blood and thunder
It's a dream still. But maybe all good things begin with a dream.
My father spent the first nine years of his life as an itinerant puppeteer, traveling California in a van with his parents and brother, performing marionette theatre at State Fairs and elementary schools. In the summer of 2010, I took a tentative road trip along the west coast to start research for a book and other projects related to this family history. The trip was difficult and weird and wonderful and broke something open within me.
There is also a pronounced feeling of restlessness about home.
BLOOD AND THUNDER is now an ongoing adventure—I spend my summers in a small cabin-van-dream-world to see what I can yet make of my life and to consider where my anxieties, longing and stories can find expression through performance, art making, and adventure.
There is information about my larger art practice on SHANNONGERARD.TUMBLR.COM
Ask me anything
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I can’t get Willy to make nice faces in these self portraits. So I gave in and said, “Fine. Let’s take a silly one.” His big idea of a hilarious joke was to smile sweetly then and leave me with my tongue hanging out. BRAT!
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This is one of my favourite photos of the trip, taken on the garden rooftop of the California Academy of Sciences, just across the road from the museum in Golden Gate Park.
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Another fun aspect of the De Young was running around the gardens and finding all these amazing words on the benches. It started a word search game that we played for the duration of the trip, looking everywhere for words of comfort, inspiration, humour and surprise. It was great to have our eyes open wider. Some of the words led us further into conversations about meaning and repetition, human community and introspection. Some just made us laugh. And some led delightfully to funny phrasing like, “Mummy we found Friends already, but we can never have too many Friends I guess.”
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Who’s that over Willy’s shoulder waaaay down there on the street?
Why, it’s our very own Carl! He felt right at home, docked beneath the Mother Spaceship of the Imagination that was the De Young.
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The view from the tower in the De Young gave us a long, wide, foggy perspective of the city. The stairs leading up (and down) were closed though. Boo!
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Last summer, during my initial trip west, I saw the stunning John Baldessari retrospective Pure Beauty at LACMA. The fun of his work and his clever playfulness made me ache inside. For some reason, Baldessari’s work to me is like looking down a long corridor into the future. It helps me dream, but some of the dreams feel fragile and impossibly far off. There is a superbly painful tension in Baldessari’s work between possibility and limitation. The way he places that brilliant, particular emphasis on combination and experiment while working within such strict conceptual parametres gets me Right Where It Counts.
This year’s trip was a different experience altogether, having with me this child who will change and grow and leave and return more times and in more ways than I can predict. It was a gift to spend these precious weeks together.
I made the above image (ALL) after my favourite (WRONG) Baldessari piece.
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After the fair was over, we still had almost a week to enjoy San Francisco. One highlight was spending a day in Golden Gate Park and visiting the amazing De Young Museum. The day was perfect— finally some overcast weather, chilly enough to need jackets (!!) and sooo foggy and lovely in the park. The museum itself looked like a borg cube, or a dreadnought rising out of the mist and trees. Spooky and great.
Ed Ruscha’s piece A Particular Kind of Heaven was down, so I didn’t get to see it, but I did make some other great discoveries like Richard Diebenkorn and got to see several works by Robert Motherwell, a favourite.
What is your particular kind of heaven?
Mine is on the horizon: The leaves changing colour, cooler temperatures, wool sweaters, school!, coffee and long autumnal walks. Now that I have wheels, I hope I can spend more of this Fall out of the city, where I best belong.
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But the real reason to participate in the Renegade shows was the honour of visiting with Becky and Aitor of the Sweetie Pie Press and Misanthrope Specialty Co. We live in the same building in Toronto, but these darling folks travel so much of the year and I miss them SO when they are gone. A reunion in one of the world’s great cities was incredible. You should have seen my grin coming over the Golden Gate that morning and my absolute glee at getting to embrace my BFFs.
Becky, for these reasons and many more, I love you:
>You rejoice in the success of others and create opportunities for other people to achieve— as a crafter and arts administrator and as a performer, you do this so well.
>When you drink red wine, your teeth get so purple that I can barely contain myself from grabbing and hugging you. It is the most darling thing I have ever seen.
>Your long fingers were amazing to draw for Unspent Love and now I can never see them just as fingers, but only through the lens of having traced their shapes into drawings. Your face is like that too. It is like Michael Ondaatje says, “this is the way to know someone’s face.”
>When we talk on the telephone, you are high-spirited until the very last second. Right before hanging up, you suddenly say “okaybye.” All one word and with a tone of sad defeat. It makes me wanna keep talking and talking.
>In anticipation of my recovery from abdominal surgery last year, you gave me your lowest cut jeans and brought me portions of soup I could keep in the freezer.
>You like the opposite kind of wool that I like, so when we crochet together, there is never any mineminemine.
>You are the best person with whom to drink pickle-based highballs.
>You are a galvaniser.(I found a sweetheart in San Francisco too. Isn’t he handsome?)
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Our trip this summer was partly funded by sales at two Renegade Craft Fairs, the first in San Francisco. Look at those adorably-bored, contemporary-attractive folks looking down on all the home-made goodness. The fair was held at the Fort Mason Centre, just across the water from Alcatraz.
I was there peddling Plants You Can’t Kill. Janine at Uppercase Magazine wrote this very nice little piece about the project for her blog that includes some sweet photos:
http://www.uppercasegallery.ca/uppercase-journal/2011/7/13/renegade-sf-plants-you-cant-kill.html
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This is what we drove towards— the beautiful home of my mother’s cousin, Brian and his wife Colleen. I absolutely LOVED it there.
This trip was mostly motivated by a desire to research my dad’s history as a traveling puppeteer in California in the 50s, but the surprise gift of this summer has been getting to know my mom’s side. I can’t believe I had these wonderful people in my own tree all this time and never knew it.
Brian and Colleen, I love you both so much! Thanks for sharing your magic with us for a week and for opening your hearts to us too. I won’t be a stranger any more.
Now I know why there are so many love songs about San Francisco.
So much more to say about this place. So much more to dream about and to reach toward.
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