Back in Vancouver

Well, it's sunny still [mostly] & not nearly as hot as in New Mexico. It feels great to be home. There are piles of slightly unpacked things all over the house, so I'm not fully back yet.

I am thinking ahead to projects I want to do. I'm taking three surface design classes with Maiwa in September, & I am beginning to work up a proposal for a show I want to do called Oh, Solo, Double Trio: Numbers in my Life. I've got 15 or so quilts and I am thinking about whether I'll do any more. I have 2 fermenting ideas.

Here's  a detail of the quilt about zero.

 It's a Zero Zodiac. The idea came from an other quilt I did called Dragonfly Dancer. It was an alphabet quilt.

I need to photograph some better detail shots before I submit the application.

For fun here's another--well two, I couldn't stop myself.

 Double,Double

 Fingers & Toes, 10

I have also been doing some writing for this proposal or show about my life in mathematics and the gradual shift towards art. 

Recently I have started to reclaim myself AS a mathematician.  This is really almost a choke for me, until I realize that I do call myself a dancer, even though I never danced professionally; I do call myself a choral singer, even though I am not right now in a chorus. So suddenly it is clear to me that all those intense years of studying in mathematics made me into a mathematician. I have stopped arguing with people about being called that.

And I have just picked up a wondeful book called Here's Looking at Euclid. Last night my friends were laughing at me because I didn't even 'get' the reference to Humphrey Bogart's line in Casa Blanca, I think it was. 

Does that make me a math nerd? 

My favorite sentence in the preface is something like this: 

The history of mathematics is mathematics.

The author goes on to point out that Euclid & Pythagoras's discoveries are as true now as they ever were, and that by the time we graduate from highschool we are operating in the mathematics up to the 1600's. He says his graduate work too him up to the 1920's, and he's a man in his 40's I'd guess. So there you go!

One surface design classes I'm taking is with a famous quilt artist, Susan Shie. It's called Diary Painting for Quilts.

Another one is on Stitching as Mark-Making. I've taken another stitchery course, so it will be a revisiting; and the other one is called Monoprinted Cloth & the Stitched Mark. These two are with Ilze Aviks, who I had never heard of before. New Zone Department.

That's it for now.