This morning I photographed the first little bits I've made as a promo image for the gallery:
The houses are made from old tourist brochures with the doll house punch-outs someone so thoughtfully left for me in a plastic bag at the dump. The garbage cans are the shaft of raven feathers cut in sections and painted black (the hollow shaft of a raven's feather is white even though the barbs are black). The RV sign is from a tourist brochure. Its on a stick of what might have been incense. I found it on the floor outside my studio. 
I *might* make 800 of them. That's about how many houses there are in the Dawson City area. Or I might just make however many I make before the opening.
Tomorrow I'm going to try my hand at felting raven feathers, wool, laundry lint, and dog hair. I want to make hundreds of miniature ravens to fill my miniature dump.
***
People are also asking my about MY house. The Residency uses a historical house called McCauley, named after the first mayor of Dawson City. This was his house. It's a lot larger than I thought it would be. Two bedrooms and one smaller studio are upstairs, and my larger studio (complete with sun room), the living room, and the kitchen are downstairs. 
The other part of the studio is taken up by a few artificial Christmas trees from the dump and other instant-diorama material. The sun room is ridiculously hot in 23 hours of sunlight every day, so I've turned it into my drying room. The window ledge has a bunch of lichen on it, and the table has some trash-plaster leftovers from the construction pile drying.
We also have a work shed and a storage shed. Joan has taken over the work shed, though I might sneak in there for a little chop sawing one day.
When local folks find out Joan and I are the new artists in residence, they either discreetly ask how we like the house, or they bluntly ask how we like the ghost. Apparently the house is haunted, though I haven't met it yet. Joan thinks she has. The house is very creaky, but I don't think the creaks have consolidated into a ghost for me. Plus, depending on what you count as haunted, most of the houses in this town are probably haunted. A lot of people have died here, especially young folks. Thousands of people came up to dig gold and make their fortune and they died of cold, cholera, starvation, disease, or, occasionally, murder. Ghosts aside, I think the real mystery of this house is how we've managed to go through five rolls of toilet paper in a week.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
All kinds of houses
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My husband and I owned the McCauley house in 1984 and stayed there that summer while we were running Klondike Kate's. Everyone in town seemed to know the stories about the ghost. It was said that she was a young girl who died in that small upstairs room when she was locked in by her father after she refused to marry the man he wanted her to marry. She starved to death up there.
People said that she like men and enjoyed irritating women. One friend who was a border guard liked to come over on his days off and stay in the house. He said he felt her presence and it was always warm and friendly.
One morning my son, who was eight at the time, came running down to the kitchen to ask who was the woman in his room. Yes, his was that small room upstairs. By the time I got up stairs there was no one. He insisted that she was an interpreter. He knew because she was wearing old-fashioned clothes. Hmmmmmm.
The house was on the tour bus route then, too, so we often were surprised by people photographing the house and coincidentally us.
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