Sunday, November 18, 2012

I made a print I like!

So there was this study about lil monkeys deprived of nurturing attention-- actually in a pretty cruel way, I'm pretty sure they were Skinner boxed for their first 2 years -- then they were given a choice between a fake-o mother made out of wire that dispensed food, and a fake-o cloth mother (also on a wire frame, so booo) who didn't offer food just something soft and not so bleak for chrissakes, and the lil deprived monkeys picked the cloth mother every time. Points for the importance of a little comfort in this world, no? It helped scientists to tell moms 'Sorry, we were wrong about that thing where we said coddling your kids is damaging, it's actually the other way round, it's ok now to touch and hug your kids. Sorry, untouched kids!'

So, yay cloth mother. But the cloth mother is still thin comfort, right? So I have been thinking about the things people turn to in our lives that are the cloth mother, like drugs and booze and sex and eating and shopping and watching shit on the internet and being at dating sites and basically anything we run to in order to run away from the Big Owies in life.

I am backing away form the lemon flip project I've been on working on less & less frequently since the winter of 2008, I'll get back to it, just following the muse here, and doing some studies toward a possible cloth mother project. Here is the first take on a cloth mother that I rilly rilly like. I thought I'd share it.


2 comments:

ccollins said...

ArtySpark, I really enjoyed your post. A meaningful insight. I can't imaging a more meaningful set of direction from this muse person you wrote of. Knowing and loving the cloth mother is what I want. Thanks for the pictorial representation. It helps.

Pippi said...

I had heard of the story sometime in my education, and in wanting more visuals for this project came across a history of the study and its scientist. I found it on a site about the history of adoption, which gave me the ominous-tinglies.

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm