Having worked on my thesis for an entire year, you might think that I am tired of that project. In a way, I am. I am tired of making enormous swirl-covered trees. I am tired of having to finish the dragon I’m working on by next week or not have enough dragons for the project. I’m tired of having to write fifty pages as fast as I can.
But I’m not tired of the work I made. If you think about it, I spent about 11 months making this project happen, and then two weeks watching it do what it was supposed to do. I had two weeks, during which I was madly attempting to catch up on all the other work I was also supposed to be doing, to sit near my display and watch the fish and consider where I was going to put the dragons next. And then I had to take it apart.
This is kind of the way a lot of things in the arts are. A musician practices for hours and hours and days and days, in order to be prepared for a one-hour performance. Most exhibitions are a couple to a few weeks in length, but many sculptural pieces took the artist months to create. So what to do?
Well, I feel like my thesis is not done. I am taking it with me. For now, that means the dragons sit on my living room table, and sometimes they get to play in the snow. The tree trunk is currently buckled into the backseat of my car. It truly goes everywhere with me, so that I don’t have to carry it up the steps to the apartment. The other tree pieces are sitting in the spare bedroom, as though they are guests.
It’s kind of like my thesis has a second life. My dragons are now part of my daily world. While this means that they are taken out of the context that I made for them, it makes me reflect on the ways that they fit into this world and this context.
Starting tomorrow, I’m going to begin having weekly Traveling Dragons posts. What would the world be like if there were tiny dragons living here too?
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