Rattle Them Bones

A few years ago, my husband and I took our kids to Washington, DC.
We went to all the tourists haunts, pulling the kids behind us.
But there was one place that everyone loved.
The Museum of Natural History.
The kids ran from top to bottom, pulling us along
talking excitedly about this exhibit or that one...
I loved it all - the beauty of the hauntingly sorrowful changes that our world had suffered through...
The recreations of all the magnificent animals that roamed before man ever began leaving his footprints...
But my favorite place was the rooms that housed hundreds of skeletons.
I was just fascinated with all of those animal skeletons.
I honestly never realized that until I walked into that room...
It was breath taking.
How could the natural color of the bones
be so alive in a creature that had drawn its last breath?
It was facinating that they could make these skeletons seem so alive- so real- when they were strung together by a man's hand.
I was eventually pulled from the rooms because I kept going back and forth,
looking - reading...
making up stories about them...
some kind of odd attachment began brewing in that room all those years ago.

Since then, I've been known to collect bones...
wherever I happen upon them...
and whatever kind I find.
I have began adding them to my mixed media work in the last year or so.

A few months ago, while reading my friend Judy Perez's blog,
I saw mention of where she had gone to a SOFA expo.
She had a couple of photos of work done by Geoffrey Gorman.



He picks up found objects, screws, bolts, weathered wood...bits of this and that
and fashions them into the most beautiful sculptures I have ever seen.
He assembles some into animals, some into men...
allowing Mother Nature to have her input on them as well.
If you get a chance, look at his work.
You might be as taken with it as I am.
Be sure to visit his blog too.
He offers some insight into the process-
you know -
The why of The what.