Tortoise and the Big Cell

I fell in love with this tortoise this weekend, a sculptural piece by Sandria Cook.



Here Sandria is seen adjusting the tortoise's head.



Look at that!

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Big Cell has a name, THIS IS NOW, taken from Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Little House in the Big Woods.

“She thought to herself, "This is now." She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

In addition to naming Big Cell, I also added Braille to it using slip dotted on small slabs that I'll attach later. (The cells need more secrets, I think. I've been thinking a lot about how to incorporate even more secrets, hidden in plain sight.  I want them (all my work really) to be handled and touched constantly but I don't want them to necessarily give up all their secrets.) I translated THIS IS NOW into Braille and dotted it on:  ⠞⠓⠊⠎⠀⠊⠎⠀⠝⠕⠺

One of my big dilemmas is how to represent the kind of information that DNA conveys. I've tried stamping words or dichos/sayings into clay wrapped around a dowel, so that I can have the shape/information coiled into the nucleus, but something about that is unsatisfying--and the pieces are not so hearty. I thought about stamping each word (usually of a Shakespeare sonnet) onto its own tile so that you'd have to know the sonnet to use all the words and recreate the poem--haven't tried it yet, but I like this idea (even if I don't like the idea of all that tedious stamping). I've also considered stringing the information onto high-fire wire, so that the whole thing could be bent and coiled after firing without breaking it apart. (Still may do this although high-fire wire is not a cheap option!)  So The Brain is still chewing chewing chewing on these things.