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Suite 2, The Coal Shed,
402 William Street, Wiarton, Ontario

roguegoat@hotmail.ca

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From Pinterest’s “21 Ideas for an Empty Hearth...install long eared, attitudey rabbit”.

Front yard sanding session with Tip.

Still here. Still R.O.G.U.E.G.O.A.T. 😜 “Still puffin' my leaves (Josh yes, me a hard no on the paranoia>narcolepsy it induces in me.) , still fuck with the beats. (Mostly beets but we do have a drum kit in the bathroom?!) Still not lovin' police , Uh-uh (Josh still not lovin’, actually, extra not lovin’.) Still rock my khakis with a cuff and a crease, fo’sho (No, for both of us. No iron in the house. ) Still got love for the streets, reppin' 213, for life (Actually, mostly love for water and fields and the 519). Still the beats bang, still doin' my thang. (Yeah!). Since I left ain't too much changed, still...” Things have been tough the last while. Messy. Scary. Hurtful. When everything falls apart, the opportunity to deliberately choose which pieces are worth picking up and what bullshit you should leave behind presents itself more clearly. Hard times distill & reveal who you really are, your self delusions, your motivations, hopefully your strength and empathy...as you react and respond and reforge a new equilibrium. If the distractions of pleasure are a closed circuit, the capacity for change is a privilege of deep joy on a trajectory. You can always choose a better path forward, it’s only ever up to you. So...”still, the beats bang, still doin’ our thang”. Which is, in the context of this space, still working as a team making quiet windows of grace onto an imagined reality of place. 😍🤘🏻 I’ve only been replying to current client emails for the last two months, please excuse the ostrich-ing! We will be doing a release on August 25 at 9EST of mostly mid to large work and then (thankgoditsbacktoschool!) immersed in prep for my favourite show (and our only one this year), @circlecraft

This week has been truly overwhelming, but Tuesday night at Phish, I was blissfully unaware of what was unravelling and surrounded by friends. The past few days have reminded me of how important our friends are; that they accept and support us for exactly who we are, dark and light, but also believe in the best of us and love us enough to call us on our sidesteps and stand up to us when we are falling down. I’m grateful to have had amazing people in my life when I needed strong voices to lead me to better choices , I’m grateful for them now when I do not, but do need nudges to ask for help. So many people go through life trying to avoid responsibility, but our most real and constant and human one is to each other, always.

Yesterday - I took the train to Lewes (pronounced Lewis because ~English), and then walked the course of the River Ouse to where it meets the sea at Newhaven. Along the way, I stopped in Rodmell, where Virginia Woolf lived and worked for over 20 years of her incredible life before she ended it by stepping into the turbid Ouse, her pockets filled with stones. As I had followed the river south and then cut inland on a bridle path, it felt like I walked backwards into her life; the last views across the Downs, then back to the church that has stood since the time of the Domesday Book, through Leonard Woolf’s gardens, backwards into their low ceilinged and book strewn home, this house where her incredible mind conjured A Room of One’s Own, Orlando and Mrs.Dalloway. We insist on a magic to these places where great things were wrought in brains we admire. But it’s busy here and the extra bodies in small spaces only make me anxious to leave...it’s just a topography to a life, vaguely interesting signposts to inexplicable brilliance. The run of the river water, the twist of it twines time with the cadence of my feet; Virginia slipping beneath it as one, further back, men fishing, sustenance, further forward, industrialization and the slip of the rivers course westwards, Virginia again, parts of her as history flowing from its’ mouth into the sea and across, directly across the Channel to where lies Dieppe, the blood of Canadians on its’ shores, swept back dilute by tides, iron brine. But it was mostly a day of noticing small things and my own, very solitary experience of it, not terribly troubled by the weight of history. “By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.” From A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (of whom I have an eponymous lamb). 😜

Montreal sunsets. The process of leaving.

One walnut aurora borealis pieces available. 24x36, $1385. (18x36, $1025 SOLD)

I’ve been taking a silversmithing course with the best teacher ever @shellstrong (At the OS Workshop, which only exists at all because of another incredible woman! @moragbudgeon) Shelley is an amazing human, a very technical jeweller with a fidelity to traditional skills...but also has a great deal of understanding for more esoteric, fine art-y perspectives on design. Which means she has a fair amount of latitude for students like me who don’t really take to doing “projects” well and I hate “pat on the head” technical processes just to make something look good easily. I like doing everything the hardest way possible and tend towards making things even more difficult by only loosely following the rules and creating even more technical challenges then necessary. She only sighed a few times at me 😜 in six weeks. It’s hard to see in the photo but the bottom edge of my really thick-Shelley said it would make it harder -ring is textured to look like grass and then the blackened silver rabbit cut out is a riff on the animated Black Rabbit of Inle, which I’m guessing you would have to be English/Englishy and of my general age to have been traumatized by. It kind of turned out like a rabbit super hero belt for my finger, which is awesome. The necklace was made by cutting out the silver, sweat soldering the negative rabbit, resizing the cloud cut out to be a separate component, cutting out a raindrop and setting a pain in the ass tiny stone on it, stamping the words, blackening the baseplate and the storm cloud, filing, buffing and Shelley saving the day with custom jump rings to assemble the hanging components. The words are a reference to the Nayyirah Waheed poem and Vonnegut quote below and a personal reminder that strength is not hardness and vulnerability is not weakness. Also...rabbits that aren’t soft suck, so there’s that. stay soft. it looks beautiful on you. Nayyirah Waheed Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Duncan’s favourite napping spot...under the coffee table, in the middle of everyone, in a purloined dog bed. He sleeps with his eyes open 😳 but incredibly deeply.

Climate Change is Real. Mad love for this lone fellow protesting at the lights in Hepworth today...unfortunately when I was in too much of a rush to stop and ask his name. If you are interested in climate change activism in Bruce/Grey/Owen Sound...please consider attending the Round table discussion at the Harmony Centre/OS tomorrow night at 7 (a follow up to the @resiliencedoc premiere) and/or The Green New Deal Town Hall in Wiarton May 23, 7 pm at my studio.

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