Elaine Parks, Helix, ceramic, mixed media, photography

American, b. 1959, playing from Los Angeles, CA, USA

I am a native of Los Angeles. My artistic interests have always reflected interaction with the natural world, expressed as both objects and installation. I received my MFA from California Sate University, Los Angeles in 1999. Immediately afterward, I relocated to extreme rural Nevada, where the sparse landscape’s elusive beauty coalesced my ideas about landscape. During a decade in Nevada, I exhibited throughout the state, including the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, taught at a local community college and received significant awards from the Nevada Arts Council. Since returning to Los Angeles, I have participated in local group exhibits, collaborative projects and installations.

For images of Elaine's work see: http://www.churchillarts.org/publications/ http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/56487-elaine-parks https://www.behance.net/elaineparks

Thoughts on the Telephone process

Playing Telephone was both difficult and enjoyable. I felt it was important to be very careful to observe my preceding artist’s message and try to discover the deep message as well as the surface message. I’ve worked in collaboration in the past, but this is quite different, since differences of understanding couldn’t be worked out in conversation and over time. I really concentrated on my artist’s piece, rather as a meditation. Perhaps, I expanded my listening and seeing skills and had to keep focus on the message I believed I understood, instead of letting myself follow a tangent down my own path. I can, however, follow that tangent now. I feel that this project helped me clarify some ideas that I had been germinating and now I can implement these concepts in a new body of work.

As a result of playing Telephone, I do wonder if art communicates with more authenticity than language alone.