This is my inaugural post, which is really my “about” page, but hey, it works as an intro until I get the next post up and running.

I am an arts administrator, museum curator, theater person, and wanna-be artist living in northern California. I will willingly call myself an artist when I complete a work and put it into the world, which I hope to accomplish within the next few weeks…or months…or soon. I write (mostly plays and essays). I have done a lot of theatrical costuming and, as a result, my ideas for artworks usually involve textiles. I love artist books and altered books, and have begun work on a number of pieces related to those media.

My greatest project of recent times is to begin to make sense of all the ideas that I’ve gathered–from living in different places, from being an observer (I’m not anti-social, I just forget to stop watching and participate), and from all the information swirling around us daily–and to create something from the gleanings. I do very well in finding connections between what some may consider disparate topics and ideas. I considered naming this blog the ‘cabinet of curiosities,’ and when I searched on the topic, just to see what’s out there, it became of those moments that was simultaneously gratifying and disappointing. Disappointing in that there are many essays on how blogging is, in essence, the virtual cabinet of curiosity of our age. But at least I found my way to that conclusion on my own, which is the gratifying part.

So, I imagine that this blog will cover many topics, but by embracing the whole ‘gleaner’ way of life, I figure I have given myself permission to stray, make detours, explore asides, and find inspiration in tangents.

A movie to watch: The Gleaners and I, by Agnes Varda.

A link to define Cabinets of Curiosities on Wikipedia (which is, of course, where all true gleaners eventually land), where I found this quote: “The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.”