Tag: basket case

I finished a new sculpture this week, which prompted a little existential crisis about the whole body of work.

My therapist said that whatever this new piece represents is so painful that my brain is trying to protect me from it by telling me that there is nothing worth doing. It’s unusual for her to make that sort of pronouncement. Usually she’s more given to soothing noises and difficult questions. Usually I’m not having an existential crisis about my work. Maybe she’s right.

The next morning, I read this little snippet of wisdom in an article that my sister-in-law posted on Facebook:

“In those moments when you feel discouraged or lost in the studio, or when you experience rejection, rest completely assured that what you don’t know about something is also a form of knowledge, though much harder to understand. In many ways, making art is like blindly trying to see the shape of what you don’t yet know. Whenever you catch a little glimpse of that blind spot, of your ignorance, of your vulnerability, of that unknown, don’t be afraid or embarrassed to stare at it. Instead, try to relish in its profound mystery. Art is about taking the risk of engaging in something somewhat ridiculous and irrational simply because you need to get a closer look at it, you simply need to break it open to see what’s inside.”

– Teresita Fernández

Staring and relishing the ridiculousness and mystery has always been part of my process. I like to practice yoga in the front room of the studio, where all the girls are hanging. It’s especially important when I’ve just finished one. So I went back to the studio and unrolled my yoga mat.

Here is what the new girl (on the left) looks like when I’m lying on the floor:

I was going to call her “second brain,” but she insists that her name is “i know what i know.” When I’m feeling really sour, I think of her as “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

The crisis seems to be over for now, and I probably won’t take all the sculptures down and flatten them before my next open studio (6 February 2015). The idea of flattening them still appeals to some parts of me, but maybe I’ll save it for when I’m older and maybe I’ll make it into a party and ask people to help me.

Here’s another view of the latest one:

It’s called “how bees work.”  I think I might have mentioned that it surprised me.  I didn’t see it coming.  It was a little like being carjacked.

Anyway, it demanded that I use this antique eggbeater, which was left behind in one of the failed restaurants in the Copeland Block.  The eggbeater reminded me of a dream I had a long time ago.  In the dream I saw a swarm of bees with transparent abdomens, and inside their abdomens were tiny eggbeaters.  “Can I have a stinger?” the force behind the sculpture asked.  How could I say no?

I’m never sure how much to say about what a particular sculpture represents to me.  I know that people are often curious.  I also know that I don’t want to deprive them of the opportunity to make their own meaning of it.  I heard a story about this piece resonating with someone while it was at the photographer’s studio in a way that I never would have imagined because it’s so far from my own experience.  I’d really love for people to weigh in on this issue if they have opinions.

This piece is an ending of sorts.  I’m not sure exactly how to explain it.  It’s like an exclamation point on the end of a sentence.  Someone who saw it when it was freshly finished said that they had a sense of a soap bubble stretching and stretching and finally breaking apart into two separate bubbles.

I’m a long way from being done with wire sculptures about living in a female body, and I suppose I could get carjacked again by another piece of my past, but the ideas in my queue are all based on a plaster cast of my own 45-year-old torso.  The work I’m planning now is about the present, about being middle-aged.  It feels incredibly vulnerable to be putting my own shape on display like that.  It feels vulnerable to even talk about it.  It also feels necessary.

Here’s the latest piece, hanging with two of her sisters. The one on the left was made with a mannequin, padded out with plastic bags and duct tape. The one on the right was made with a duct tape dress form that got covered in several layers of plaster. The one in the middle is the most recent, made with a plaster cast of my torso.

Before she’s finished, I will have gone over every square centimeter of her dozens of times with my handy 3-needle felting tool. I probably will have stabbed my fingers dozens of times too. She’ll end up completely covered in felt, like this thing:

I think I will have to start a new wire frame soon, to give me a break from all that felting.

I finished it this spring, but it has taken me until now to take it out and get it photographed. I needed to live with it for a while. I have been more unhappy with this piece than with any of the other Basket Cases, probably because my experience of it is so different from other people’s reactions to it.

Recently I read an article called “Art and the Dread of Experience.” It was written by a psychotherapist. An artist friend of mine complained that the article focused too much on product instead of process. “You can tell he’s not an artist,” she said. But a lot of artists focus excessively on product too.

What I liked about the article was the idea of a work of art as a container for for emotional experiences, especially the kind of extreme emotional experiences that people tend to dread. That is exactly what the Basket Cases are, and it tickles me that they are literally vessels. The studio itself, because of the work I do there, has ended up being a container for those experiences too. My artistic process is also a sort of container.

So anyway, this latest piece is a container for my gnarliest feelings about motherhood in general, about my own mother, and about the kind of mother I might have been if I had chosen to have children. At my last open studio, a lot of people described it as “sweet.” I did not feel sweet when I was making it.

“There is a sweetness to that flower, though,” said my process-oriented friend recently. “Maybe there’s more sweetness in the experience than you’re willing to admit.”

Maybe so.  They never end up being about only one thing.