My first taste of Scotland.

the edinburgh castle, with constructions after the fringe festival.

some poor elks head that was in one of the Queens many homes.


the famous william wallace


and some decapitation



a piper


Tim photographing sheep


My homestay Family
Margaret MacDonald and Patty


stairway to heaven

pictures finally!

GRAHAM HUDSON, artist in residence Installation in London

for more info on Hudson

yeah, this was cool. Ever seen that Pink Floyd Album? Well here is the album, my picture is from a different angle but the building is the same one.

a vegetarian on a meat eating island.

Hello my loved ones,
It’s been a little while since I dropped a line. Everyone seems to be settled in back in the states, my family is adjusting to each of their new homes. My mom is living out in the hills of Forestville in a home where she can relax and paint, my dad is living in Cotati with his fiancée and her daughter, my brother is living with friends in Santa Rosa and my sister is living in Portland while teaching 3rd grade in Washington. This is the longest I have gone without seeing all of them. I have been in London for the past month living with Natalie and Ben, the lovely ones I met first while couch surfing. They made me feel at home and I enjoyed every moment with them. It’s funny how thanks to the Internet you end up really making friends for life. They are the most loving couple I have ever been around and every conversation we had I learned from. It was a tough limbo period of this trip to just wander around London with nothing that I had to do but I felt that London taught me so much and it will always be one of my homes.

During this last week I met up with the Arcadia University Study Abroad Program in Edinburgh. We stayed at The Carlton and I met five others going to Aberdeen and GSA, all of us from the states. I represented the west coast. Everyone else was from the South, East and Midwest. All of them very nice, I became friends with two guys Tim and August, both are attending GSA. We were set up with a home stay in Sterling, Scotland. The boys got a lovely older couple and I had a woman named Margaret. She was 76 and wonderful, but she couldn’t seem get over the fact that I didn’t eat meat. She even tried to offer me a keesh with bacon bits inside it. But then she realized that vegetarian meant you just don’t eat anything that ever had a head except for a head of lettuce. She was really wonderful and spoiled me. I learned all about her life born and raised in Sterling. We also did touristy things and I got to see the Told Town Jail (with an enthusiastic performance), The Sterling Castle and the William Wallace Monument. Apparently, they hate the movie Braveheart here. Apparently Wallace was 6ft 7in and they were ashamed of Mel Gibson being cast the part. I got to see the original battle sword and it was longer then I am. I was impressed by the giant dents it had.

And now I am here, in Glasgow, finally. I’m living in the student housing with five other people, three girls and two boys. They are all nice and one is from Southern California, but I am the oldest of the bunch. I have spent the past few days wandering around Glasgow and journeying through the Famous Mackintosh Building, the main building for Glasgow School of Art. It is beautiful and if you don’t know who Charles Rennie Mackintosh is, you should look him up because his architecture was beyond his time (born in 1868) and absolutely amazing. He collaborated with his wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances and her husband Herbert McNair. Their work is like a mixture from Japan and European Art Nouveau to traditional Scottish Architecture. The Glasgow School of Art is considered his masterpiece. I plan on taking lots of photos to share with you.

Today I went to the Necropolis, which is a large old graveyard on the largest hill in Glasgow. I took a few pictures and some video footage; it was so beautiful and comforting. It was nice to just sit above the city with all of the elder souls looking down at the traffic and listening to the noises of the world moving around. I felt miles from nowhere and yet in the middle of it all…much love to all of you.

Cheers,
Sierra

goodbye london

well last night i had a big farewell night out in London.

I will return of course, but for now I'm heading up to the Northern Country to go to school and create.

Natalie and Ben, my current roommates who took me into their home with open arms last night decided we needed to go out and get "pissed"....well, that's basically what we did but in a way I didn't imagine. London always has surprises up it's sleeve for the nights out. We began the night at a five story bar where each room had something different going on including loud DJ music, live blues and just drunk people making out downstairs. Sara and I got ciders and yelled over the loud music while everyone else did the same with their drink of choice. Then we all decided to move on to a place where there would be dancing because Natalie really wanted to dance. So we headed over to a club that had the longest que outside, wrapped around the building, it didn't look promising for us to get in when one of Ben's friend Johnny and his sister said that we could jump the que because they are on the guest list. I had never encountered anything like this before but it actually worked perfectly. We ended up being let in right away, after they checked our bags and took my water bottle (bastards). Then we entered the crazy club and danced, well I sort of "mock danced" to the silly music and everyone standing around looking cool. We got more drinks and before we knew it Sara and I were drunk...and we had a lot of fun. After the horrible band "I am Insect" began to perform we all decided it was time to leave. We soon found ourselves wondering the streets, our troop now consisted of six of us, we had lost two or more in transit. We found ourselves at the infamous restaurant Belle Italia, known for being open 24 hours where we ate food to sober up. Took the bus home and rambled into our unconcsious worlds....it was wonderful.

On My Way

Well, in a few Days I'm on my way up to Scotland to meet up with the abroad group and then get settled into Glasgow into student housing(eek!). We will see how it works out, apparently I will be living in a flat with five other people, we share the living room and kitchen but I get my own bathroom...I've never lived in anything like that before so I'm a little anxious. However I am really looking forward to creating finally!

Morgan has asked me to collaborate with her on a documentary for her video class at Cornish so I will be taking footage of Glasgow, Scotland, and the locals there while she gleans footage from Seattle and surrounding areas then we will see what happens when we combine our perspectives. I always really enjoy working with her on projects so this is going to be a different experience since we are doing long distance.
I also am working on creating a CD cover for Ben's demo that he just recorded back in Olympia. Just something small to be photocopied in order to fold into a sleeve to hold the CD. So I'm actually pretty busy which is refreshing, I was getting pretty bored for a little bit without anything to do and no motivation. Once School begins it's going to be overwhelming but after last night I can't wait to be making some videos. Natalie's friend Annike Bosma shared all of her videos with me and they were very inspirational. I also shared all of my work with her from this past year and she gave me some really great feedback on them. I also began to think about how I use language. She was from Holland so English is not her first language, therefor when watching some of my videos she was lost because she didn't understand everything being said, that made me think about how I would really like to play with that idea of language and make it easier for people all over the world to understand even if there are words...and such. I don't know if that makes sense but it was a thought and might be a direction to take in the future...

24 hour clock

I had been a little sick for the past few days when my lovely roommates Natalie and Ben dragged me out of the house yesterday to go to a small gallery opening with a number of artists who did works in helium balloons. The who was somewhat dissappointing(the artist's didn't think about the weight of the objects placed inside the floating balloons) although there was a nice one that I took photo of.


We ate free cake and met up with Ben's fellow graduates of the art school Saint Martins where we, along with everyone else in the gallery was led by a man with a lit up green wand to a hidden venue of sorts that was supposed to be close by for the afterparty. It turned into a 45 minute walk throughindustrial areas, around a park, through some locks for the river and into a hidden warehouse next to a canal.

The afterparty consisted of cheap beer, projected videos, loud usa/european music from the 80's, a strip show of a woman who was wearing pink valour and lots of art students dancing. It was fun and rediculous. I met lots of people including an unrelenting boy you said i should couchsurf on his couch, luckily natalie told him to leave me alone and then told their friend Hendrik to buy me a beer. Hendrik was a nice guy and what began as just a beer ended with me being deserted by my friends natalie and ben and leaving me in south london with him to make sure i was safe and had a place to stay(you gotta love friends).

Normally this wouldn't be a situation that I was okay with but I knew that Hendrik was a good person, he wasn't trying to get with me and we just got along so I felt safe. We ended up rambling through the streets with several other graduates, one who looks like Albert Einstein, one who was from the states and getting married in order to stay in the U.K. and others who I never got their names or stories. After our long ramble into the city and to our bus stops I had decided that I could stay at Hendrik's given there was a spare room. (This wasn't the first time I've had to do this in London) So we end up in his giant flat that happens to be on the River Thames, his parents bought it for him and his brother to live in.(lucky) So I drank tea, ate honey for my throat and passed out around 5am.

Today I awoke around noon to the boats going up the river. I ended up looking at all of Hendriks photography (which was beautiful) and wandering around yet another part of london I've never been to. He showed me a gallery space that I have to show work at. It is my dream home-Morgan, you would love it.





the photographs were interesting and the space was amazing, we wandered around and i just got more and more ideas for a show of my own.

Afterwards we went to the oldest pub in London, and ate some food while watching a little blonde girl wearing a bright yellow t-shirt, flourescent green fairy skirt and pink sandels dance around her parents. By the time I got home it was 6PM, exactly 24 hours since I had left the house. A lovely day/night/day it was.

Art.

In the past few days I've wandered around London looking at the exhibitions. I went to the Tate Modern to see french artist Pierre Huyghe's first solo exhibit in the U.K. "Celebration Park" It consisted of 10 rooms with installations including neon signs, film, architecture, and posters. What was exceptional about this show was the fact that he had chosen to present an integrated installation of new and recent work rather than a conventional retrospective.

There were a lot of references to things I have been thinking about lately like "Modern Times" which is the title of Bob Dylans new album and Charlie Chaplins old film(one of my favorites)which examines the organization of labour under capitalism. In Pierre's case he had a giant neon sign I do not own Modern Times Which could also invoke how we use and divide time, or set aside free time, in modern capalist culture.

One of his videos titled This is not a time for dreaming tells two parallel stories, one historical and one contemporary, which unfolds together as a single puppet show. It made me want to really try puppetry. Here are some photos of the exhibit that i gleaned from the internet. They can explain more then I can through words.

the artist and himself.

still from This is not a time for dreaming

these were GIANT revolving doors, they would dance around the room slowly. I found them to be quite beautiful and surreal.

Terra Incognita/Isla Ociosidad Topography of Idleness Island translated into data then used to create this structure and animatronic panguin.

still from film Streamside Day about a U.S. suburbs special day of celebration.



After that exhibit i went to a miniature exhibit held at the Jerwood space where one of the artist's Tessa Farmer took apart dead bugs and created whole worlds of them reconfigured into other creatures and fairies suspended out on birds and hedghogs.I had never seen something so fascinating, delicate, and small.




I cant wait to get back into school and begin creating...it's been too long.