Biography Born in 1946, Sana Krusoe earned an MFA degree from Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California. She is currently a member of the art faculty at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Curriculum Vitae   CV_09.pdf Statement flutter & hum: statement This is the work I have done since my father died last year. It has been a time of navigating the terrain between life ending, and life starting, and ending again. The work took on a life of its own. I started last fall with sarcophagi for dead birds. My freezer is full of dead birds that have died flying into my windows or under the attack of my cats. I feed the birds, nurture the cats, look out the windows, and think about original sin. thrum is the remnant of that investigation, though its emphasis turned, with mine, toward something growing, burgeoning, rather than something put to rest. As I worked in the studio and the season changed the work shifted toward that raw generative energy that persists and reasserts itself. The first stages are opening and willingness: (un) furl, (un) fold. As buds began to form, and mornings began to be filled with birds again, I thought of the quietness of beginnings: the first movements toward desire: murmur, ripple. I found myself dealing with the idea of flirtation (birdstyle): the blush of new color and markings (flush and blush), the arousal that comes with desire (flutter, flutter/arch) the outright, bold challenge of availability (flamenco, flamenco (bristles). Many of the pieces are based on wing forms, particularly as the wing rises, descends or dives. Some are based on motion relative to wind: billow, flap. All are moving in a field of desire for home, for food, for breeding. thrum, which began with the body of a dead bird, is banded with rivers and roots, home and food, emerging from seed. fuse and fuse/hatch take their titles from Dylan Thomas’s line “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; That blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer,” the quintessential paean to the desire, hunger and energy that link life and death. The fuse is the stem, the throat, the vein. The material in fuse is fish bone and cartilage. The insects in fuse (hatch) are from a hatch that rose and died in my studio. I will admit to having to hunt for a few more, original sin again. hum, murmur and thrum are the sounds of sap rising, warning, agitation, excitement, arousal. (un) fold, (un) furl, flap, billow, and flamenco are stages of response, from interest and willingness to revelation, excitement, hunger and invitation. This work is frankly feminine, I think, despite deriving more often from the behaviors of male birds. I hope I have embedded in it some ferocity and humor, since those are part of the terrain of élan vital. One piece (un) furl derived its shape from a Canadian Geographic photo of a mallard defending its chicks from a heron. The image is heart stopping, fierce, frightening, beautiful, full of the drive for progeny and the force of hunger, and the site where living and dying converge as part of the same moment. Sana Krusoe June 2009 Press Release An exhibition of recent sculpture presented in an installation by Sana Krusoe opens July 6th at the Davis and Cline Gallery, in Ashland, to continue through the end of the month. The project started as an exploration of form inspired by the bodies of birds – small or large, - ovoid shapes resembling the space contained by two hands cupped in prayer. Simply ovals lengthened at both ends. Forms as points of departure – for the poet and thinker living within the sculptor. Thoughts transformed into explorations of various kinds, motivated by ideas lying at the core of this work. From birds to flight, to migrations, to patterns of migration, to navigation, to weather, to astronomy, to our planet, and its physical properties and its place in vast, limitless space.