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.