Strangers at the Gates
Boxing Day in South Bend is chilly, but sunny. We did not have snow for the holiday, nice for all of our travelers, but not so great for the little baby sled under the tree for our grandson. We have a nice training sledding hill, right in our front yard, so maybe later this winter.
A few years ago, The Indiana Women’s Caucus for Art decided to put together an exhibit about threats to the Great Lakes. Several of our members actually live on Lake Michigan, and others on waters close by. The show, Living Waters, took a while to come together, and we had some challenges securing the right venue, but here we are, two weeks out from installation. The piece that I made, Strangers at the Gates, is about the three electric barriers on the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal that separate the Asian Carp in the Mississippi River water system from the Great Lakes. These invasive fish are voracious and a huge threat to the food chain for aquatic life. They would join a long line of other invasive species, carelessly introduced, with unintended consequences to the balance of the Great Lakes ecosystem.
Living Waters, opens January 14, 2019, at the Notre Dame Center for Arts and Culture, South Bend, and will close March 22.
I also have a piece, Coin Op Laundry, in the Art Link Midwest Regional Juried Exhibit, opening January 4 at Art Link Gallery in Fort Wayne, IN.
Reading List:
I am closing my 2018 good reads with a few astounding titles: Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver; Virgil Wander, by Leif Enger; and The History of Bees, by Maja Lunde. Other books I have enjoyed, Ways to Hide in Winter, by Sarah St. Vincent; Key to Treehouse Living, by Elliot Reed; There, There, by Tommy Orange; and Longbourne, by Jo Baker.