Joey

Please note: I’ve posted my 3 drawings from the midterm critique but only as closing
gesture, one last hooray before I depart from my ideas about meandering lines. No, no, this is not entirely
true. In fact, the ideas that I was working with earlier will probably always be present in the back of
my mind, they have been inside me from the very start. Which is why I can’t make art about them right
now. It is too big…

I am starting fresh, so very very fresh…

The process began with a brief walk through the streets of Florence, picking up scraps and
bits and things and strings. Back in the studio, I made a pulp out of the things that were
pulp-worthy, and selected a few object to display within a my pulpy sculptural thing. I used wire mesh to
make a form to spread the pulp over, creating niches in the shapes and sizes of the objects I wanted to
include (which happened to be a broken pair of glasses, a bunch of cut lock tops, and a cut bike lock
chain. I thought maybe there could be some sort of narrative here). After allowing the pulp to dry onto
the screen, I pealed it off and was surprised (and delighted) to find it held its shape quite well and
was rather strong. However, when I placed the objects into their respective niches, and took another look at
the piece, the combination was not that masterpiece I’d been envisioning. In fact, my reaction was more
of a “hmm, well there that is…” But I do really like the aesthetic and the conceptual possibilities
presented by a form made out of pulp from existing objects.

Next, I took all the envelopes from letters and packages my mom has sent me and made them
into a pulp. My original idea was to cast them into sort of a hanging nest-like shape, but that
didn’t quite go as planned. However, I do think im going to continue using materials that have some sort
of significance to me or my life. I might do a similar sort of thing that I did in at first
with niches, or at least creating the pulp form with certain objects in mind. I’m not sure exactly what
aspects of my life im going to deal with yet.

Another possibility: when I was talking to Julia about this, she mentioned that the cast
pulp looked to her like a topographical map. That’s not something that I’d seen right away, but
interestingly enough, when I started taking closeup pictures of the stuff for this blog, looking through the
camera lens totally made me see these structures are like huge land masses. Especially when photographing the
piece that included the objects, it almost felt to me like I was looking at a landscape with a pair
of huge glasses in it. So I think there’s some there. I think its pretty obvious that im not exactly sure
about what im doing at this moment, but I do feel on the verge of something. Clearly this blog entry is
so long because im trying to get all this stuff straight in my own mind…you all just happen to be
privy to my thought process!