in a square so as to not waste any bit of dough and they were so soft they almost melted in your mouth. Her meatballs were the same and I used to love to watch her cook in the kitchen. She'd let me help roll out the dough in long 'worms' and then feed it into the cavatelli grinder to make the little canoe shapes that she pronounced 'cava-teels'. 

There would always be a few small pieces of dough left at the end of each 'worm' and these were put aside for Pop Pop. He would come in and with his two large soft fingers he'd pull the pieces into a handmade canoe shape and if you were lucky you'd get one or two of these in your bowl which of course tasted the best. These gatherings were my first experience of community and looking back now I think I have searched to recreate them in every group I've been a part of. Why were they so special to me and how can a gathering over food create a community with others are just two of the questions I'm looking to answer with this project. But more on my reasons later. 

For now, I've decided to kick off this series of dinners with an homage to my Nanna, and although my cavatils came from a bag (frozen but Italian) I did make her sauce and meatballs recipe and we shared it with our extended family/good friends 'Uncles' Matt and Dan and Gryffin's half sister Beckett.

As usual I made the sauce using the Hunt's tomato sauce as a base (the darkest and richest can brand that my grandmother found to be comparable to what she had in Italy). Also as usual, as a nod to my grandfather, Pop Pop, I made one larger egg shaped meatball as Nanna used to do to denote that it was the one for him with the raisins in it. And for the first time, I added a can of crushed tomatoes to make the sauce a bit chunkier, and also for the first time I made little tiny meatballs for Gryffin and Beckett. The meal was both a gift to my loved ones but also a self welcome home of true comfort food.