LONG OVERDUE: the transformations of my new home. Landscape: from blank slate to increasing refuge. Apart from help planting the big trees and rocks, I did all the rest myself, in stages.

1. The back: building a prairie garden

2. The front: buffer from the street.

Last night (Friday Oct 12, 2018) was the opening for this exhibit in the 'gallery' room of Oxford Community Art Center. It will be up through November 2nd.

This exhibit tells visual stories of recovery and healing using art therapy, both as part of professional therapy ‘assignments’, and as self-directed therapy.
The methods that I found produced the most revelations:

• emotionally responding to the therapist’s ‘assignment’;
• working rapidly and intuitively, even ‘primitively’, with no attention to aesthetics;
• and using the non-dominant hand, which helps bypass intellectual decisions to access the unconscious and core issues/emotions more immediately.

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TOPICS USING ART THERAPY IN THIS EXHIBIT:
PTSD from sexual assaults long years in the past (art therapy in clinical setting)

1. Associated self destructive beliefs and behaviors
2. Recognizing & replacing those beliefs and behaviors
3. Rebuilding self and hope

DIVORCE: after 35 years of marriage. Struggles, impact and reconstruction. Self-directed ‘art therapy’.

SURGERY/PHYSICAL HEALING: Post right shoulder surgery demanding non-use of arm. Non-dominant (left) hand paintings. Helpful to process pain and frustration during the long 6 weeks recovery, it also proved a welcome and fun distraction. Self-directed art therapy.

Following are the text and images present in the exhibit. My hope is that this show brings encouragement and hope as well as revelation to as many people as possible in the community.
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Part One: PTSD art therapy:
Introduction: The precursor to diagnosis and therapy: a revelation in the early 90’s that something was very wrong - not sure what. So I created these 3 pieces to explore realizations. (The girls are all me at different ages, each scarred by something. Adult self in closest chair)

1. My Cave: dirty clothes everywhere= my shame. Notebooks & papers = my ‘story’. The dirty dishes etc. = a trail of negative coping behaviors. My ‘Mess.’ 
2. Neutral Place: We meet in a neutral safe place for conversation: I listen cautiously, full of doubt
3. Letting In: The first girl to respond is the youngest. The older they get, the more cautious, and ashamed.

Fall of 2003:
 Sometimes it takes multiple tries to find the right kind of help. Finally, a proper diagnosis: PTSD from sexual traumas. (2= age 14, 1965, & age 20, 1972)
ART THERAPY was employed in a series of assignments to aid in the steps of recovery, which are:

1. ‘Break the silence’ -- tell your story, receive validation
2. ‘Process’ -- the traumas, feelings, beliefs
3. ‘Restructure’ -- beliefs, coping skills, self concept, and reclaim personal power.

(For more information, see handout, side 2)
Primarily I used childhood art mediums and fast, impulsive execution to access the emotions.

RESTRUCTURING phase 2:  identifying and changing self destructive beliefs, behaviors, and coping mechanisms, which often includes substance abuse.  Confronting, assessing, and replacing these coping mechanisms helps build a healthier, victorious life.
My assignments were 3 fold:

1. “r.e. body hate: What’s the belief? ”
2. “What do you get from drinking?” 
3. Replacing self hate and hopelessness with new perspectives.

The first 2 assignments resulted in a series I called ‘Idols that comfort in vain.’

“IDOLS” series

1. ‘The accusers’: my weight is visible evidence of bad choices and deserves condemnation from without and within.
2. ‘The Golden People’: I don’t fit in, can’t compete. Intimidated, awkward, I need alcohol to socialize.
3. ‘How do you spell relief?’ Drinking insulates from anxiety and tumult outside. In reality I am blurred, altered, trapped.
4. ‘Hope in a Bottle’ It is my only comfort and ‘light’ in this dark, impenetrable wilderness that isolates and imprisons me.

My exhibit of both new and old works opened at Oxford Community Arts Center on November 11, 2016. Originally scheduled to run for 6 weeks, they asked to hold it over until February of 2017.

Title and description of exhibition: “Stuff Of Earth”  - Varied work and media, celebrating the natural world both as subject matter and as tools and media in the creative process: drawings, paintings, collages incorporating found objects such as sticks, leaves, berries, grass,  earth, flowers and more. 

One of my favorite things I did during the summer ahead of the show was finger paint with mud: various samples of earth with different hues, including charcoal and ash from the fire pit, mixed with acrylic medium as a binder.

I also played with 'painting' with leaves and flowers scrubbed on bristol board, most from my prairie garden, then rendering the garden views itself using those plant offerings.

These colors were often surprisingly different from the appearance of the plant parts. How they hold their color over time will be interesting to see. These particular works may not be stellar artwork, but the process was a stellar experience.

I also created some new, smaller collages for this show, focusing on use of sticks, weeds, seeds and leaves as components with the various torn papers.

Here is a sampling of these experimental works included in the show:

Other work in the show focused on both new and old works in painting, collage, and 'stick and ink' pieces. Many of these can be seen on the gallery page. A few that aren't:

Life Changes. Sometimes more than we expect. 

Dissolution. A prettier word than divorce. The end is the same: the death of one way of life, the bumpy birth of another.

So, I'm no longer wife or partner in the DeVore's Land & Water Gardens business I helped build and fuel for 35 years. The farm and woods are no longer available to me. My wonderful large studio on the second floor of the house is no longer mine.  All losses are worthy of grieving. It will take time.

Meanwhile, I have purchased a little house in Oxford. It is enough. It is a blank slate. I am in the process of making it mine. Moved in July 5. This summer has been spent on working with the interior and landscaping the yard, as I had to leave behind the landscape I had helped form on Hogue Rd.

It will be a while before I have a functional studio. In the meantime, creative energy is channeled into making this little house a home for me, and this bare little yard a sanctuary for me and my new cat, Tucker.

First, before pictures. Next, the 'During' phase, interior: remove all cheap-o carpet. Discover old asbestos lino underneath. Company can't remove, so I must. Hence, beefy dust mask & scraper. Big job! Then, paint all walls, trim, & kitchen cabinets. But first, must scrape bubbling up old paint off kitchen. Another big job! Finally, new vinyl everywhere, enlarge closet in master bedroom/soon to be studio, and create/install faux tile in kitchen made by painting and glazing strips of cardboard. It fools everyone. 

Time to move in at last. Next phase: organize. Get curtains. Live in it. Make it my own.

Des Fleurs, the local Oxford Garden Club, manages the Children's Garden they helped finance on the N. side of the Oxford Community Arts Center on College Avenue, Oxford, OH. They contacted me about designing & installing an interactive 'Fairy Garden' in an odd shaped shady bed in one corner of the garden, where the kids could build & play. They had a suggested budget, and anything above that was my donation to the cause.

This was a very satisfying project. They approved my design, which included a dry stream bed, some anchor plants, a hypertufa boulder (the smaller of the two that had been used in the 2009 Cincinnati Flower show) with some ground cover plant pockets, and suggestions of completed planting, which would be the garden club's responsibility (along with maintenance).

I created a mock-up using photoshop and some photos of the area, and from that design, proceeded to construct the bed (with a little 'slave labor' from John to excavate the stream bed and haul the oversized gravel.)  The plant choices were hopefully to inspire kids to build twig fairy houses in the branches, or in the shade of the perennials. It included a small stone cairn that I imagined storing raw materials in, but which ended up being used like a dwelling. 

They sunk a dark blue basin into the stream for a water feature, and incorporated the fanciful bird bath & other statuary they already had. The result was quite charming.

The end of 2012, DeVore's Land & Water Gardens was invited by the seasonal exhibit planners at the Krohn Conservatory to design and install a 2013 winter exhibit that would run from January 19 through beginning of March. The design John & I came up with was more ambitious than anything they had ever fielded, and the use of masses of stone & logs as well as the size of plants and water feature made them nervous. In the end, the committee consented, and the theme, Enchanted Spring, was chosen, with the idea of incorporating my elf & fairy houses into the planting. It was an incredible installation, extremely successful for them, and great publicity for us. I spent that late fall building a number of new fairy houses to include, as well as finishing up the Oak Burl house.

While I did have some input on the overall design, as well as creating the concept drawings (plan view) for the committee, the major design concept and plant list was John's. That, and his expertise at installation, really provided the 'wow' factor, though the crowds were enchanted with my structures. Krohn was responsible for the perennial & herbaceous plantings, as well as some smaller shrub additions. It was an extremely well received and delightful exhibit, and very satisfying.

It starts with a huge old oak burl harvested from felled tree by the barn, the insides slashed with a chain saw, then the thing left out for a number of years where weathering broke down some of the wood. Next step: chiseling out the inside to create "living space" and to remove punky wood.

After it's been cleaned and inspected from every angle, the "noodling" process begins. "Who" would live there, how would "they" use the space, build where, and with what.... As this was the most ambitious structure I'd yet made, I worked by creating a master sketch of the burl as well as printing out images and sketching construction ideas & drawings over them.

I worked on this off and on for months. It was ambitious and satisfying, both. Working hearth/chimney, balcony and 'patio' with split bamboo flooring, kitchen window with pebble mosaic wide sill. Door of driftwood with custom frame. Even a hidden 'tunnel' and ladder to get to the patio from inside, though no one will ever see it. We know it's there, though.

I was invited by the head of the Cincinnati Flower & Garden Show to create an exhibit for their Spring 2009 event, which was themed as 'Fairies in the Garden', and ran for 2 weeks in April. She had seen examples of my elf & fairy houses on the landscape website. They provided me with an 8' diameter round plywood top on cement blocks, surrounded with black cloth skirt. The rest was up to me. It was a wonderful experience, using both my gardening and artistic abilities. I did have to press my family muscle into service for the big stuff (the hypertuffa boulders, sand, and smaller rocks delivered & placed as well as some planting) but the design & final say were all mine.

I incorporated nearly all native plants, including local wildflowers and moss from our woods, my elf & fairy houses, and my bonsai junipers & chinese elm trees to add to the mountain scale feel. It was very well received, and I won an award for my plant choices and design.