moving along.....

Well, I got up to my goal of 120 pieces for the installation - step one of them, at least. Yippeeeeeee! I am now going to let them dry for a week or so, and then go back in and alter a portion of them on the sander. Then I'll need to paint them. But it's great to have this stage done.

I really enjoyed getting to play on the lathe and work the way I do on the sander at home, quickly making tons and tons of little bits. I especially loved turning these little holly branches - the wet green wood cuts like butter and I loved working with the contrast of the white white wood and the darker grey bark color - when the lathe is spinning, you get used to how it looks when you have taken some of the bark off because it's spinning off-center - but when you stop the rotation, you see what pattern you created.


I did this drawing of the way the whole installation will look through the windows inside the Wood Turning Center. It's too bad in a way that people won't be able to physically move around the pieces, but I still think it will be exciting to have the color outside that window filling the grey cobbled together space.

I have been chatting with a family friend, Sam Chase who is a psychoanalyst. I wanted to know if there were any ways that the body has a built-in centering system, either medically or psychologically. I want to link the body and/or brain in with this project to talk about centering from an emotional perspective. I still need to come up with a title for this project, which is going to take some more research - I am thinking the title will be a word that uses either a technical part of the lathe or a medical or psychological term. I was also looking at information the other day on the web about the brain and that might be my link.


Okay, so the other things I wanted to share here are that Liam and I started in on turning this pegboard bowl. Well, I'm letting Liam do the turning, truth be told. Then I'm going to finish it up. Can't wait to see how it will look. We were really curious how it would be to turn it because that masonite is compressed fibers, but he got nice long shavings from the gouge digging into it, not a cloud of dust. The pegboard I bought was originally 3 feet by 2 feet and I cut it into 8" squares and glued those together. For some reason the holes didn't match up, so I drilled them out a little larger than they would have been. We are going to keep the edges square and then I'm going to paint the entire thing with Plastidip. I think it's going to be a really cool piece that might lead to a few more companion pieces.

We are the 11th ITE group since this residency began in the mid-1990's. After the 10th group, the Wood Turning Center published a big book about the residency with profiles of every resident on their own page, personal quotes, and images of the work they made. It's a very nice book. The Wood Turning Center's website has a lot of this information as well. We have a copy of the book in our common room and we'll look at it a lot when we are hanging out in the evenings - it's hard not to feel a little daunted by what we see others accomplished. The first thing we hear from Albert when we arrive is that "the time is ours and it doesn't matter if all we produce is a pile of sawdust." On the other hand, there's an exhibition at the end of this and everyone feels the pressure to have good work to show. We have two days of openings and presenting our work to the public, a panel discussion I believe - and nobody wants to be sitting in a pile of sawdust for that!

And then there's the World Cup tugging at our heartstrings.......begging us over to the pizza place.......sigh.........


Last but not least, I remembered another idea I've had that I have wanted to do on this residency for years that I'm going to have to squeeze in too - I want to turn a chunky wide-rimmed bowl and make a garden around the rim. Here's a preliminary sketch of my idea, but I think I need to continue drawing and see what forms I really should use.

Okay....it looks like the rain is letting up a bit here. I'm off across the street to the studio.

One last thing though - Vince has a video on our Echo Lake weekend that is on his blog - it's about five minutes and tells about the history of that collaborative weekend. Here's the link:
Echo Lake Part 1