Crafty Scyence was a performance sculpture that played on the idea of women having healing and intuition powers, that have implicated them as witches.

Please read the "Statement" for a more in-depth explantion.

For this performance sculpture, I invited only women artists to sit inside of the three booths. These women created "soul paintings" of participants in NEPO art walk.

These "soul paintings" were made with white paper, crayons and a hot plate.

This is a technique common in preschool classrooms. The crayons blend and melt on the paper as your draw with them.

Viewers had to kneel to participate in the project. The women artists inside of the booths only used their hands to communicate.

The women artists held hands with each participate to create a connection before drawing their souls.

The souls were made on precut lanyards that each walkers wore on the rest of the walk.

Wearing his soul.

My second year participating in the NEPO 5-K I created this paper tent that had 5 windows that only revealed hands working.

Ben von Wildenhaus played a westernized version of belly dancing music from the 1960's and 70's on top of a "stage" made of pallets, photocopied images and cardboard. He would stop during his 6 hour performance as a factory manager/creepy DJ at a strip-joint to conversing with walkers, making them feel uncomfortable about watching the hands, or make them turn back and spend time watching the hands. He recorded his music on a tape recorder and passed the tapes to walkers to deliver to the tent. At the tent we had 2 tape recorders that were constantly playing and layer his prerecorded sounds with the live version.

I needed 20 women to sit for one hour and "make." Viewers and walkers werel not be able to see the performers, only their hands. The single sided mirror allowed the performers to see the viewers and the viewers to only see themselves. Because we no longer know how anything we own is made or created, there is a magic and also a grotesqueness to watching.

Many of the performers ended up communicating with their hands or let the viewers to work with them and make together. Several of the performers had very intimate meaningful interaction with people, only using their hands.

Each window had materials such as:
Window 1: a beet, pearl tipped pins, vaseline, and a wood carver
Window 2: clay, buttons, needle and thread, flocking
Window 3: butter, palette knife, paper, black ink and wool yarn
Window 4: glycerin block, pearls, needle and thread
Window 5: black leather, scissors, Made In China tags, white ink pad

This gentleman watched for a long time. At first, he was slightly scared but then really embraced the watching of "process."

For the NEPO 5K Don't Run 2012, I created a fence-like structure that viewers sat down, held my hands and looked through the eye holes.

As you can see, people first came up to the fence, sat down, looked through the holes into my eyes and held my hands though the little window. It was a very caring hand holding.

Each person sat and we looked in each other's eyes for about 1 minute or more. People had different reactions...some were scared, some silly and others gazed for a long long time. It was interesting to see how people dealt with intimacy.

After looking at each for awhile, I transferred one of their hands on top of their other hand while I got the viewfinder with my dad's pictures that he took on his trip from the Lewis and Clark trail.

The images were printed on transparent vellum. The same image is layered twice on top of each other and flipped so that it created symmetry, then was sandwiched between two layers of cardboard. I put a hole in the corner of each frame and attached a piece of yarn so people that walked could wear them.