by Marja-Leena Every mother, grandmother, and friend who has been like a mother to another –
You are invited on a little tour of a few highlights in my spring garden:
Here are the winter pansies in a pot by the back door,
over there are the last tulips amongst the forget-me-nots,
see these bluebells under the currant bush,
a mexican orange bush by the front steps, doesn’t it smell heavenly?
and there are the lilacs that evoke memories of my mother’s garden.
Happy Mother’s Day tomorrow!
by Marja-Leena 
I’m still feeling tired and under the weather.
It’s a glorious sunny day at last and the garden is beckoning.
I need to repot the tomato seedlings, still so pitifully small.
I must start hardening the geraniums and other plants for their move outdoors.
Lots to do, so I hope the sun gives me energy.
by Marja-Leena 
One of the more splendid events in the merry month of May is graduation. This year we join many proud parents of sons and daughters who are graduating this month from institutes of higher education. Our daughter Erika has completed four years of study at Emily Carr Institute. On Saturday, May 5th we will be watching her receive her Bachelor’s in Communication Design. Congratulations, Erika, we are so very proud of you!
ECI has a huge graduating class from their many programs, so it will be a long afternoon of speeches, honours, cheering, clapping and a few sentimental tears at the Chan Centre at UBC. Then Erika’s family in Vancouver will celebrate over dinner in her favourite restaurant. The evening will see a very lively party scene at ECI with the opening of the grad exhibition.
Here’s what Erika wrote on her blog:
My project AfterTASTE is exhibiting in the design part of the Undergraduate Exhibition at Emily Carr Institute! I’m also on the design team for the show’s website, which showcases about 240 students’ work, so I technically get two exhibits 😉 The website will be displayed at computer kiosks throughout the two buildings. The show runs for two weeks so I hope you can come check it out! Grad catalogues will also be available. Please pass on this info and enjoy!
Undergraduate Exhibition 2007 
Emily Carr Institute 
1399 Johnston Street, Vancouver BC
Exhibition May 6-21st
 Open daily 10am-6pm
Opening Night May 5, 7-11pm
More info: 604-844-3075 grad2007.eciad.ca
I noticed that the exhibition website has its online exhibition coming May 5th. If you can’t make it to Vancouver for the show, do view all the best work by this year’s graduating class on their website.
UPDATE May 5th: The grad website is launched! Please check out thirteen cent pinball for more details.
by Marja-Leena 
Connecting with D’Amico #2
Yippee! Our collaborative project In Its Four Voices – Silent Messengers: Connecting with D’Amico #2 has been published on Qarrtsiluni, the online literary and visual art zine! Go see and LISTEN to it! Then come back….
I must tell you the story behind this international collaboration. First about the image. Artist Karen D’Amico** of London, UK, and I met and corresponded through our respective artist blogs. She mailed me about a dozen close-up photographs of rocks that she had taken, and offered these to use in my work as I wished. I chose five of them to create the prints called Silent Messengers: Connecting with D’Amico #1-5. Thus it became ‘a borderless collaboration of sorts’, as Karen commented.
Sometime earlier this year, blog friend and prolific writer and poet Tom Montag of Wisconsin, USA, expressed an interest in writing a poem inspired by one of my Silent Messenger pieces. Tom wrote a fairly long and thrilling piece based on his choice, Connecting with D’Amico #2.
I am still astounded and awed that my work inspired this. In turn, I felt excited and inspired to find a way to make this into some kind of performance piece. With no experience in this and with the three of us in three different countries, a voice recording seemed the best possibility.
Around the same time Qarrtsiluni’s editors decided that the theme for March and April would be Ekphrasis – ‘poetry in dialogue with visual art’. Perfect…. except for the restriction to far fewer lines than Tom’s poem has. We checked with the editors to see if they would consider an audio file. Yes, they replied and so, we pushed on.
I roped in my clever daughter Erika who had some experience with digital music recording. The challenge was to find four readers and capture their voices into one recording. My husband got drawn into this, a bit reluctantly, heh, to read the first voice. As Karen was too busy to participate at this time, Erika took her place as the second voice. And I read the third voice, that of the artist/marker, of course. Recording our voices here at home was physically easy enough, but Tom is in Wisconsin, you know. After a few trials, the best recording of Tom’s reading of the fourth voice was over his phone into our computer with the aid of some special software and Skype (thanks to my husband’s expertise here). Then Erika did all the intricate editing work on all the voices using Apple’s Garage Band, not exactly the most professional program but giving us reasonably good results we think.
As Tom said, this is ‘a collaboration of a collaboration across three countries and three media’. This project has been an exciting new venture for me, and for all of us, and I’m so thrilled with it. A huge thank you to Tom for the fabulous poem and his reading, to Karen again for the photos that inspired my work, to my husband for his voice and technical help, and to Erika for her voice, advice and skillful editing work! And a big thank you to all the editors of Qarrtsiluni for their excellent editing suggestions and for publishing this.
We hope you like it…
(Tom is away on vacation right now, but I hope he will write a few words about his poem on his blog when he gets back. I’ll update with the link here when it happens.)
** Reedited March 15th, 2013 during a blog tidy-up: Karen has not been at this blog address for some years, so link has been removed. I have now quite accidentally found her new eponymous website: Karen Ay
by Marja-Leena by Marja-Leena 
enter the tunnel
this cave of origins
this passageway
of dreams
going through…
the narrowing…
into the light knowing
our origins
and our evolving
-James B. Harrod, OriginsNet
I wrote about this fascinating site back in February. At that time I had copied this poem into my little notebook of quotes and interesting ephemera, and came across it again this morning. I just had to share it with you today, as I keep thinking about my deep fascination for my own origins, of the origins of the Finno-Ugrics, and of all humans. I’m understanding more and more that this is at the very root of my fascination and passion for the traces left behind by these early people on rocks and cave walls, in their sculptures, standing stones, dolmens, pottery, jewelry and so on. And this passion naturally translates into my own art work.
Aligning with these thoughts of mine, I also enjoyed Harrod’s notes about the meanings behind this search for origins, such as this one:
“Origins” means the fons et origo, the fountain, the source, the waters of life, the depths, the springs of the creative process, our religious, spiritual and creative imagination, both collective and individual and in all living beings.
by Marja-Leena 
Looking through some of my old photos, I was again struck by these interesting rocks on the Saanich peninsula on southern Vancouver Island, taken in the summer of 2005. They make me think of weathered old bones of some prehistoric creature.
by Marja-Leena 
I have often mentioned that finding connections and being inspired by them is very much a part of the way I think and find ideas for my art work. One of my print series is even called Nexus, which mean connections. Blogging for me is about connections too, about inspirations given and received in this wonderful moving web that covers the world.
These thoughts have re-emerged to the front right now as I’ve been honoured and very awed by several blog-friends who’ve found connections and inspirations from a couple of my recent posts.
Dave wrote a fabulous poem.
Mouse in France wrote some great prose, both inspired by my post about hands in cave art.
Olga wrote both prose and a great poem about her thoughts on connections, inspired in part by an art piece of mine.
Venus de Willendorf was the subject of one interesting blogpost by Finnish blogger “hanhensulka”, living in Brussels, and he responded to my comment with a post linking to my Venus works, and the hands post as well!
Thank you, friends, for this wonderful web of inspiring connections!
On the home front, we have been having a week of mostly sunny weather and spring is definitely here at last. I’ve been busy preparing for friends arriving this afternoon for a short stay this weekend (connections of another kind!). Dessert just came out of the oven, husband is out picking up a fresh salmon for the barbeque, and I’m having a short break catching up a little with blog reading and writing. Have a great weekend, everyone!
———-
Addendum: April 2nd. Though I don’t take horoscopes seriously, I could not resist a chuckle over today’s very weird one for this Aquarius, in our local newspaper:
“You’re making a connection, a link between your small mind and your higher mind. You may feel like an alien in a bubble, but you’re no stranger to being strange. Stay in touch with your earthly relations.”
by Marja-Leena One day last week, I took our SLR digital camera and tripod to the printmaking studio in order to do the photo documentation of my year’s work. I’m an amateur photographer, so it’s always an interesting challenge for me, and I’m learning. Fortunately, as of last summer, the studio finally has daylight spectrum lighting, so that’s no longer a problem. We have a good spot on one wall with even and indirect lighting, so there’s minimal glare on the works that have a shiny transparent layer. Some readers may remember my mentioning past struggles with this.
Checking the downloaded images later, I think they have worked out well, but I’m only just beginning to process them – the usual checking for colour (the Raw versions seem better), contrast, light and dark levels, and cropping.
I’m also struggling to come up with a title for the series of ‘studies’ that I did last fall. I find the word ‘studies’ rather dull and over used, and doesn’t quite reflect the playful explorations in creating this little series. I like ‘sketches’ but these aren’t drawings, they are unique uneditioned prints. Hmm… vignettes? traces? reflections? meditations? These will have the series title first, such as this: “Silent Messengers: Vignette I (II, III to X). What do you think, dear readers, any suggestions?
Another part of the documentation process is to check the prints in each edition, select the best ones and also select the artist’s proof, shop proof and any decent trial proofs, and sign them all with edition and proof numbers, title and artist’s signature. Then I record all the information about the process, the paper type and size, print size, and the edition numbers on a special print documentation form, one for each edition, which I then keep in a binder with all my other documentation forms. The shop gets a copy of the documentation sheet along with the shop proof. This is fairly standard practice in printmaking shops. I find the records very useful and I can make copies for any gallery or purchaser if requested.
Now I have to get back to work editing, but here’s one of the small layered pieces I did, and will tentatively title ‘Silent Messengers: Vignette I’. There’s just a little bit of glare in the middle, but not bad, I think.
UPDATE MARCH 29th, 2007: Thank you everyone for your imput, which has helped me chew on the title some more! I’ve finally decided to call these one-of-a-kind little pieces Silent Messengers: Assemblage I to X. I’ve removed the image that was posted here, adjusted it closer to what the original is, and given it its own post.
by Marja-Leena 
drenching rains
absent sun
turbid drinking water
today
sunny breaks
walk in the park
blinded by green
north, south,
east, west
now hail
March is a lion
