by Linda | Apr 27, 2023 | Anniversary, Artwork, Celebrations, Ceramic Tile, Clay, Community, Earthsongs Studio, Events, Fundraiser for Ukraine, Linda, Murals, Studio
Earthsongs Ceramic Studio is celebrating its Thirtieth Anniversary with a full year of celebration…EVERYONE IS WELCOME!
Earthsongs is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, with a full year of celebration, beginning June 24, 2023 through June, 2024. It is a wonderful thing to have been able to remain here creating art and adding to the life of the Borough for these years. I am so grateful to all those who have been part of the Studio and made it possible for me to create in clay:
- To clients who commissioned work for installation as well as those who purchased moveable work for their home and as gifts
- To those who attended the myriad workshops and classes I offered
- To those who participated in the public art projects I led
- To the other Metuchen businesses who carry and carried my work: Marafiki, Gardenia, and especially Papillon.
- To the Metuchen Inn who continues to showcase my work and donate food for Gallery Openings and other special events
- I am most grateful for your continuing support of the studio.
Because of what I have always seen as the mission and role of the studio:
Yes, creating art from clay, but about making an impact on the community and bringing people together through the arts,
it seems most appropriate that the thirty-year anniversary celebration, June 24, reflect that mission. As I envision the Anniversary Celebration, we will recognize the day by installing the Community Peace Mural (created August, 2022, by nearly 50 people during CLAY DAYS in METUCHEN) which speaks to peace around the world, but with a special eye to Ukraine. Hence, my hope is to create a celebratory event through this Anniversary that will not only be festive for all those who can be at Earthsongs that day, but raise funds specifically for the people of Ukraine.
SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 2023, 1-4pm
- 1pm | All are welcome to Earthsongs, visit the gardens and pond, enjoy some appetizer munchies. (The mural will be covered.)
- 1:30pm | The first 50 who donated $100 to Ukraine, will then be invited to a meal, completely donated by Hailey’s Harp and Pub, at tables on the closed street of Bissette Place to enjoy with friends and neighbors.
- 2:30-3:00pm | Diners will be encouraged to return to Earthsongs
- 3:00pm | Unveiling of the Community Peace Mural, entertainment, desserts prepared by local residents from Ukraine.
How can you participate?
First, everyone is welcome! Feel free to bring friends!
The meal will be limited to the first 50 people who choose to donate $100 to the people of Ukraine.
All others are welcome to spend time in the gardens at Earthsongs, enjoy the snacks there, and, if you choose, offer whatever donation you wish to this cause.
Essentially meal choices will include: Hailey’s special beef dish (Shepherds Pie), Hailey’s famous chicken dish (Chicken Francese), and the Pub’s so appreciated vegan dish (a Healthy Stew).
Donations can be made by check sent directly to Earthsongs, or via a Venmo.
Final date to reserve a space at the meal will be June 4.
We hope you will plan to join us for whatever parts of the celebration fit your interest and schedule.
by Linda | Sep 29, 2021 | Community, Life in General, Relationships
This is my contemporary version of the Medieval “Canticle of the Creatures”
With joy we greet you Brother Sun and Blue Sky!
You brighten and enliven all.
Ah, Sister Moon, such a comfort,
your soft glow companions us, and with the stars twinkling by your side,
you give us hope when life is darkest.
While the Weathers, fierce creatures that you are,
swirling rain and snow, winds and heat,
swaddle us in your wild caresses.
Ah, Sister Water, so soothing, refreshing, invigorating, playful,
and Brother Fire, cozy, bright, enlightening, ardent,
both of you so useful.
You teach us how to be truly helpful
singing and dancing and making merry even as you serve.
O dear Earth, you are surely our Mother,
nourishing us with every good and delicious thing,
surrounding us with beautiful and engaging things,
providing us with furred and finned and feathered ones,
friends to enrich and enchant us.
But you are also most surely our Sister,
created by the hand of the same Mother/Father God;
we are born of the same with destinies linked.
Having been cared for all this time by you, our older Sister,
we now recognize that to go forward, we must walk hand-in-hand, conscious of each other’s needs.
And most fondly of all, we embrace the humanity of all humanity…the whole of what it means to be a human creature, spirit-embodied, both beautiful and disfigured, both charming and crude, both creatively boundless and yet utterly limited,
And we rejoice most especially when we can clasp the reality of all of that, and become a source of forgiveness and pardon and love to ourselves and others.
Finally, deeply encoded in our humanity, our continuing companion, Death, we call you Sister as well
…even as we name the nurturing creatures of Earth herself and Water and the Moon…
who, in your way, completes each of our bodily lives as we know them and frees our spirit from those confines.
by Linda | Apr 12, 2021 | Community, Studio, Uncategorized
Many Christian artists take the time of the 40 days of Lent to engage in an artistic spiritual practice. I have never felt called to do that…until this year.
Hearing that 43 US Senators had blatantly abandoned their oath to uphold the Constitution and voted to acquit Donald Trump of his involvement in the January 6 storming of the Capital, I knew I needed to respond to that with the power of art. But social commentary has never been the focus of my work. I was quite at a loss to respond and yet found it absolutely necessary to do that.
Eventually the memory of what I had seen in Olympia, Greece surfaced.
There, just outside the ancient Olympic stadium, was a WALL OF SHAME to expose those who had cheated. Each on a pedestal had a plaque that included their names, their fathers’ names, their crimes and the city-state they had represented (and embarrassed).
That seemed the perfect approach to highlighting the blatant dishonesty of those 43 Senators, only rather than include their own names…which I did not want to incorporate into anything so permanent as high-fire clay…instead included only the names of their fathers, since their crime echoes back and forth through history.
And so I began as Lent began, setting out to create 43 5”x5” 1/2 thick tiles. One side included the necessary words…the other, abstract gouges and impressions, and as the project evolved, I knew what I was creating was really “A Study in Orange,” and so glazing on the other side of the tile was settled.
My plan from the outset was to share these with the community on Good Friday: a kind of communal Way of the Cross for us as a nation. I was very uncertain that I would complete this project and, as a friend assured me, “it will take a lot out of you dealing with all that duplicity and hypocrisy,” because, not only was it necessary to focus on the betrayal of those 43, but authentically acknowledge the ways that shows itself in me.
Remembrance is important; my hope is that recognizing this COMMUNITY DISHONESTY calls us each to action.
My intention going forward is to have the installation exhibited in more formal spaces that have a sensitivity to social consciousness; then to sell each tile and donate all of the proceeds to a national organization that works for justice.
by Linda | Sep 13, 2020 | Relationships
September has unceremoniously arrived. Most of us can hardly believe it…I know I can’t. I thought for sure we would be ‘through the Portal’ by now, on to other things, the new taking shape…
But no.
“The Portal…calls us to tarry rather than rush through, to accept our vulnerability and not simply re-clothe ourselves in garments that no longer fit”.
I continue to sit in that doorway trying to discern which “garments I should not re-clothe myself in,” which “garments no longer fit,” looking out at the world, still very separate, visiting few friends, at best, “zooming” with family.
Knowing that offering classes and workshops are very definitely some of the “garments” that no longer fit, that organizing and administering arts groups in the community is assuredly “a wardrobe” I have definitely outgrown, I looked with uncertainty at the Studio’s relationship to the rest of the world. I agonized over whether or how I should reach out and connect with the community during the height of the Quarantine, but recognized that, too, was not vestiture that was mine. And with it all, I was concerned that my connection with others would become more limited than I would appreciate.
Shaking me into the beginnings of a new consciousness, however, is the surprising unsolicited flow of commission requests. I am in the midst of a whole series of large projects and small ones, all delightful ideas that call me to engage with the clay in both familiar ways as well as those that stretch my knowledge and relationship with the material. Interaction with individual clients around specific projects these weeks has assured me that there will continue to be lively human connection in the studio.
Every artist, and I believe to the pluperfect, the clay artist, has an element of the hermit in her personality. Thus, my alone-time working at Earthsongs is deeply welcomed. Despite that, there has continued to be a genuine flow to the life of the Studio. Because of this, I have come to know that it is the creative impulse itself, purely the energy inherent in the action of creating, that is an attraction, even as my “old garments” are cast aside.
So that even while alone, standing purely as maker, I understand myself more clearly now as a genuine part of the flow of life here in this local community and the community of the world.
Do I need to do away with other “garments”? Perhaps. But for now, I’m becoming more comfortable wearing just the ones I still have.
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