Wednesday - The Jackson Pollock dress

When I walked downstairs in the morning wearing this dress my boyfriend went "ooooh, I love that dress, it reminds me of a Jackson Pollock." He's right, it's kinda like an expressionist painting. I got this dress from a second hand store in Levin. It was summer and I needed a dress for the trip and the matching belt with it was too good not to buy.

Today I went to work and then I went to the launch of my friend's beer. He is such an amazing person, an incredibly hard worker, generous with a kind soul and really good at making beer. He made a wheat beer recently (my fav type), it is so good, so so good, it tastes like banoffee pie.

 

After having a beer we went to the art opening of our new Mexican friend, Jorge Satorre, an artist who had been staying with us for the week. His work was beautiful, truly. The piece I am rubbing is a stone from Guatemala. I couldn't stop touching it and wanted to keep it close to my skin. I have a sponsor child in Guatemala who has recently stopped needing my support. To feel a rock from the land he has grown up on was pretty amazing. It was magical. The rest of Jorge's work included tiny bronze minatures of all the extinct New Zealand birds. To see them all, lots of them, perched on a plinth was pretty tragic. The way he had arranged them was as though he had left space for the ones that would eventually become extinct. If you click here you can see more about the exhibition. I wanted to include this quote from the exhibition catalog that I think is rather wonderful and expresses how I sometimes feel when I am engaging with the cultures around me. 

"It is impossible to say what an individual is doing unless we have tacitly accepted the essentially arbitrary modes of interpretation that social tradition is constantly suggesting to us from the very moment of our birth. Let anyone who doubts this try the experiment of making a painstaking report of the actions of a group of natives engaged in some activity, say religious, to which he has not the cultural key. If he is a skillful writer, he may succeed in giving a picturesque account of what he sees and hears, or thinks he sees and hears, but the chances of his being able to give a relation of what happens, in terms that would be intelligible and acceptable to the natives themselves, are practically nil."

Edward Sapir quoted in Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of culture, (Walnut Creek, C: AltaMira Press, 1992) 571