Thank you everyone!

It has been a really interesting semester reading everyone’s post about the wide range of subjects and media. I think that seeing everyone start in such seemingly different places, yet begin to see all of our subject matter connect, in ways small and large, has been a truly unique learning experience. Seeing everyone research topics ranging from home, identity, community, family, and personal history, demographics, healing, remembering, and honoring, all come together has made me realize that at its core the process of creating is really about a shared human experience. All of these topics overlap because they are all fundamentally human experiences. Obviously they have manifested themselves in a wide variety of manners as represented by our different medias and methods. Yet I think it isn’t hard to find similarities between Martha’s beautiful cast glass pieces and Lynn’s search for home, between David’s doors of community and acceptance, and Andrea’s work about healing and honoring American service men.

I have especially enjoyed seeing all of Carleen’s work with her school and community. Seeing her dedication to her students and campus was a real breath of fresh air, and helped remind me to brush off the hardships of teaching and focus on the good during what has turned out to be a very difficult semester of teaching. I am really envious of the number of workshops Carleen was able to go to, as well as seeing Rick work at the LUCHA clay studio. I don’t mind working in my classroom, and really I am lucky to have a wheel and a kiln at my disposal, but I think working alone just isn’t the same. I blame the amazing community atmosphere in Junction for ruining a solitary studio experience for me.

I had planned on visiting a variety of museum programs but was only able to take in a couple, along with some museum related workshops at TAEA. Seeing Pam write about her trips and memories of museums and galleries in NYC such as the MOMA as well as her bookmaking classes also game me encouragement and really helped push me to finally attend the TAEA conference. Of course the chance to see old friends in San Antonio isn’t really that hard of a sell.

While it has been a good experience overall, I think there are things I miss from a more traditional research class. Last spring I really enjoyed taking Futures class on traditional craft because it was so wonderful meeting everyone in person Thursday nights and seeing how different people would select different aspects of the same readings. We were all on different topics so those opportunities weren’t as available. It was also really difficult to sum up the readings, especially the museum theory works, in a way that shed light on the subject without becoming an overwhelming amount of info to post on the blog.

I think it might have been interesting if we had taken a few weeks at some point to assign a reading for the week to see how others responded to what we had already researched. I think that might have given us all a deeper understanding of one another as well as the different research. We could all pick the best of what we had covered, so everyone would be exposed to the most important and relevant research from our wide breath of work.

I have come away with some great insight into topics I never would have looked into as a result of being exposed to everyone’s work, and for that I am deeply grateful. I’ve got some great ideas for my own work and I don’t think I would have found new direction without my research and the research of everyone on the blog. Like I said before, all of our work crosses over and interacts with one another. I think that is the biggest lesson, that we are all connected and in many ways our creative endeavors are never that different at the core.