Tag: art
Bones of Earth, Bones of Clay
I’m fascinated by bones…all bones, especially the white bleached remains of the wild creatures picked clean of all flesh, marking the place where they lay down on the Earth and died.
I am not alone….
Bones of Metal
French artist Phillipe Pasqua designed and fabricated this full-scale, 21 foot tall Tyrannasauras rex sculpture. Comprising 350 bones of chrome and aluminum, the Lizard King towers over the Seine River in France. (Click here for more…)
Bones of Rock
Speaking of T-Rex, a rare nearly complete fossilized skeleton heads for the Smithsonian as the centerpiece for the new dinosaur hall. <more here…>
In other bones, Paleontologists recently excavated the fossilized tail of a 72-million year old hadrosaur in the northern desert of Mexico. Discovered by locals, the scientists unburied fifty remarkably well-preserved vertebrae. From these bones, scientists determined the dinosaur suffered from arthritis and tumors (Click here for more…)
Bones of Clay
From molten origins of Igneous rocks, whose feldspars undergo weathering and disintegration at Earth surface, forming a variety of clay minerals that, thankfully, blanket much of Earth’s surface.
I too am descendent from Firstborn Earth. I know this clay. It is me.
During one muse-filled summer break from teaching geology, a series of ceramic sculptures, whose central theme of twisted spinal columns sprang to life beneath my hands, telling tales of my own origins, my vertebrate ancestry. My own bones.

Summer 2004

Mary C Simmons
Our evolutionary paths cross, clay and I, in a moment of geologic time-the instant in which I so briefly live. I witness a distant past and participate in this miraculous path of life upon which my hands and this clay chanced to meet.

Mary C Simmons
Gravity and Grace; a Million Pieces of Home

Complete and Utter Ecofantasy….
Twenty-five years ago, I read the entire volume of the making of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, a tribute to the spirit of womanhood in the incarnations of 39 women, from the un-named Primordial Goddess, through the millennia of human history, culminating at Georgia O’Keeffe. I rejoiced to hear that the art piece had found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum, and resolved that one day, I would visit the museum and see this great art work up close and personal.

Before I ever got to the Dinner Party, the current exhibition by an African artist, El Anatsui, took my attention, my astonishment, my reverence. Gravity and Grace, a monumental work of art composed of metal shards from the urban landscape.
Ugly litter; breathtaking art.

See the exhibition October 25, 2013 — February 9, 2014 at the Des Moines Art Center











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