Notes on Structure

Hi All, I have just finished my second draft of my thesis paper (that goes along with my thesis body of work for my MFA.)  I thought it would be interesting to include an excerpt of it here:

Examining structure is examining the strengths and weaknesses of something, gaining full understanding of whom and what something can be at its core.  Knowing structure is to know how something can fall apart and what keeps it together.  I like to build structures to make them fall apart in places and be held together in others.  I do this by mimicking designs that I have seen in biology and in architecture, or consciously taking those structures away.  As the maker, I have this intimate knowledge about the forms I build.  This relationship makes the object I’m making take a position of weakness and vulnerability, but only after I have gone through the paces with that material and that form.

This is an in-progress view of a piece called "linear flow."  It has a salvaged wood frame with steel mesh strewn between.  The teal are bamboo skewers which are then glued into the mesh as a way to illustrate the lines and curves it makes.

The creating and destroying of structure reflects the struggle I have with allowing looseness and fighting tightness in my practice.  These are values that are very important to me because they challenge my natural tendencies.  The materials’ dictation of the end result is a way for fate and unknown to enter and destroy the certainty in my design.  What is left is a form that is in between states, teetering on the brink of a number of absolutes.  

Linear Flow, installed at the DA Gallery, Pomona, CA for their Trilateral Exchange show.