Putting the psycho back into psychogeography / ice storms and opportunities

When I moved to central Mass in August, I began almost immediately trying to figure out what it might be like to live in a cold and snowy and icy place. I started a couple of aerial paintings with this sort of "cold place" re-imagining in mind. Not really knowing the lay of the land and still learning how to get around, I didn't have a grounded reference for making work about my new locale. This lack of knowledge and experience led way for paintings that were open-ended, still quite speculative and, I soon found out, imbued with unconscious material – like the image below, which is a photo of one of the paintings in progress taken in October.


The painting has changed since I took this in-progress photo sometime in October, but if you look closely at the center, you can make out this triangular-shaped freezing, teeth-chattering, eye-squinting, nose-dripping "face." I find it both curious (and actually quite hilarious) that this material appeared from what I was intending to be planes and shards of splintering ice, blinding sunlight and confused movement through winding and forking roads. I also find it curious that this work was a bit of foreshadowing.

In mid-December, Fitchburg was the epicenter of a huge ice storm that took out the power grid for much of central Mass. Frank and I were without heat and electricity for a week and intermittently thereafter for the following week. We had friends, and knew of many others throughout the city and countryside, who were without services (some including water) for 2 weeks and even more.

The storm was unbelievable and devastating in ways I can't accurately describe. To understand the full effect of the damage would require an eyewitness view of what a war zone this area had become... roads blocked with debris, power cables stretched across and dangling in the streets, cars destroyed, military and emergency vehicles crawling and flashing lights day and night, bulldozers and chainsaws and work crews in military fatigues, busloads of refugees coming into the city's shelters. For weeks, the streets were a flurry of activity toward cleanup, recovery and repair.

Frank and I and one of our neighbors had two trees fall on our cars. My car took the brunt of the damage and was declared "totaled" by the insurance co. The neighbor's car lost a back window, which was easily replaced. And Frank's car had damage to the moon roof, which is relatively minor. My car is still drivable, but does need to have the roof repaired from what appears to be mostly cosmetic damage. Though I've finally settled up nicely with the insurance company and have the money sitting in the bank and ready to put toward the repair, there remains a waiting list on every local auto body shop... for obvious reasons.

Still... somehow in the midst of all this crazy weather, which also included several snow storms, I've had some exciting professional opportunities open up. First, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I moved back into a public studio. I am now part of a local art collective, Rollstone Studios, in downtown Fitchburg and a member of the Fitchburg Cultural Alliance. Secondly, I have been slated for a solo exhibition at Fitchburg State College in the fall. Third, I received a call from an out-of-state client (during the storm, no less, when I had very little cell phone battery left) telling me that her alma mater had gotten the okay and is raising funds to commission a large piece of work from me. That work will begin next fall. And finally, I've picked up a couple of courses to teach at the college. So... all's well that ends well.

The above painting has progressed over the months as have I. I've actually adapted to the cold much more quickly than I thought I would. I've learned to drive and walk in the snow, but it's still quite a lot to contend with. The teeth-chattering face is no longer visible in the painting or a prominent feature of my psyche, but the resonance (and humor) of that image still resides and peeks through in the painting on some level.

Mapping My Los Angeles by Reconstructing the Thomas Guide

Three years ago, I moved from LA after almost a decade there. Life in LA entailed long, traffic-heavy, and intense drives, but also many opportunities to walk for pleasure or errands. I was fortunate to live in Silverlake, a neighborhood where I could walk to most of the shops: Trader Joe's and Mayfair, a health food store, a post pack and ship, hardware and art supply, Video Journeys, movie theaters, boutiques, restaurants, bars and even a yoga studio. Most weekends I could usually park my car and not drive at all, unless to visit far-flung friends. Most friends were far-flung because we were all driving long distances to get to our school or work or other places where we might have originally met. On average, most people I know in LA drive 40 or 50 miles a day, which was true for me as well. However, it's not uncommon for people to drive much longer distances throughout greater LA County.

In the days before GPS technology was as mainstream as now, everyone I knew found her or his way around the city with the
Thomas Guide, a several hundred page, spiral-bound, street-by-street map of LA. The Thomas Guide opens with a page-size image of LA County with grids and numbers corresponding to the hundreds of close-up maps that follow. I so often used my first 1997 Thomas Guide that the worn and highlighted pages started falling out. I eventually replaced it with a 2002 edition that stayed pretty much intact because, in those 5 years, I'd committed to memory so much of the city that I rarely needed to check for specific streets. When I left LA, I had one very worn and one relatively new book map of Los Angeles.

While living in LA, I began to have the notion of deconstructing and then reconstructing that map of the sprawl. Shortly after leaving, I took apart both Guides and began to stitch them together as a single flat map. My relationship to driving with the Thomas Guide had been page by page, single snapshots of LA streets. I felt curious to see the pages of the book become a single image.

When I stitched together an entire map of LA out of Thomas Guide pages, the end result measured over 8 x 12 feet. Onto that massive map, I began to hand-stitch over roads where I'd walked or driven, using the stitching to represent my footprint and tire-print on the environment. The stitches would record my complicit impact on the landscape. I'd already been stitching walks from memory and knew that I wanted to do something similar with driving, but wasn’t sure exactly what or how. Would I use the sewing machine – trading one machine for another? Hand-embroidery? I wasn't sure.

I paused on the project due to my uncertainty about how to continue, the complications of another move and a new studio with limited wall space. So, I packed the map up in a project box with the intention of picking it up again later when I had sufficient wall space.

Fortunately, that time has arrived! I'll be moving into a new public studio next week (more details later) which will afford me the space and viewing distance to hang the work and complete it. Here's what I have so far:


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
paper map, machine stitching, hand stitching, cotton muslin backing
8' x 12'


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
detail

This (still unfinished) detail is only 2" by 4" and represents just a few miles. I'm hand-stitching each of the walks (as I remember them) in shades of green embroidery floss. The darker the shade, the more frequently I walked that particular route. Similarly, I'm hand-stitching the drives in red with the darker shades representing the streets and free-ways I traveled most frequently. I'll continue with this process over the entire map.

Unsurprisingly, I'm finding this piece quite a memory exercise. In remembering how much of LA I covered, I'm overwhelmed by the realization that I was only one person in over 10 million – the environmental footprint each person makes in that (or any) city is tremendous. The enormity of the impact is staggering... and I've only just begun the project.

All Streets, Visual Data and a Narrative Atlas: Tracing my tracks on a short derive through the internet

I belong to an online cartography community where someone posted this compelling image of all streets in the lower 48 U.S.states. The topographical features of the landscape are created by the cross-contour effects of the roads alone. No geographical features were added to this map, and yet, look how clearly defined the Appalachian Mountains are due to the routing of roads that either avoid or hug the ridges. This map was created by Ben Fry, a programmer who transfers data into visual form.

Fry's work made me think of a link that an artist friend recently emailed me: the website of Nathalie Miebach, a sculptor / basket weaver who transforms data (in this case weather and environmental changes) into visual (more specifically aesthetic) form.

And a funny little map from an excellent cartography blog by John Krygier who collaborated with Denis Wood to write Making Maps. The Narrative Atlas from Denis Wood looks fascinating.

Portfolio

I've been adding more works to my portfolio blog. I'm still marveling at how far behind I got on everything because of the move. I'm still trying to catch up on things I started 6 months or more ago.

8 years later: On revisiting old work, finding joy through grief, and growing out of dormancy

[Obama's election] marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the "values voters" around whose sensibilities we've had to tiptoe...

[This marks the end of] an era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off, and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency.

...these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way. The election brought the return of a country we'd lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.

For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief.

Judith Warner, Tears to Remember
The New York Times, November 6, 2008

Judith Warner articulates so much of what I've been feeling these last few days since Obama's election. I've been trying to write about it, but just haven't found the words. So thank you, Judith, for giving me opportunity to quote yours.

Culturally and historically, this election is meaningful in ways we don't yet have the hindsight to comprehend fully. As Warner says, this triumph ushers in a new era of the same magnitude that Reagan's election in 1980 ushered in with the previous. I believe that Tuesday's win goes beyond the person of Barack Obama just as Reagan's campaign tapped into the zeitgeist of the previous generation. With a positive message and rationally-based campaign (not to mention the use of technology in information exchange and grass-roots organization), Obama was able to motivate a critical mass toward progressive change and begin the healing of a racial divide. This is no small thing. That there was a critical mass to be motivated in the first place speaks to the changing of the guard of ideas and values rather than change in leadership alone.

Personally, I feel as though I'm beginning anew... as if I picked up where I left off in the year 2000. And somewhere in the muddy middle is this depressive and hopeless blur of the past 8 years of dubious elections, corruption, lies, an ill-founded war, social inequalities, economic disparities and (eventually) financial collapse.

In the weeks leading up to the election, I'd become increasingly anxious about what the outcome might be. Like so many others, I'd begun to expect failure and had lost much hope in the corrupted political and financial institutions and processes. It wasn't easy for me "to risk heartbreak on the chance," to quote Warner again, that anything in this country had or could be changed for the better. But I did risk (even so far as to become a volunteer for the Obama campaign) and things did change.

It's within this context of post-election exhilaration and pre-election hopeful anxiety that I chose to finish archiving my thesis, Fallow, online. The images below are excerpts.

we planted a tree

the first tree died and we planted another one
we're planting a whole forest of trees

For the most part, archiving an artist's book into a blog format is a slow and monotonous process of cutting and pasting text, layering and transferring images, matching images to text, etc. The upside to the drudgery is that it has been affording me plenty of opportunity to sit with the material, to ponder and to take a broad view of the work over time.

So for the last few weeks, I've been archiving, which means I've been pondering Fallow, fretting over the potential outcome of the election and wondering about the dialectic between those two activities. Specifically, I've been wondering: Why now? Why did I choose the weeks preceding and directly after the U.S. presidential election to archive (and essentially "show" in another venue) a piece I wrote and videotaped 8 years ago?

Only through the work of archiving – telling and re-telling, the act of reiteration – have I been able to better understand the motivations and answer those questions for myself. And with that, I should probably offer another re-telling – a concise summary of Fallow – so connections between the emotional charge of the work and my feelings about the political horror that has been these past 8 years and the promise of a more fruitful future might make more sense.

Fallow narrates a series of shared losses that I and my marriage partner, Frank, shared in the Summer of 2000 and about how the nature of human loss is to compound one loss upon another and another... loss of a parent, a pregnancy, a beloved pet. As the text unfolds this personal narrative of repetition, still video images complicate the narrative with both disruptive and sympathetic resonances. The video images walk the viewer step-by-step along a staircased circular path leading through a fallow plot of land in the Franklin Hills of L.A. The views reveal an otherwise overlooked and forgotten location where the lack of cultivation (either in planting or pruning) has spawned an abundance of plant and animal life. The story circles between those spaces of hope and grief where the play of image and text repeat cycles of attachment, suffering, joy, and even outright delight in the wildness of the landscape.

For me, Fallow is a pretty grim (though still surprisingly playful) piece of work that ushered forth from a depressed mind. That being acknowledged, it is not an easy piece for me to revisit let alone read daily or sit with and ponder for weeks on end. It nearly always brings me to tears. So with that level of grief embedded in the work, I wondered (as I was cutting and pasting and layering and reading words like "one loss leads to another") if I would not in the days and weeks following the election be writing a blog post that would cast this work as yet another song of grief.

'sokay we say
'sokay we said

we push the furniture to the middle of the room
and paint the walls red
we mop the floor on our hands and knees
we wash our hands
we clean our noses of the smell
we clear our heads of the idea

we're spending this year talking ourselves out of
what we spent last year talking ourselves into

'sokay we say
we're convincing ourselves
we've convinced ourselves

This repetition (and expectation that begins to form with repetition) is built into the content of the piece as well as its structure – how bodies and minds interact with the piece during installation / presentation. Online, the reader can pick up the narrative of Fallow at any point or read in sequence as it appears on the blog (from top to bottom, contrary to the way blogs are usually read). Similarly, with gallery installation, the viewers create the repetition of the narrative by their movement through the space – movement which is led by individual interest or curiosity.

With the gallery installation, I marveled at the consistency with which the visitors viewed the material's content. Despite being fairly diverse (in age, sex, race, status, occupation), each individual walked a slow pace through the gallery and read every single page (all 210) in sequence. I had not expected this at all. And further, that many of them would be moved to tears... though I myself had been, though Frank had been, though friends had been, though colleagues had been... I had not expected this from strangers.

That others might share in the circumambulation of the space as Frank and I had wound full circle again and again in the Franklin Hills – that we might share some common emotion despite individual differences of experience – was surprising to someone as myself so overcome with sadness and so accustomed to disappointment. On election night, the feeling was one of déjà-vu as our house cried tears of joy with friends on the telephone, with email chats and with images of strangers on television during the election speech.

fallow means something else now

Frank recently reminded me, "Fallow does not mean dead, only dormant."

I think I had forgotten this.

Frank and I and so many like us have been dormant for too long in a country where fear and greed have won out over reason and justice. My hope is that this little archive of Fallow becomes a personal marker for the end to hopelessness and the beginning of something better. The people have shown with their vote to a whole world watching that "We are better than these last 8 years."

Fallow continued

110 pages posted with only 100 more to go in the thesis archive.


I used to think fallow spaces were fertile spaces
when I was angry as a girl
I would run away to the fields and pull up by the roots
whatever things were growing wild
I would bring them back to my room to sit in a bucket of water and rot

fresh flowers

archiving the thesis

I've gotten back to archiving my MFA thesis, Fallow, but have yet to finish. 71 posts down. 139 posts to go. This is a slow process indeed.

The future belongs to them: drifts through downtown, equestrian statues, monuments to shade and reversing nostalgia in a cold place

I have a mental image: a 4 miles square grove of shade trees in the desert... lost objects that never were. And I'm thinking about this passage from Guy Debord:

A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of partial, less difficult projects, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration from the locations where we are used to seeing them.

For example, in the preceding issue of this journal Marcel Mariën proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby — the future belongs to them — the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge, which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history...

Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
Guy Debord
Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955)

As the leaves turn and weather goes cold here in Massachusetts, I'm beginning to change my expectations. I'm no longer that person who lives in a hot climate, but am someone who lives in a cold place... with snow. I have a bit of fear about this unknown thing called 'New England Winter,' but also a child-like curiosity about another way of living and moving about in the landscape that involves things like snowshoe lessons (??) and cross-country skiing and driving with special tires. Compared to my previous experiences, I might as well have moved to a different country.

Not long before moving from Knoxville, TN to Fitchburg, MA, I made an unremarkable walk from my studio to the post office, which is to say I walked from one end of downtown to the other in the heat of the day. As I walked, I became increasingly aware of how much my dread of relentless sunshine (a mental holdover from living in Los Angeles for so long) and the oppressive heat (in which we were to pack up and move house again) was directing my movements through the city.

Being on the academic calendar, Frank and I always move in the hottest months. Three summers ago, we packed up and moved across country from Los Angeles, CA to Knoxville, TN in record heat through multiple desserts. It was a wretched and cursed event involving a car break down in the Mojave Desert and the heat exhaustion of one of our cats, Salvador. Salvador was so traumatized by the heat and sunshine that he, for several weeks after the move, cried and ran away whenever a patch of sunlight came through the house windows.

Like Salvador, I'd become over-sensitized (if not outright traumatized) by years and years of relentless heat and baking sunshine. To survive, I covered with hats and long, lightweight sleeves and searched out pockets of zigzagging shade that I would cross streets to follow. My shade-finding skills had become so naturalized and reflexive that I hardly even thought about them anymore, which is why this unremarkable walk across Knoxville's downtown is still something I'm thinking about.

As I made my way through the streets, my goal of getting to the post office became secondary, and at times contradictory and back-tracking, to the shade-searching desire. Becoming more aware of the impulses that were driving my walk, I started to see how I was always walking ahead of myself, scouting and calculating... the buildings on one side of the street, the overhang on the other, the trees by the sidewalk, the two-block alley, the park with more trees, the archways and courtyard. My search for shade had become an almost obsessive-compulsive kid's game akin to not stepping on cracks.

From this awareness, I began to sketch out mental "shade maps" and "sun maps" of different cities that change with the seasons and times of day. I wondered what it might be like to use one shade map to refer to pathways in another city. I thought about the Guy Debord quote. I thought about taking the Thomas Guide from L.A. and using it to map my way through Boston. The act could be my own "feeble beginning" and play on Nostalgia in that I'd be making visible what I'm already practicing: imposing the past on the future, learning about what is unfamiliar through what is known, designating categories where before there were none.

It would be near impossible for me to drift through any city free of all categories without some severe mental impairment (intentional or not). I mean, I'll continue to know what a subway is, what east and west are, which side the ocean is on... though that one may be easier to upset than other categories since my whole west coast sense of direction was based on my orientation to the ocean and the mountains.

So from this cold place with the ocean on the east, I'm wondering which features of the landscape will consistently navigate me and what role snow will play in directing my drifts through New England.

Necktie label

I recently added a label called 'neckties' and realized that I don't have a good image of the Necktie Ballgown on this blog. So here it is:



I constructed the Necktie Ballgown by draping, sculpting and stitching together approximately 60 men's neckties into this kimono-like dress and then wore this extremely heavy costume (about 10 pounds) during the performance below.






I recorded this performance at Gaviota Beach near Santa Barbara, CA a few months after completing my MFA at CalArts. The action was a personal commentary on femininity and professionalization and was the second in a less specific ongoing series of Landscape Actions. The piece is called Climbing Rocks in Necktie Ballgown.

Necktie Purses statement

This statement is relevant to the Necktie Ballgown as well.

These purses are sculpted from men's neckties through a process of weaving and draping. The construction does not follow a set plan, but is open-ended and intuitive, a method that allows each piece to evolve through draping, pinning, and stitching over a soft form.

I love working with 1970s neckties because of their bold patterns, brilliant colors, and sturdy polyester. These vintage ties have a particularly playful and showy, almost peacock, quality. What makes them compelling as masculine tropes is what lends them so well to be transformed into feminized objects.

Purse Show Opening

Tonight is the opening for the Purse and Handbag show at Hanson Gallery... from 4 to 7 pm, I believe.

Also, Kevin Cowan of the Knoxville News Sentinel wrote an article about the show, the work and the artists. Here's an abbreviated version of the article online.

Embedded in Kevin's article is a video of Judi Gaston, friend and fellow fiber artist from the Emporium Building Studios on Gay St. in Knoxville. She's talking about her Recyclable series of clothing to which the purses belong. I especially like the bit where she's describing the rustling that the skirt of plastic bags makes as you walk about "leaving a trail of fun behind you."

More Necktie Purses

Below are two more purses I just finished. These will be included in a show this month at Hanson Gallery in Knoxville, TN. I'll post more details once the show opens. But until then, a little preview:

From necktie purses 2

with lining fabric:

From necktie purses 2

From necktie purses 2

From necktie purses 2

again with lining fabric:

From necktie purses 2

and a detail of the quilting:

From necktie purses 2

Already September

It's September and I'm working though my studio is far from being set up. I'm just working around the mess. Will be back with some pics in a week or two.

The weather is still extremely cool here in Mass and some individual trees have already begun to change color. Fall is going to be brilliant!

Setting up the new studio in New England

We made it to Massachusetts last Friday without any major moving difficulties. We arrived to find the place beautiful! ...and the weather cool. We're both excited and happy to be here. Even the cats love it here; they have plenty of windows and a sunporch (which I've already set up with an easel, a work-in-progress and some painting supplies).

I'm still working on arranging the shelving and stash in the fiber studio. Will post more as things progress.

Moving Update

Frank and I found a great place to live in Massachusetts! I'll have a home studio for at least the first year or two, but I won't have it set up until August. In the mean time, I'll continue to pack... and then the move...

See you again in August.

Studio clearout and traveling to New England to find a new place

I cleared out my Knoxville studio this week and have been packing things up for my and Frank's move to the Boston area where he'll be starting his new job as a tenure-track professor. This has been a long road for us (8 years in Los Angeles for our respective graduate programs and then a three year appointment in Knoxville), but worth it to be finally headed where we want to be.

Of course, we'll both miss all of our friends, family, fellow artists and colleagues, but we're absolutely thrilled to be settling into a new life in an exciting new location.

I'm writing this from a hotel room in Newark, Delaware making my way up to New England where I'll look for housing. I'm on the road as a pit crew member of an ultra-cycling record attempt. My mother-in-law's husband, Gerry Eddlemon holds the national first place record in state crossings and the world's second place record. On this trip, he'll be attempting two more state crossings in New Jersey and Vermont. In exchange for my help as a crew member, we'll be stopping in Massachusetts between rides so I can look at housing.

Here are Mikki and Gerry together in the Connecticut crossing. And though the article doesn't mention it, Mikki is an extreme athlete as well having won several marathons and long distance runs in her age category and placed first in several races in the Senior Olympic Games... hence the big banner in the first picture welcoming "ULTRA EDDLEMONS."

Frank will be flying into Boston in a few days to meet us there. Exciting stuff!

Open studio: Instances of resistance

This photo montage is another piece in the Instances of Resistance series where I search out and photograph feral plant life growing among human construction / ruins.

I've used some of the same digital photos as the smaller pieces on paper below. The difference is that the photos in the large piece are printed on fabric, montaged onto a raw canvas and over-stitched using the sewing machine.

Instance of Resistance #10: Feral greenery in the underground city
digital photos on fabric over-stitched onto canvas
3' x 4'

Here's a detail of some of the stitching:



Below are a couple of the ones I printed onto Bristol Board then drew over with a soft-lead pencil.

I chose drawing as the medium because I wanted to put my own hand into the photos and make a connection between the role of subjectivity in my art practice and the un-tameable, rogue plant-life. I also thought that drawing would be the best way to animate the plants with playful and caricature-like personas.

I enjoy how these pieces invoke nostalgia (a theme in my work) with their simultaneously shadowy presence and candy-like preciousness.

Instance graffiti #4: 11 feral plants, 8 twigs and 1 cross-beam in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

Instance graffiti #1: 12 feral plants among others in brick ruin
digital print and pencil
2008
8" x 10"

The stomping grounds / Knoxville in the NY Times

A fellow artist friend who also recently left the area just emailed this link:

music, art, food, green

The article definitely focuses on some of the better aspects of Knoxville.

Sale! studio materials and equipment

I haven't posted in a while because I've been both out of town and working on clearing out home and studio for our upcoming move. I do have some new work as well, but don't have the photos back from the photo shoot yet. Hope to post those soon.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been selling some of the sorted items and studio furniture and plan to sort out more items for First Friday, which is next week. So far, I have for sale:

Consew industrial sewing machine with table
vintage and other fabrics
miter box, saw and other framing tools
35 mm cameras, Pentax and Cannon
Bell and Howell 16mm film camera
slide projector
opaque projector
art tackle boxes
storage boxes and containers
small frames
vintage tables

... and lots more that I can't remember right now. Will update if I think of anything significant.

More conceptual, less material

Here's some playful work from 2001 which I thought was appropriate at this time as I continue to clear out more studio materials... all in preparation for our big move to the Boston area!

These pieces are from the series Found Landscapes in which I chose plywood panels (from the hardware store) with woodgrain patterns suggestive of landscape features. I brought the features out by staining the panels with oil paint.

In the first piece, I collaged a smooth stone in the center of a concentric ripple pattern and then accentuated the pattern by staining with blue paint. In the second, I used yellow paint to stain over a 1/4 circle shape in the upper left corner. Then I outlined the shape and drew sun rays with pencil to suggest a child-like symbol for the sun.




Just as a curious side note, Cathy Malchiodi in her book Understanding Children's Drawings (p. 212-13), suggests and cites research that claims that children who are facing death or loss of a relative will often place a sun in the upper left corner. When I worked with children, I noticed however that most children (even those who are not facing such a loss) tend to put a sun in the upper left corner.

Of course, children from other cultures have different symbolism. For instance, I'm unable to find a reference, but I remember seeing a documentary during my studies about Australian aboriginal children who used semi-circles to represent people in much the same way western children might use the stick figure.