Stills

I prefer the upper one (it's faded out with the opacity option but on a black background which is why it's not shining in this still as it might), and that's the one I'll be using in the relevant section in my video talk. With photos arrayed around me, and drawings, and paintings, as well as digitally drawn images (like the one above), I realize the possibilities for adding art to the video are endless and that it's going to take me a lot longer than originally thought. This image alone of took hours - and I haven't figured out how I'll use it in the video yet. Motion key frame to expand and vaporize it? The image needs to be luminous - is it luminous enough?

                                          

How Can We Be Different and the Same?

direct link to video at Vimeo: How Can We Be Different and the Same?

A talk on the maternal body and sexual difference that I recorded in 2004 in Vancouver, and gave at an ARM conference at York University in Toronto in 2006. Recently I found the footage, and began playing with it in Final Cut, adding a number of filters. I am still working on the video, and will add scrolling images over the next week or so.

While I received a true 'dissing' when I presented this paper - a high level feminist maternal theorist arrived about half way through with her husband and spared no words in dismissing my work - and I never finished the degree I had intended to get for this work, I still stand behind every word. This was my last academic paper.

I was criticized for being 'essentialist' - such a, to my mind, pointless North American label whenever anyone tries to openly discuss the difficult and complex issues around the maternal body and motherhood and sexual difference. All I could respond with was that I had chosen to speak of 'an Adam and Eve' because you have to say something, offer an opinion on the reality, its difficulties.

Although I received apologies from the later-comer to my talk, I felt my position really too radical for even an organization focusing on research on motherhood.

So I will embed this on my 'birthdance' page at my website, where my work on the maternal body is.

Many thanks for reading this, and perhaps even watching.



                                          

Ink of Mask

"...nest, crysalis and garment only constitute one moment of a dwelling place..." Gaston Bachelard, 'the poetics of space,' (Beacon, 1966), p.66.

"Ink of Mask," 6" x 6.5", 15.2cm x 16.5cm, India ink, graphite, pen ink, Faber-Castelli watercolour pencils on archival paper, 2010. Photoshop 'flourescent filter' added to photo of a simple doodle sketch to pass the time.

Just a scribble, though it is based on a beautiful photograph somewhere on Facebook (FB's numbering of photos, removing all references to an individual's site does not help one to re-find an image), the original far superior to this ditty, done while my video was rendering.

Later: I purchased some new watercolour pencils today, having misplaced ours when we moved into our apartment 3 1/2 years ago. The image below is the original.