off running and out of sync

Sometimes, it feels like I can't turn around without knocking something over. Lately, it is more than things are moving at such a pace that I need a score card to keep track. I am starting a new teaching post, at a school 45 minutes from my regular school. So , one night a week, I will be out very late. My regular classes begin at 8 am- 3:30 T TH.. so it is not so bad.
Both art shows that I worked on seem to be in great shape, though I have not had time to photograph them.. Putting together Five syllabus and course outlines has taken up a lot of time. I wish I could say I did a great job, but that would no be true. I am having more trouble than before with organizing schedules.Also, I was denied coverage for my new insurance carrier, so, I will be without insurance for about a month. I was denied due to the reporting of medical conditions that are still not fully diagnosed, so it is hard for me to know what to do. I have the preliminary Neurology workup this Thursday, so I have to go, even though they are just supposed to set up further tests, which actually are not going to happen because I will have no coverage to pay for the tests occurring outside my plan... Duh...
In the mean time, I have had some flashes of insight as to the nature of my sculptural work. It is so strange. I fully develop the work with a specific intent that the figures be perceived as objects. After all, that was the point. As women, when we undergo radical cancer treatment we lose the things that connect us to the world of experience, we become abstract numbers, cases... protocols... even as healing objects, the figures fall more readily into Icon than the more direct political reference that would result from making them life size. So when my adviser suggested I make them larger, I was annoyed. Making them larger, only serves the inevitable Western impulse "Why not make them bigger," as if that will make them somehow better...

When I showed them to my friend from London, she totally got that they were never intended to be adult, or waiting to become life size... they are symbols, not replicas of real life. She also suggested that I should put them around and wait to see what arises. This rush to show, exhibit, and get feedback is not my style. I hold work back for years until I see what must be done. I have only been making these figures in their present forms since Jan 2005 and they need to 'percolate' in their own space. I have shown them and have not been at all happy with the way they were exhibited or the way they occupied the space.

Last night, I had a flash about the difference between exhibiting and living with a sacred or symbolic piece of art. Somehow, the public exposure or valuing silences the piece, or cuts off the subtle meaning that can only come from prolonged viewing or multiple viewings in a space of reception and openness. Art as something that you totally get in one viewing is something I do not want.

Watching the "How art made the world, to death and back again" series from PBS, it occurred to me that art that is meant to reconnect some spiritual lack,has moved out of the places where it is best understood or experienced. 9small gardens. or alcoves in private settings) In "Ways of Seeing", Berger laments that art is out of place by means of mechanical reproduction or replica, but it is also out of place if the work is situated somewhere, where it can not be viewed over the period of time it might take to really experience the work. Like sculpture on the Internet, or postcard, it just doesn't give you the thing that sculpture does best. Occupy real space..