Artist Statement: The Three Pound Brain Meets the Nine Pound Hammer (Vacant Building, Ellensburg, WA, 2002)      "What appears to be a singer's random assemblage of fragments to fit a certain melody line may be, for that singer, an assemblage of fragments that melody called forth. It may be a sermon delivered by the singer's subconscious, his second mind. It may be a heretic's way of saying what could never be said out loud, a mask over a boiling face."         -Greil Marcus, from "The Old, Weird America" Anyone who has experienced the common cold knows that illness has a life cycle. Born as a tickle in the throat or perhaps a headache, it moves through adolescence as a cough, into adulthood as a full-blown fever, and then finally lingers and dies. The experience I have had with mental illness can be characterized in much the same way. Illness of the brain takes on its own life and then substitutes its life for that of the victim. The birth of mental illness is both insidious and at the same time violent- it slowly destroys the original persona by growing around it and suffocating it. The illness becomes its own organism and establishes its own needs. The death of mental illness actually results in the birth of a new persona. The original persona is gone; the new persona, tempered by the experience of losing and then regaining the mind, emerges. In "The Three Pound Brain Meets the Nine Pound Hammer" I use themes and elements from early-recorded American folk music to explore the life cycle of mental illness as I have experienced it. One of my main resources is Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, which many consider to be the most definitive collection of early folk music. The songs, recorded and pressed onto 78s in the 1920's and early 1930's, are at once raw and elemental as well as haunting and complex. The musicians represent all regions of the United States, and their songs draw from a vast range of sources, from 18th century British balladry to Southern gospel choirs. However, the underlying themes in these songs are the same: legend, the bible, plague, vegetables and animals, love and death. It is the use and individualization of these themes that attracts me to old time music. As many of the folk musicians used this thematic database to tell their own story, I too have drawn upon these same themes to tell one of mine. "The Three Pound Brain Meets the Nine Pound Hammer" is divided into four rooms, representing the four seasons as they correlate to the stages of the life cycle of mental illness- spring/birth, summer/adolescence, fall/adulthood, winter/death. Think of "The Three Pound Brain Meets the Nine Pound Hammer" as a cosmological journey through my brain, set to the tune of Harry Smith's celestial monochord, and enjoy.