Fossils, part 2

On a trip to Israel, right in the middle of Jerusalem, I saw a big archaeological dig:

Look! That guy was uncovering the past right in front of me! In my next life I wanna be an paleonlogist. I wanna DIG.

 So imagine how happy I was when I read this year that Rowan University - right here in NJ! - wanted volunteers to dig in their fossil pit. All I had to do was bring my own lunch and drive 2hrs each way. Oh Boy! Into the pit:

The Edleman Fossil Park, at the bottom of an old quarry

High-tech equipment: buckets(to sit on) and crates (to dump the dirt).

My own little plot of million-year-old dirt. All day, I sat there, carefully scraping away the dirt, revealing shells and bones and conglomerations (bits of nothing-interesting stuck together so that it looks like it might be a fossil, and you show it to the post-doc for assessment). 

All the fossils are placed in red plastic boxes, all labeled to show their exact location.

The red boxes are sent to the paleo lab, where I volunteered to sit and clean up the fossils with a toothbrush and dental tools. 

On the left are some of the specimens. On the right are the same specimens, after cleaning. Yes, after driving, digging, scraping, brushing and scraping some more, you have an exciting bunch of....slightly less grubby lumps. 

I love it. I happily crouch in the mud, slowly uncovering what are certainly very common fossils. If I find something exciting, I'll hand it over immediately to someone who actually knows what they're doing. But the mundane interests me. There are small orange stripes in the dirt, which turn out to be bog iron. Worthless in the study, but historically important in NJ history. In the past, I had spent a lot of time & effort hunting for bog ore - more on that next week.

I see silvery lines in the layers, mushy remains of what? I've read enough to know that the earliest rope is found at archaeological sites as lines of decayed material. Here, we find the fossilized remains of tunnels dug by ancient critters. 

No idea, yet, how or even if, this will influence my art. Will it lead to a new series? So far, I've played around with the greenish stain that forms on our clothing in the pit. What is that stuff? Glaucomite, I'm told, when I ask the high school and college volunteers around me. Just kids, but eager with the same addiction that drove George Smith back to the British Museum, again and again.

Fossils

 Fossil Strata (2008) 23" x 23"  The top layer here is a damask napkin, dyed gray and sewn over scissors, pins and sewing machine parts. My thought was: if thousands of years from now, archaeologists dug up my sewing room, what would they find?  What would it look like? My art presents sewing notions as fossilized items (why are our tools called 'notions'? Notions can mean small useful items, or whims, wishes, fancies. Why can't they be TOOLS?). Anyhow.....

As I was saying, as I was 'fossilizing' these tools, I got it in my head that if fossils were such an important element in my art,  I should actually SEE more fossils. Of course I'd been to museums, but I wanted to go behind the dioramas and cases, and see how scientists deal with fossils. A friend of a friend introduced me to someone who worked at a big museum, and he invited me to come visit. Now, this very nice man didn't actually work with bones...he worked with insects at the museum. I'm not the world's biggest fan of bugs. But....I went.  And I saw the cases, the Schmidt boxes of bugs-on-a-pin, the stacks of materials waiting to be cleaned and studied.

And there was a mason jar, with small vials in it (on the right). The vials held 'soft-bodied specimens' in liquid, and the vials were stored in the liquid of the mason jar, so there was absolutely no danger of them drying out. This one just stuck in my head.

A few weeks later, I bought a big box of old mason jars, with glass lids. And I made my own display of Soft Bodied Specimens:

The lids are resting on a bed of cotton in a shallow tray. Each lid covers a specimen of embroidery or crochet.

Soft Bodied Specimens #2, with crochet and lace.

Soft Bodied Specimens #3. The background cloth has the names of various types of lace, while each lid covers a lace specimen. And this one has small plastic vials containing tiny bits of lace and crochet. 

A couple of years later, I was putting together a show at a small local museum. The director wondered if I might be interested in creating a show combining my textile art with their large clothing collection. What I heard was "wanna play with our collection?" Oh, god, YES! Which is how the show Closet Archaeology (a future posting) came about at the Hermitage Museum in Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ. One of the items in their collection was a corset from the 1700's:

All hand sewn; such a wonderful piece of art, with that amazing shape. Even if it was meant to tightly restrain women. So.....I went into my collection of old corsets and girdles, and my mason jars, and created a series of Preserves:

Stuffing those torture devices into glass jars was great fun......

In my next post, I'll show you my current adventures actually digging for fossils.