Sit of Faith

This object needs your trust. It needs you to believe that it is a chair, believe that it wants to be a chair. Without you, it is simply not a chair. This object changes its physical shape, and perhaps its role in the room, when in a non-chair state.

sit of faith / steel, aluminum, wood, rubber, teflon, lead shot, sinew / 48” x 38” x 24” / fall 2007

Five Easy Pieces (in White)

Five vacant pocketwatch cases are venues for a collaboration of slippery concepts: the semantics of ‘white’ and the pragmatics of time.
From left to right...
white flag: Doves triumphantly tangle themselves in geometric exultation of the tiny and the precious. The ‘diamond’ rotates at 6 degrees a second in an effort to further sparkle your eye.
white lie: A seeming innocent action solidifies and traps the movement; the plaster drys and the moment is recorded. It is a traceable regret which continues to erode, now the authenticity of everything is questioned.
white wash: The surface is censored. A layer of white begins to obscure the truth underneath: overspray on a wood bench, efflorescence on masonry, ice on a small branch. Time allows exposure, and exposure steals the details.
white noise: The corporeal time is obscured by the sandblasted surface. Only the application of a wetting agent to the crystal will help you separate the signal from the noise.
white hot: Seconds shout at you in both analog and digital dialects, just to make sure you are aware that time is far from patient. It doesn’t matter what hour it is, it matters only that time has been lost. Do something – not nothing – and do it right now.

Detail images...

five easy pieces (in white)
found objects, purchased objects, fabricated objects
24” x 16” x 1”
fall 2007

disaster in blaauw 2

I pulverized these plaster molds in the kiln a couple of weeks ago. Damn Blaauws. Damn me for being so impatient and wanting to dry them in the kiln, trying to rush nature.

These were my first attempt at making one-part plaster molds of grocery-store plastic containers, which were to become dishes/platters for the Cup Sale. Thank you, David, for reminding me to photograph them before they journeyed into the kiln to dry...

Anyhow, to make a long story short, after the Blaauw disaster I made 60 of these instead:

These pieces were made by playing with the nuances and irregularities of slip-casting techniques. Drips were left uncorrected to bring attention to the inherent beauty of imperfections.

.

sometimes i make things as a way of asking a bunch of questions (like these)

Can a generic object become specific?

How do two materials meet?
What is that space within a fracture?
Can the most logical procedure bear extraordinary results?
What is the potential of a single line?

.

action?

It has been a while since I have posted..
I have been making...I just haven't been documenting what I've made (yet).

But I offer the following as evidence that 'things' are, in fact, being made...

cracks are facts

thing 1 and thing 2



.

infinitely scalable

I want to make a drawing.

I want to make a drawing the size of this room.
I want it to be specifically for the room.
I want the lines to inhabit a different space.

The gaps from my "mutant twins" vessels (see below) were carefully photographed and traced using Adobe Illustrator. This vector-based drawing, infinitely scalable, then found its way onto the walls and windows of our Ceramics crit room. We critiqued this piece yesterday, and I am still listening to the recording, trying to soak it all in...

More later...

.

mutant twins

How can two identical objects become mutants of each other?

I began with two identical (purchased) vases. They were slip-cast, and therefore (theoretically) identical. I sandblasted the surface of one vase in order to distinguish it from each other, then I broke both vases into about sixty pieces using a hammer. I reassembled each vase using the pieces from its twin, my goal being to bring each vase back to its original form. Knowing that the goal was unattainable, but that my pursuit would be meticulous and faithful nonetheless, was at the core of this exercise.

The reconstructed vases are mutants of each other.




.

fanfare!

(Cranbrook's big annual fund-raising dinner)

I decorated the kiln room with things I found around the department:
Glass bottles (sandblasted and turned upside down, then zip-tied together), hardcover books (courtesy of Brian and a local church that was having a going-out-of-business sale), and luminescent plastic jars of chemicals and oxides...

.

too beautiful

From my critique yesterday afternoon:

"These pieces read like a photograph."
"It's de-mystified. It's just a thing that I can move."
"Do you think it's possible that your pieces are too beautiful, and therefore I cannot even approach them?"
"You've gone to great lengths to create an environment for us to see your work, and now this environment too has become part of your work."
"In the end, you win. You have all different sorts of ways to win."

Can a piece of work be "too beautiful" that it is unapproachable? Can a piece of work be so visually stunning that its beauty masks its content? Is there even such a thing as being "too beautiful"? This strikes me as absurd-- that something can possess so much aesthetic power that it repels you, that somehow, its visual beauty overpowers its truth and distracts you from finding its core. What this means is that you would have to look longer into it-- penetrate its surface-- in order to find its meaning.

In my working process, I never think about beauty in an intentional manner; it is never planned nor inserted into my work, but it emerges (for me) as an extension of time. The more silent the piece, the longer I gaze. The longer I gaze, the more I see. Maybe we expect to understand something right away, and maybe that is why art often comes in the form of a statement. Some works are easily accessible because their statement is so clear. I envy the artist that can produce that type of work, because I can't. When I am working on these pieces, I am so incredibly lost in the work. I am hoping to give meaning to a material. When I wrap the broken vessels, the only thought in my head is the pull of the string against the tip of my right index finger. I set simple rules for how to wrap them, and follow these rules consistently, but never without constantly questioning them. When I drill into my vessels, the only thing I see is the tip of the tool sliding into the material. I feel friction and resistance. I notice how the light hits the surface. I try to remember exactly how that friction felt, where I will meet resistance again, and then I start to drill some more. If that finished piece can carry that same contemplative dialogue with the viewer, I am getting somewhere...

shift

I've been here for four weeks, and I have already had three paradigm shifts-- I will talk about this later today at my critique and blog again later this week. For now, a few images of my oculus pieces.

These oculus pieces are placed on turntables. They each have this conversation with a fixed light source on the wall. This conversation is documented by the tooling marks that I have placed on the surface of the vessel. The pieces are meant to be rotated by the viewer.

The broken vessels, which I am very optimistic about, did not photograph well last night, so these images (of my oculus pieces) will have to suffice until I set up another documentation session. I've been working/living inside these vessels for a few weeks now. Realizing how I have started to position myself inside these objects was the first paradigm shift. Much like buildings, these vessels become containers for light.

.

going home.

This is Tony's last year teaching at Cranbrook. This May, he will be moving to a loft in Chicago where, at 65, he will begin a "new life" as a practicing artist.

He has just announced that the Ceramics Department will be taking a 10-day trip to Korea this January. For reasons I have yet to understand, he calls it "going home."

a sit of faith

There is a drawing in a sketch books from my last semester of architecture school which has been haunting me over the years. It is a sketch of a chair partly inspired by a conceptual staircase made by one of my professors and partly inspired by my fascination at the time with the mechanics/objects of sailing. I thought about the trapeze acts of sailing, the acts of faith and trust of life in the equipment.
I thought about how the sail was activated by and took its form from the presence of a wind.
I thought about how a chair could be activated by and take its form from the presence of a body.
I wanted to make a chair that needed the presence of a body to fully realize its chair-ness...

I left the chair totally undeveloped and moved onto another idea about a hypergeneric workstation (a story for another time). I was able to take the opportunity to make the chair for my first project here at Cranbrook.

The assignment: make that thing you've never made.

It is sited in the stairwell; it relies directly on the architecture.

Wall brackets and runners with teflon bearings

Back side of wall brackets. Wood brackets with ball bearings.

Left side of assembled chair.

It functions as a chair in the sense that one can sit in it, however it still needs a bit of tuning in order to fulfill the ideas suggested by the original sketch...

david at midnight:


im at noon:

"She works with light."

That is how Tony describes what I do.

working with facts

It's amazing here. Cranbrook is truly a place that allows you to be brave. I am honored to be here, surrounded by makers, masters, and wizards. We are filled with velocity and starting to make work. Tony is such a source of light. I have the most amazing studio that looks southward out into a forest of long, spindly trees. The natural light here is amazing, and it's really starting to shape my work...

Jim Melchert gave a talk yesterday and showed us his beautiful tile pieces. He told us about his conversations with Sol LeWitt, his time spent watching Dorothea Rockburne draw, and the logic behind his broken tiles. He called it "working with facts," because once his tiles are broken and reassembled, all the work that follows resonates from the fractures on the tiles. The art is created by following a simple set of rules. A work of art should act like a musical score in that, once the rules are determined, the work moves forward by itself, creating a life of its own. Once the score is composed, it takes on a life of its own, and anyone can play it. It reminded me of sentence #5 in Sol LeWitt's "35 Sentences of Conceptual Art."

Irrational thoughts should be followed through absolutely and logically.

Last night, charged by Jim's words, I bought a few white stoneware pots and broke one of them on the floor. I wanted a ubiquitous ceramic form-- so familiar to the eye that it was almost shapeless-- hence the stoneware pot. I then wrapped white string around the broken pot until a new skin was formed on the vessel, a repetitious motion that bore an interesting geometry.

I am looking forward to where this will take me...



.

a world of distances

I have been attempting to put into words my inclination towards things.

Without trying to oversimplify what we do (we being architects, ceramists, metalsmiths, makers) the challenge is always this: to negotiate the distance between ourselves and the rest of the world. My own purpose-- what I am driven to do in my work-- is to dissolve that distance, whether it is physical or intellectual. If you've been in a James Turrell Skyspace, you know exactly what I am talking about. When inside, it is as if the sky is being pulled into the room with you and held there, right above you. It is the closest you will ever been to the moon, which hovers closely above your head, confronting you. The distance between you and the sky, once miles apart, has been erased.

I find myself drawn to such things because they attempt to compress that distance between the body and the material world. It's a strange distance-- this radius we keep, mediated by sight but perforated only by touch. I can't throw a vessel without repeatedly tracing its shape with my arms and hands. That connection is so clear, and the negotiation between myself and the material is so critical to the process.

I want my work to carry this awareness. I hope it continues to embody this optimism and challenge that separation between ourselves and the world.


Kielder Skyspace by James Turrell

a white hollow-core elephant

When I graduated from college, David, his family, and my family flew out to Tucson to help me move. Everyone helped with the packing, then my parents headed on a plane to San Francisco and Dave's parents and sisters drove back to San Diego while David and I planned our nimble heist. We were abducting my 7-foot-long, 3-foot-wide wooden thesis model out of the College of Architecture gallery and into our rented U-Haul in the middle of the night, even though it was scheduled to remain on display for the next few months (for the upcoming accreditation visit, or something important like that, because I had promised a few people I'd donate it to the school). But I'd obviously changed my mind, because I remember walking into the gallery that night and thinking that it was going to be a cold day in hell if I ever let this beast out of my sight. This was the sole object of my attention during my senior year. I worked on it devotedly and lovingly, obsessively and fanatically, sometimes with discipline and sometimes with reckless impulse, but always with fierce loyalty.

I am a bit of a nut, no? To be so deeply attached to a hollow-core door.

Nonetheless, we packed it carefully into our truck and hauled it safely to San Diego, and soon after I was reprimanded by the college for my act of theft. While I was away in San Francisco that week with my parents, David somehow single-handedly managed to mount it on our wall, 11 feet off the ground. I don't like thinking or talking about this feat that he is so ridiculously proud of, because I can guarantee you he was (more than once) thisclose to dropping it or breaking off a limb (the model's, not his) because he was probably performing this feat on one leg while peeling a banana and trying to dip it in a jar of Laura Scudder's chunky peanut butter. That's just how bizarre the boy is when no one is watching.

Anyhow, this grand pièce de résistance has been proudly hanging on our loft wall for 4 years now, a symbol of my priorities as an architect and an impassioned distillation of how I view the built environment. And sometimes it just looks so sexy, casting leggy afternoon shadows on our wall.

I came home early yesterday with a debilitating headache and laid down on our couch. We are moving soon (to Michigan, for grad school) and have been discussing the details of this 2400-mile maneuver. The simple fact is that we will need to part with much of what we own, and I know David hasn't dared to mention my thesis model because he doesn't want to upset me by suggesting that it shouldn't make the move. Well, Dave, I haven't mentioned this white hollow-core elephant either, because up until yesterday afternoon, I was convinced we were going to take it with us.

But I think you and I both know that we are evolving into something else now, because as I stare at it hanging so impressively above our lovely space, I feel it has served its purpose.

i've never said this out loud before...

There have been a lot of questions lately about why David and I are headed to art school. For a few people (and that includes David and myself), it seems to make a lot of sense. We don't even have to explain; there is a knowing look, a confirmation, a nod that can only mean, "Yeah, I get you." But for the most part, David and I have been breaking out the allegorical speech, which, now in it's thirty-seventh iteration, is pretty damn good. Although it is a bit heavy on the logic (my opinion), it outlines our future interdisciplinary practice as the impetus for heading into Metals (Dave) and Ceramics (myself). Which is all very true. Yes, we want our work to shift comfortably between scales. Yes, we like furniture. Yes, we want to manufacture products. It all makes so much damn sense.

But there are some points that, for one reason or another (perhaps too tender to put into words?), we never seem to say out loud. So I thought I'd make them known-- right here, right now.

1 Because we don't know what to expect. Seriously, we have no clue.

2 Because we are beguiled by artists (and maybe even a little intimidated). If I ever ended up in an elevator with Donald Judd or Rebecca Horn (and thank god there will never be a situation where I would have to converse with both of them simultaneously), it would be way more than I could handle. I'd be unable to interact. Maybe David would say to Rebecca, "Your work is so graceful and lonely," or ask Donald why his Robertson heads at the Chinati aren't precisely aligned-- because David is brave like that-- but really, David, what would we say?

3 To deeply know our chosen materials. I bet it's a lot like getting married. You say, "I want to know all there is to know about you, and I don't care if sometimes you're ugly on the outside, because I bet you're always pretty on the inside."

4 To make. We are weary from toiling over paper, from the slow and compromising implementation of ideas, from watching projects fade and fall. Dave swears he is slowly being post-tensioned into the shape of a question mark. We want to stretch our arms, gather in material, and implement a shunt from our head to our fists. We want to (and I am borrowing from a wonderful professor of mine here) "work like bandits," charged by the energy of our hands.

5 To do something else. I don't claim to know much about Architecture (notice the capital A), although I think I know enough to get a simple building from paper to Certificate of Occupancy. So really, when David and I started talking about grad school and what it would mean to us professionally and personally (not a big difference there, really), we found that our fundamental questions could only be answered in an environment where a. everyone was a wizard at what they did, b. we had access to tools and materials we'd never had the chance to tinker with before, c. our learning processes would not be so linear, and d. for once, we weren't in the midst of so many architects. This narrowed our options down quite a bit, but in all honesty, the answer was Cranbrook from the start.

6 Because it's going to be so much fun.

take the story of carpenter mike
dropped his tools and his keys and left
and headed out as far as he could
past the cities and gated neighborhoods
he slept ‘neath the stars
wrote down what he dreamt
and he built a machine
for no one to see
then took flight,
first light



(don potts + calexico)

first post

where to start?