The wedding was on her turf, in Preston, England, and all her friends and relatives came out. Aunts and uncles, cousins, and even her grandparents in what was probably their last major family outing.

Tons of family and friends from my side came as well, from all over the United States and Canada, from elsewhere in Europe. I think it was my grandmother’s last international trip.

Most of the guests stayed in the Tickled Trout Hotel on the banks of the River Ribble. (You really can’t make names like this up.)

The American guests were terribly impressed with how old the church was. It was from the 1800’s and was in fact a fairly new church by local standards; the church in the city centre has parts from the 1500’s and history back five centuries farther. The reception, though, was in a manor house that was several hundred years old, older than anything European in the New World, and that felt satisfyingly Olde Worlde to us gringos from over the pond.

The organist struggled something fearsome. The wedding was truly wonderful in almost every possible way. But the organist was another matter. The crazy thing is that no one but Susan and I heard it. When we mentioned it after the ceremony, people were like “No, the organist was great!” and we were like “Really, the organist sucked.”. The video later proved us right.

After threatening rain, the weather held the end, and we had a wonderful after-reception party at Sue’s parent’s house. People milling and chatting in the back garden, in the sun.

Nearly everybody stayed that night and came together again the next day for, of all things, a birthday party for me. Only after that last grand gathering did the bride and groom leave for our honeymoon, traveling first to Vienna and then to Budapest, where we had met four years earlier and fallen in love.

And now here we are, living in Minnesota with our crazy cool 20-year-old kid and a cat that projectile sheds. We are in the midst of repainting the house in colors at least two people independently described as gingerbread, but which we defiantly think of as Scandinavian. Our big anniversary present to ourselves is a new computer; apparently 25 is silicon in the modern universe.

Figuring out how to pack up our books is one of the big challenges of our upcoming sabbatical, and our big goal for the year is to make art together.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact it’s hard to imagine it any other way.

The common refrain from my family at the time was that Susan was the best thing that ever happened to me. 25 years later it’s still just as true.

Looking forward to another 25, dodgy knees and all :-)

Love you!

In a desperate bid to not to be outdone by our amazing progeny, Sue and I will be hanging our first collaborative art show next week at the Prairie Renaissance Cultural Alliance (PRCA) Gallery! The kind folks at the PRCA actually approached us about doing a joint show last year; there really wasn’t time to put it together then, but we agreed to do something this year.

In many ways the “simple” approach would have been a combination of Sue’s recent sculpture and my photography. We really wanted this to be a collaboration, though, and over the course of the year we worked together on a collection of photographs documenting her use of her body (in particular her head) as a canvas. Thousands of photographs were taken (over 7,000 in a single three month period!), forming the source material for the pieces that we’ll be hanging. Sue laid out the tableaus, I shot the hell out of them, and then we worked together to figure out what images to use and how.

Portraiture is one of the oldest of artistic disciplines, often providing an “objective” (or at least objectifying) view of the individual. These images examine an artist, Susan Gilbert, at work, capturing her use of her own head as canvas. Some of the photographs are disconcerting both in their underlying subject, and in their focus and presentation. Some are overtly political in their content, while all comment on how we see those around us and respond to change. No single image is the “true portrait” of the artist; they are all fragments of a whole, distorted by the cultural lens through which they are viewed.

The show includes the biggest photographic prints we’ve ever made (the largest is 60″x40″) and it’s quite something to see the work (and Sue’s head) that huge! We also have a diptych of collages that are 6 feet tall and together over 8 feet wide, so we definitely decided to “Go big or go home!”.

We’ll hang the show next Saturday (8 Feb) and the show will open on the 12th. There will be a reception at the gallery on Sunday, 16 Feb, from 7-8:30pm, where you’ll be able to publicly question our sanity while eating nummy snacks!

…a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. – Lewis Hyde

Tomorrow (24 June) marks the 24th anniversary of our marriage!

There are so many things I’m grateful for, and no way to enumerate them or document them here, so I’ll settle for an example.

Among her many “strangely inventive” artistic talents, Sue makes books. Wonderful, handmade books, where she cuts and folds all the paper, sews together the signatures, builds the cover, and glues it all together. Some of these are displayed in galleries, while others (such as the one pictured here) are notebooks or journals filled with blank pages inviting us to share our thoughts in word or sketch.

For the past several years, Sue has made such journals as high school graduation gifts for our and, more substantially, Tom’s friends in that year’s graduating class. As he moves on to college, the numbers are beginning to contract, but over the years she’s made many dozens of these books, often for people we didn’t actually know terribly well. That’s a lot of work, constructing by hand an object whose future is far from certain. She is, after all, making blank books, in an age where the future of books is at best unclear, an age where most are far more likely to send a text message or post on a blog [I’M LOOKING AT ME!] than to write a letter or keep a journal on paper.

Thus these are, in the true sense that Hyde means in the opening quote, gifts. As handcrafted pieces of art, they have clear worth, but their value (and how they are valued by the recipients) is quite uncertain.

Yet she keeps making them. In a flurry of activity every May between the end of the University school year and the high school graduation she cuts and folds and glues and frets. She picks out different papers to use as covers, and has Tom give her feedback on which covers would make the most sense for which graduate. She increases the worth of the world (if not its value) through these gifts, each of which is in fact a multiple gift. It is obviously a gift to the graduate, but this effort is also a gift to our son, and a thank-you to the families of these students who have been important to him.

And, to the point of all this, these are also a gift to me. For while each of these books is made by her and is officially a gift from Thomas, her work enriches us all and the glow it casts as it goes out into the world reflects back on our whole family even if it was her hands that did all the sewing.

So I say “Thank You”, for this and the untold gifts large and small that she has shared with me. It has been a truly splendid 24 years together, and I look forward to many more decades to come!

With all my love,

     – Nic

Proving you really care about someone is an achievement that takes effort everyday. Chocolate and flowers on a single day won’t do.

All that said, I figured it wouldn’t be amiss to let my family know how fabulous they are, a non-commercial sort of way of course :-).

The photo up top is from 9 years ago while we were living in the UK during our first sabbatical; Tom was 7 at the time, and Susan hadn’t yet cut off most of her hair. The strip below is from our second UK sabbatical 7 years later; now he’s taller than her and looking suspiciously like a young man instead of a little boy. Both give a sense of how fun it is to live with these two — there’s no question that I’m a lucky, lucky man.

It was interesting to see how few photos I have of the two of them together outside of the sabbaticals. Those two years are documented in excruciating detail, while our day-to-day here in Morris is much more sparsely recorded. There are moments, like when Tom’s on stage, where I take a billion photos, but I end up with very few photos of the two of them together.

I think this helps illustrate the value of these years we’ve had away from home. There’s something about stepping out of your “normal” life, leaving most of your stuff behind, and making a life (even if for just a year) in a new place. It shaves off a lot of the distractions and, for us at least, meant we spent more and different time together. Some of that is in the form of being tourists together (which is where these photos come from), but it’s also in the form of walking together because we didn’t own a car, and being together because the apartment was too small for us to easily be apart.

(And I realize that having this sort of opportunity just oozes privilege; most people don’t have the flexibility or resources to do this sort of thing once, let alone twice. I’m lucky in many, many ways.)

Happy Valentine’s Day to Sue and Tom!