That Sound Under the Floor Is the Sea opened earlier this month at the Harwood (and will continue to run through April 25th). Here's the press release summary:

During Wood’s art-centric travels above the Arctic Circle in September-November 2012, she amassed more than two hundred pages of journal entries, sketches, and studies of polar and subpolar environments. The exhibition is a unique window (or porthole, in this case) into the process of creative research: Wood’s journal will be on display alongside loose-leaf studies, photographs, works on paper, documentation of performance work in the field; the first finished works to result from the journey; and in-progress drafts for upcoming work.

Felt great to see so many things I'd been imagining come together. I was happy with the colors and wall text. We built those angled shelves from scratch, recessing one so we could display the journal (and a digital frame cycling through photographs of the pages) in the open, but not in a way that invited people to flip through it much.

One of the things I was especially excited to show were a couple of etchings that the excellent Frol Boundin encouraged me to make, and then generously printed for me:

I enjoyed attempting to curate the field notes and painting drafts in such a way that they'd get at the spirit of the places I splashed around in.

Coming up, just a month from today:

Lots of preparations to do. I'm building shelves and thinking about layout....

The new year has been sort of a big one, already!

I finished the series of small Svalbard paintings I began earlier this winter, ending up with seventeen. Here are a few of my favorites:

And! As it happened, they were finished just in time to be included in the current Alcove exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art (which will be up through February 24th).

The Alcove shows are "a series of nine exhibitions at the Museum of Art highlighting work by outstanding New Mexico artists."

The curator chose to exhibit fourteen of the small Arctic paintings, and a few drawings resulting from my travels in Australia last summer.

The reception was January 18th...

 
And then I talked on January 25th.

All quite exciting!

More tiny paintings to recap the trip--I'm working on a series of 16.

Each is acrylic on panel, 2.5 by 3.5 inches.

Three small paintings from the Arctic, starring Antigua.

Well, it's my last night of the trip, for all practical purposes, aside from a brief mainland layover before flying home from Bodø; in the morning I'll leave the hut I've been occupying here in Å, a village on the southern end of the Lofoten Islands. Like most Last Nights, it's a time of taking stock, emotionally and otherwise, and I've been looking through the various studies I've made on the journey. Here are a few.

I've returned from Svalbard to continental Norway. Now I head north again, this time on my own and not quite so far--from Bergen up to Kirkenes.