listening to this and enjoying a misty, rainy, not-too-hot-but-summery-warm day on the island. Watching the fog roll in over the water from my lab window makes me feel all warm and cozy inside (well, as warm and cozy as pipetting can be). I have an on-and-off protocol day, so I've been catching up on tons of blogs this morning and letting my imagination run wild.

so, so obsessed

So I wandered into spruce & gussy this past weekend and discovered prints that I absolutely ADORED. Naturally, I whipped out the battered Moleskin notebook stashed in my backpack and wrote down the artist's name... later, I was thrilled to discover her blog and artwork for sale on Etsy.

You know the excited, inspired feeling you get when you find an artist who makes work that just speaks to you? Jennifer's artwork is basically what I aspire to produce. I am so obsessed. It's making me itch to go grab my sketchbook and take more notes for thesis ideas.

Check out my new role model here.

my love-hate relationship with a blank book.

I spent almost an hour this morning sitting and just paging through my sketchbook. I've never been good at keeping one and it's one of the things that makes me feel like I'm not really an artist. Right now I have quite a few so-called sketchbooks going: my journal is filled with doodles, then there's my "real" sketchbook, the lined Moleskin I keep with me at all times, and a collection of index cards held together with binder rings. My iPhoto library probably counts as another. For some reason I just can't seem to keep everything in one place!

Last year I had a professor who was adamant about keeping up artistic practices, i.e. drawing in your sketchbook every day. We clashed in many of our thoughts about art, and I probably didn't listen to enough things she had to say. I think I'm going to (belatedly) heed that advice and spend the rest of my summer making daily entries in my beat-up, daunting, "real artist's" sketchbook.

today, for whatever reason, i miss camp so much it hurts.

first FWMISH image!

This, my dear friends, is the product of 5.5 weeks of rigorous pipetting. You are looking at a sea urchin embryo (about 24 hours post-fertilization), which is about the size of a sand grain to the naked eye. This little guy is labeled for a gene called nodal, one of several genes involved with organizing the developing cells into body regions via several axes. I spent most of the past month making "probes," RNA constructs labeled with a fluorescent tag, so that I could use a (super sweet) confocal microscope to look at multiple layers of the embryo. Anywhere you see red, that means a cell in the urchin is expressing the gene we're interested in. The clumping in one place is a positive result (I may or may not have jumped around the microscope suite when I saw it...); these cells make up the "animal pole," which helps comprise the initial body axis.

Isn't it pretty?!

when was the last time you saw the sun rise?

Touch the earth, love the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and the dawn seen over the ocean from the beach.

--Henry Beston, The Outermost House



What a treat to watch the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain after an exhilarating night hike up the North Ridge trail. It was a lovely start to the day, made even better by a scrumptious breakfast and steaming cup of coffee.

I love this place.

making books

Lately I've been loving making books-- books of artwork, themed books, books of quotes, books of memories. I don't like calling them scrapbooks (I hate the cutesy, commercial image it's become), but I guess that's what they are...

Making these books grew out of my need to organize and record. I have always been terrified of losing memories, and of not remembering the details of experiences and places. I also save everything (a trait passed on by my mother; you never know when you might use something again!), and when the need for closet and bookshelf space was becoming immediate, I sought to synthesize years' worth of memorbilia into something meaningful.

I like making books because it feeds my love of collage-- even if I don't save an entire card, or every single map from a vacation, the torn corner of a receipt or menu is enough to represent a larger meaning. Somehow, together, those little bits of days, moments, and memories become a cohesive object. A book, a conversation, a narration. My physical organization provides a canvas for words, capturing my relationship to the subject that can only be achieved in this mixed-media genre of work.

I followed the same design concept as outlined here, using cardboard for the cover and cutting up old file folders for the inside pages. My first book documented a year of high school; my most recent attempts have been at cataloging summers spent at camp.