Today I'm thinking about another connection between my current project and the bubble disturbances. Going to a food gathering for most people is an interruption in the daily more insular family eating that we do. When we take this detour from the normal routine of eating at home with our immediate family we open ourselves up to new experiences that can lead us and be a catylist for our desire for even more connection and experiences with others. It's been a few weeks since the Mexican Grill Fiesta. The guests included a few of our friends who are also new parents with small children. Since the dinner we all have included one another in our lives socially on a more regular basis: we've shared in some impromptu babysitting, had a potluck lunch, met up at a nearby playground, and got together for a picnic at an evening concert at the river  (Rhythm on the Riverfront concert series).  While before the dinner, we had “meant” to get together and do something, it was as if for all of us, getting together put it in our radar that we all wanted to continue this circle of community getting together. This interruption of our daily routines or of the ways in which we connect to one another allows us to really see if we are living the way we want to live, if we are being with others as much as we want to be. In today's world, most of us don't live with or close to our extended family and so staying close to others becomes so important.  Of course you can raise your children on your own, but when you connect to like minded parents you form the village that sustains and supports. I noticed at our dinner, without verbally acknowledging we were doing this, we took turns being the parent or two who watched the kids, allowing the other parents to sit and talk. This seemingly small gesture was so powerful. Afterwards my friend Alice remarked that it was such a rare and welcomed treat for her to have her youngest child (a 5 month old baby) passed around amongst the adults whom she all trusted that she barely held him all afternoon. This kind of all taking care of all the kids is something very special that I hadn't predicted when I began the project. Fortunately it's something that is continuing long after that first event which brought us together.

My work in London of blowing bubbles to commuters as they hurry by was a way of changing the way in which they interact with me and with each other. I realize now that the dinners are not just a way for me to connect to others as a realization of my sense of self and identity, but are becoming a way for others to connect to one another as they navigate who they are to each other and how we go forward as we continue to create our community.

As my last few blog posts illustrate, my work this year has been about exploring self and the concept of identity or more simply, my work has been identity practice. I have looked at my self, my identity and the concepts of self and identity through practice, art making, writing, reading, theory and pedagogy. I am continuing this work here through the Sunday Dinner Project which is performative, conceptual and “socially engaged art”. This term has been coined by artist educator Pablo Helguera in his recently published book Education for Socially Engaged Art. His basic definition claims that SEA is “a social interaction that proclaims itself as art (p.1)”, but he acknowledges that “as a category of practice, [it] is still a working construct (p.2)”. Otherwise known in the contemporary art world as “social practice” this new terminology honours artwork like my Sunday Dinner project that is a “critically self-reflective dialogue with an engaged community (12)”.

One criticism that I anticipate is that these dinners are not open to the public as often (but not always) works of art considered social practice or SEA are. In brief response, my work here is about both connecting to and constructing community and while the dinners are not publicly open, the blog post, art exhibit and continued research, presentations and writing is. Working with a somewhat predetermined group (that included friends and family) was a conscious decision that I made after first trying out some public art “bubble disturbances” in London.

The Sunday Dinner Project and the bubble works are similar in that each honoured what is/was important to me at the times they were created. In London I attempted to relate to the public, while back home in Beacon, NY I am reconnecting with family and friends.

The bubbles performances took place over the course of the last few months that I was living in London. At this time, I was feeling particularly disconnected to the people in this big city. The friends I had made through Goldsmiths all lived at least an hour's commute away and I would rarely see them outside of class sessions. The weather in London was a particularly grey and rainy spring. I performed these public joyful and playful disturbances of simply blowing bubbles in places where I travelled during my normal everyday commutes. First I blew them while waiting on the platform for the Overground train at my local station in Brockley. Instantly I received a great response and interrupted the normal interaction between myself and my fellow commuters. Instead of avoiding eye contact, many people smiled at me. This seemingly small engagement changed their and my experience of the commute. Smiles and laughter and even a few comments like “you've made my day” made my experience of city living so much more enjoyable. Inspired by this I blew bubbles out of my studio window where they flew out onto the busy sidewalk (pavement) and street. Finally I blew some over the escalators at London Bridge station where dozens of people came and went transferring from the Tube to the Overground train system. This work was partially inspired by the improv group Improv Everywhere, by the artist collaboration group casagrande and by the traveling “bad dancer” Matt Harding. Their work continues to inspire me as they explore universal themes of joy and play between strangers.

The third work I created about my identity stretched my artistic boundaries as I chose to work in areas I had until this work had little experience in. The piece I created began with mixed media collage but was ultimately a conceptual and experiential performative work of art. Aesthetics were in play here at the onset, but the process and overall concept was the driving force behind and within the work.

Mapping Self: Past, Present & Future is a mixed media collage map and conceptual work of art. The physical piece of work measuring approximately three by six feet is a visual representation of my sense of self in relation to my past, present and future identities. It was exhibited as part of an art show in early 2012 at Goldsmiths College in London. Following the show, the collage was burned to conceptually represent the temporality of self identity constructs honouring the idea that our sense of a past, present and future self is only true for a current moment in time and will change as often as we do.

The contour of the collage map was constructed by combining the outlines of land masses from places I'm from, have lived, and plan to live in the future including Northern Ireland, Southern Italy, New York, Massachusetts and California. The collage imagery within the map includes writing, cloth, paint, photos, copies of identification documents of my ancestors and other ephemera which represent the many facets of who I have been (and where I'm from), who I am and who I hope to be. Burning the finished piece honours that the work is about concept and process and challenges me as an artist to accept that art is worth more than its aesthetic. Through this act of art destruction, representing the temporality of this self construct, I release my attachments to stories of my past, to ideas of my present self and to the hopes of my future and open myself up to the possibilities of constructing new identities. 

This work is part of a series of works created in 2011-2012 that explore issues surrounding identity. Also in the series is the visual/textual poem “I look at You” and the “I Am / Am Not My Things Are Not Me” event which explored the destruction of my belongings by flood due to hurricane. Each work has allowed me look critically at the constructs of self I create. Here I ask:

The second work I did as a self portrait was a performative “event” entitled “I Am/Am Not My things are Not Me”. This work looked at my identity in relation to my possesions, specifically those I lost just before attending Goldsmiths...

[below is taken from my artist statement]

Hurricane Irene hit the northeast coast of the United States in the last days of August, 2011 causing widespread destruction and more than 50 deaths. The storms hit my hometown in upstate New York with torrential rain fall and mass flooding. The worst of the damage hit my parents home just four days before my departure date for London, England to study at Goldsmiths College. In order to study abroad for a year, my wife and I packed up all our belongings and stored all but the 9 bags we were taking with us in the basement of my parent's house. Overnight, the area around their house began to flood and eventually poured into the basement reaching a water height of over three feet high, causing all the items on the floor to be submerged and ruined. For the three days following the flood, my family and some friends and I pulled out the damaged items, saved what we could and documented each ruined item in a list for insurance. We calculated that we had roughly lost about 70% of all our belongings. During the process of cataloguing, I was the person who carried out the wet boxes outside so that my wife and friends could go through them and write up what couldn't be saved. Although I had seen the piles created of our damaged items, since I wasn't the one writing up the list, I never had a full detailed picture of what was damaged beyond repair. I brought a copy of the list with me to London. I hadn't read the list until my reading of it as a performance at the Autumn art exhibit.

The days before we left the United States were supposed to be days of tying up final loose ends and saying goodbye to our family. Instead they were physically and emotionally extreme in a state of crisis. There was no time to process. The performance/event was part of the processing of the loss not only of the objects, but of the identity I've tied to them. How much of a reflection of who I am is held in the things I've surrounded myself with, in the objects I've bought, in the art I've made, in the art I've been given by friends?

List Pages 5 & 6 (of 16) 

I Am/Am Not My things are Not Me
A performative event by artist Stacey Ward Kelly

I am my things

I am not my things

I am more than my things

My things are not me

By reading aloud all the items that were once a reflection of who I am but are now gone, I ask myself, I ask the viewer...

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.