Studio Peep II.
all the spaces and times
dear creators,
When I posted the first letter on this topic (Studio Peep 1.), I was only thinking of sharing my time in the particular room I’ve been temporarily granted at school (above). But something I’ve caught onto over the past nine months are the powerful and direct influences coming from the periphery of my day to day.
More than one artist has admitted that ‘the studio’ is actually everywhere. I mean, yeah, we’re constantly soaking up inspiration from all kinds of known, unknown and unknowable sources. But recently, I thought it was plausible that a particular work of mine could be traced back to a very specific encounter that occurred out on a street seven months prior.
The work I’m referring to (below) involves the suspension of various materials on ‘invisible’ quilting thread. Against a white or light grey background, this thread is virtually undetectable— to the extend that viewers are guaranteed to walk into it and respond with an amusing just-ran-into-a-cobweb-face (I’m not sadistic, though. Really, that’s why I added a boundary with some stones).
The experience that I’m betting sparked this work involved a toy airplane dangling from a tree on my regular route to school. For whatever reason, catching a glimpse of this while riding down Wende Road one October night stopped me dead in my tracks. Usually I’m coming from the other direction at such a late hour so that I hadn’t noticed it before. I took the following photo:
I couldn’t tell you exactly why I was so mesmerized by this inconsequential thing but I’m guessing it had to do with a feeling I’d been grappling with and hadn’t yet been able to understand or articulate.
When it came time to submit an artist statement to go with the above installation in a recent show, it made the most sense to credit the suspended plane so I wrote the following:
Riding my bike home in the dark one night
I happened to look up and see a toy airplane
dangling from a string high up in some branches
There was something vaguely disturbing about its slow tilting
back and forth in the breeze
I heard Fugazi’s ‘Bad Mouth’ track in my head
“You can’t be what you were
So you better start being just what you are
You can’t be what you were
The time is now, it’s running out
It’s running out, it’s running, running, running out”
Looking back, it’s very likely that this encounter
was the impetus for this work
As if it opened a specific point of gravity
that began pulling in
everything it needed to exist
***
I like the idea that the manifestation of this work was waiting in that airplane. Maybe my hidden desire and its desire called out to each other. Who can explain how I just happened to have a roll of ‘invisible thread’ in a box in my studio? It’s this kind of strangeness that keeps me going.
I’m also including a flood of images that came from puttering with my various collections. These were all composed in the specifically designated ‘studio space'. If I ever need to put myself in a trance and disable any overthinking, I make things that I never intend to show and only take a photo as evidence before letting them come apart. Maybe I’m giving them a bit more life (than my phone storage) by posting them here.
Wishing you all a bit of strangeness that leads you to some beauty…or more strangeness,
~Corrie