Third Semester Review
On October 27, I shared my progress with my thesis committee, followed by discussion. I have recreated the presentation here, with my spoken words below each slide.
Tonight I'm going to give an update on what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at,
what I’m making, and what I’m planning on making next.
To begin, what I’m thinking about.
I’ve been trying to figure out what my argument is. I think it has something to do with intersections: intersections of words and materials, of type and image, type as image, image as type.
Regarding that intersection of words and materials and type and image, I've been thinking about how materials can form and inform communication. How what material I make a word out of, and the process I use to make that word, is just as important as what the word says. It's the intersection of visual and verbal communication. The evocation of senses and associations that materials and processes carry is important to communication.
In my visual investigations I’m looking at the range of materiality from explicit to abstract. From very clear and obvious, on a sliding scale, to super abstract where the material loses its sense of itself. Where is that point where the material is no longer self conscious, and yields to the message? When does the material lose itself and transform into something else, like mystery meat?
And within that sliding scale, I'm observing how materials carry echoes through from each extreme. As they are translating and abstracted, they maintain a certain sense of themselves, but lose other parts of themselves. There are peaks and valleys to materials, aspects of them that hold out longer and stronger than the others, the weaker aspects that are washed away at the slightest flood. Trying to put my finger on that.
But why does any of this matter, besides that I am interested in this stuff, besides that materials and type and image make my heart beat? I think it gets interesting to other designers because there are aesthetic effects of working materially. I think we all wonder how to bring physical materials into the realm of the digital, and look for interesting ways of bridging the two. Many designers have a desire to involve the human body and the senses in our process and finished pieces. I think this is a timely topic and affects all designers. That is what the elective I am teaching in the spring is all about, Analog and Digital Synthesis. I'm promoting a method of working that involves the human body and senses, as a response to the CGI digital stuff we are overwhelmed with. I'm encouraging myself and my students to work beyond the container of the computer and interact with physical materials and analog processes.
I've tried to organize these ideas into questions...
and statements. So those are the ideas I’m trying to focus on
and make my visual investigations address, as of today.
With that in mind I've been looking at other artists who use words and materials together in interesting ways. Artists that work with words and materials or illusions of materials.
Painters like John Baldessari and Roy Lichtenstein, very literally using words as images on a canvas.
Bruce Nauman and his word games, many of them "performed" in neon. I love that the neon words make sound, or at least I imagine them to have that buzzing neon sound when you stand near them. The way the color of your skin may look different when standing next to the neon light. Neon incorporates time, illuminating in sequence.
Robert Rauschenberg, for turning the canvas into a 3d space, opening it up from a 2d frame. Using typography as visual form more than understandable language.
Jasper Johns, looking at typography as form through an artists eye, drawing typography in charcoal as if it was a sumptuous nude study.
Jenny Holzer. I love her work. Sometimes I wish the projections were more permanent. They can be turned on and off, they don’t really truly interact with the surface material. The BMW race car is always on, and is adhered to the surface.
Barbara Kruger. I love her visual consistency, the limitations she sets for herself in color and typeface, the amount of emotion she can communicate through great economy of means.
A ceramic artist, Stephanie DeArmond. I love that she’s taking type and using it as sculpture, at a large-ish scale. These pieces have a sense of permanence to them, because they have been through the firing process. They are study and resilient to that huge force of temperature they have sustained through multiple firings. I imagine they have weight to them when you pick them up, even though they are hollow.
Jack Pierson. His pieces work in 2d and 3d at the same type. Like I do with Bruce Nauman's work, I imagine the sound that the neon makes and the effect it has on the environment. The letters have very physical properties—they are containers, they have a texture and a residue. I imagine the rusty residue that would be left on my fingers if I were to touch some of these.
Skolos-Wedell, who I admire for their intensive process. Building 3d constructions and photographing them. Creating type out of wood and plastic and light and many other materials. I admire how they will often start with form and marry it with content later. I think working in that direction takes courage.
Another artist I admire for his process, Richard Serra. His work doesn’t have literal words in the finished pieces, but they are very much driven by words. Words are inspiration. When he first started working, he wrote a verb list—to cut, to chip, to weave, to join, etc. He "worked out pieces in relation to the verb list physically in a space." This gave him "a way of proceeding with his material in relation to body movement, in relation to making."
Ed Ruscha is one of my favorite artists. This is a book of stains, testing out different materials and what their stains look like on paper. Blood, ink, tea, etc.
I think those experiments are clearly related to his paintings. Evil is painted in blood. Optics is drawn as an illusion to a 3d form, out of gunpowder. Rancho and Annie are painted as illusions of liquid materials—a trompe l'oeil.
Ed Ruscha talks about words as objects. He says sometimes he doesn’t know if he is painting pictures of words, or painting pictures with words. I love that crossover—words as material, as object, and words as content. Words as art.
Sagmeister always comes up when you talk about making type out of non-type things. I appreciate his work quite a bit. In these images, I think it is interesting how he relinquishes much of his formal control to his materials. When he uses branches to make the word "good" at this scale, it's going to look a certain way—very branchy. These images feel more material-driven, and less typographic, to me than Ed Ruscha's work, for example. I think the materials take over, they become more powerful than the words.
When the words become handwriting, they move farther away from that crisp typographic form. Ed Ruscha, on the other hand, creates handmade works that still maintain a typographic feel. That point is interesting to me—where type is handmade, but has not deteriorated away from the sense of a typeface.
Those are some people and work that I'm looking at. Now I'll show you what I'm making.
The project I’m focusing on this semester is a series of visual investigations that are inspired by the book The Catcher in the Rye. After reading the book and many essays and reviews about it, I created a list of word pairs that encapsulate the most important themes of the book. I’m using these words both as content, and material, to make visual work. My investigations are essentially visual essays about The Catcher in the Rye. This project is an evolution of the more traditional book covers I was working on last year.
The first investigation uses the words memory and mummy. The reason being that the entire book is Holden re-telling stories from his recent and distant memory. He is in a mental institution in California, narrating three days of his life when he is on his own in New York City. This narrative is intertwined with memories from years earlier. Mummies are a symbolic part of the story. Holden visits a museum that houses mummies while he is in New York.
Mummy and memory are related symbolically. Memory is a mummy cloth, a form of protection that we wrap around people or moments to stop time. Memory exists in many layers. It is a form of preservation, yet deteriorates and rots away organically.
The first thing I did was incise the words memory and mummy into pieces of board, and layer them on top of each other.
I photographed each word from the front and the back, so I could create a transition between the very clear front and the more difficult to read back. This transition communicates the fading, deteriorating quality of memory and mummy.
Changing the color takes the material away from board, makes it less self-conscious and yields itself to the message of the word. The incision marks, layering, roughness, and missing pieces support the idea of memory/mummy I am trying to communicate.
Layering multiple shots on top of each other further emphasizes the mummy quality, and moves the image further away from the literal board material, using the aesthetic effects of the board without the distraction of the recognizable material.
I went through variations of this ...
exploring levels of density ...
variations of memory and mummy fading in and out of each other ...
and here taking it even further away from the original material with a very stark color change.
Another part of this mummy/memory investigation uses embossing. Rubbing paper over the letters that I cut out of those boards to create a raised surface.
The paper becomes a cloth that is draped over the letterforms, covering the words, the way that memory wraps around people and moments, stopping time, mummifying.
Changing the color again here, to take the material away form itself. The paper becomes inky, velvety, like dark water.
The third part of this investigation uses the board letters as stencils to layer pencil lines around, drawing many lines over each other, layering them up.
Another version of that idea, with a different kind of stroke.
And some close ups. In the left detail especially, the pencil lines wrap themselves around the negative space to form letterforms, another mummy-like action.
And in this last mummy/memory investigation, I am also using embossing, this time wrapping thin paper around the board letterforms many times and then rubbing. I’m using the process of wrapping to communicate the idea of mummy without the word mummy actually being present. The idea of mummy is communicated through the process and treatment of material, rather than being spelled out. I’ve applied the idea of mummy to the word memory.
Another view of this piece, the letter R unfolded. Because of the folding, wrapping action, the letterforms are repeated and reflected.
All of those mummy/memory pieces came from this simple set of cut cardboard letterforms. I really enjoyed the typographic feel that all of that work has,
the consistency. It is handmade, but not messy. The letterforms maintain a sense of order and cleanliness. I like the mix of messy and rough material with crisp typographic form.
The next investigation uses the words catch and meet. The relationship of catch and meet comes from the title of the book, The Catcher in the Rye. Holden is walking on the streets of New York and hears a kid singing the song by Robert Burns, Comin Thro the Rye.
The kid is singing the lyrics incorrectly. He sings, “if a body catch a body coming through the rye” when in fact the lyric is “if a body meet a body coming through the rye.” It’s a romantic song, but Holden sees it differently. Holden imagines kids playing in a field of rye near a cliff, and he sees himself catching the kids when they start to run near the edge of the cliff. He sees himself as the catcher in the rye, a savior of children, catching children from the fall from innocence into adulthood.
This mistake of catch for meet is important, because catch and meet imply very different feelings. Catch is about capturing and holding tight, while meet implies a sense of freedom. I wondered how could I treat the words catch and meet to express these different feelings visually.
I made a series of the word catch out of concrete and paper. The word is preserved in concrete, captured, embedded permanently in this hard and stiff material.
Then I started to photograph these pieces.
I combined them into 3-d collages. The words start to echo each other, shattering as if they were falling off a cliff.
Some compositions have the feeling of a voice reverberating, being yelled in a canyon.
I think this is the most successful version because it is the most contained, it feels the most captured. It has that echoey quality of sound bouncing, or something falling into water, the ripples of that force, but it's frozen in concrete.
Meet on the other hand needs to feel like freedom. It needs to be looser, to contrast catch. I used laserprints to create a series of monoprints. When I paint ink onto a laserprint, the ink will shy away from the area where the toner is and flow more easily onto the paper area. So this means that a laserprint makes a great plate for a monoprint.
I pressed these laserprint plates covered in ink onto paper. The ink is free and fluid, moving where it wants to as it meets the paper. It's messy.
Depending on the thickness of the ink I can make the word in positive form,
the thicker ink will stick to the toner area more.
Or I can make the word in negative form. The wetter the ink, the more it runs off the toner area and bleeds into the paper.
I started layering multiple prints on top of each other on one sheet of paper ...
seeing how repeating the words could bleed into each other.
I got some beautiful forms.
The printing plates themselves are also of value. These are the leftover laserprints after they have been pressed into the paper. They create a texture, a rhythm, have an ease that also reinforces the freedom of meet.
When the ink bled through the back of the laserprint, I was given another set of forms.
This inky, ghosty quality comes from the freedom of the ink to move through the paper and emerge on the other side. The opposite of Holden catching children and capturing them before they cross the line into adulthood.
The next investigation uses the word pair am and was. The whole book is Holden telling a story from the first person, and he is constantly losing track of tenses. Suddenly switching from past to present in the middle of thoughts, in the middle of paragraphs. I wanted to make a visual investigation that has to do with keeping track of tenses, past and present, so I chose to use the words am and was as content.
I created a patterns from the words am and was and printed them out on various types of paper. I created a supply of material for myself. Paper fabric.
And then I started cutting my material up, and piecing it back together.
Interrupting the patterns of words, the way Holden suddenly changes tenses in his narrative.
I think these collages have the disjointed quality that Holden’s narrative has.
The confused quality that you get when you hear a story told in a disjointed way, from multiple tenses.
I also think these collages reference the idea of past and present meshing and influencing each other, the way our memories are changed and brought up by what we experience in the present.
The idea of past and present as threads weaving in and out of each other.
The words intertwining at many scales, in many layers.
Some of these pieces are woven so they have a three dimensional quality to them.
Some are simple, and the legibility starts to deteriorate.
Others are much clearer.
I kept collaging until I used up all of my material and was left with a small pile of scraps.
As I was looking at the results, I was thinking about quilts and blankets. What would happen if these am/was forms were huge and warm and you could wrap them around you? What if you could wrap yourself up in the past and the present tenses of yourself? After all, memory is a form of protection. Memory is a cloth that we wrap around people and moments in time to protect and save them. To keep them warm.
I started cropping my work with the idea of quilts in mind.
So these would be initial designs for an actual quilt, a huge king-size quilt.
Quilts have the advantage of being reversible. One side could be predominantly present, one side could be predominantly past.
So I narrowed these collages down into essentially sketches for quilts, which I’m planning on choosing one of and actually making (eventually).
This one might be my favorite.
Or this one. It's the most abstract, but i still think you can find the A and the M in there.
I think what i’m doing with these quilt collages is clearly related to our rug designs.
And influenced by my love for the great quilting women out there: Gee's Bend quilters in Alabama, Denise Schmidt, and Nancy Crow.
In addition to the quilt plan, I wanted to try something else with these. I took one collage and translated it through different iterations of itself. I used this collage as a skeleton of form.
I started replacing areas of the collage with the actual text from The Catcher in the Rye.
Re-collage the collage.
I also translated the form into a print, using that same monoprint technique I used with meet.
I think this idea of shifting form through materials ties into the idea of shifting tense. The verb to be in past and present. Back and forth,
shuttling from one world into the other.
I love the deterioration that happens, while some words are still very legible.
Redrawing the collage freeform with ink.
Tracing with pencil.
Printing with a transfer marker.
And then looking at the reverse of all of these different materials. A simple change of color takes the transfer marker and turns it into an illusion of another material, chalk perhaps.
Here I'm letting the collage free by cutting the pieces out from themselves.
Layering multiple pieces on top of each other to get a peeling back effect, a 3d piece made from 2d layers.
With this series of work, I’m addressing a concept in The Catcher in the Rye, using meaningful content, but also engaging in a material and formal exploration. I'm watching how materials carry echoes of the structure of the collage form. When I change materials, the form is translated and abstracted, it maintain a certain sense of itself but loses other parts. What parts are strongest and weakest? The peaks and the valleys of a material? the peaks and valleys of a form?
And these forms have a future life, as possible quilts or posters or many other applications.
The next investigation uses the words stasis and motion. The book ends with Holden watching his younger sister Phoebe on the carousel in Central Park. She is in motion, going round and round on the carousel, but because it’s going around in a circle, she’s really in a state of stasis. This is a very important scene in the book because as Holden is watching this he’s realizing that he can’t prevent her from growing up. He's sort of coming to terms with the reality of time passing, of not being in control.
I made myself some rubber stamps, and started printing the words stasis and motion, tying them together by pulling the stamps to leave an ink trail, a residue connecting the two words. A visual pull between stasis and motion.
The material, the rubber stamps, stick to the page and create a vibration as I pull.
They resist the motion. They jump. They try to hold on to the paper, as Holden tries to hold on to moments.
I realized that i didn’t need to be printing the word motion to communicate the idea. Stasis is enough, because I am creating the word stasis through my body’s motion of pulling the stamps.
I printed many versions of these. Here’s one that is a little more playful
with round stamps instead of rectangular.
I’ll show you how I made these stamps. Remember the cardboard letters from the mummy/memory investigation? I really liked the consistency that those gave me, but the cardboard material was not very forgiving to deal with. So instead, I had a complete alphabet lasercut out of acrylic. I chose to use Din as my typeface, because it's not self-conscious. It is able to take on the flavor of the materials it lives in.
I used these letters to make molds. First I created walls.
I placed each letter into its own wall,
mixed up some rubber,
poured the rubber into the walls,
and let the material cure.
Now I have a group of flexible rubber molds that also work as stamps.
Those are some things I've been making. Now I would like to talk about what I'm planning next, and show you some unfinished work.
I’ve done a bunch of material tests that are awaiting application into a more finished idea. I plan to explore some of these deeper.
The first test is using my rubber molds to cast concrete type.
The wet concrete agrees with the rubber molds quite well.
My concrete letters pop right out of the molds, they are crisp and sturdy.
I would like to use these letters to create another investigation for The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not sure if that is going to be done through photographing the letters,
or combining letters in the molds themselves. This is a C that I’ve made first, let harden, then poured a wet H and inserted the C into the wet H so they are permanently attached to each other. Letters locked together. In the bottom right image, you can see the letters C and H in the shadow that the concrete structure makes.
Here I’ve taken concrete letters and poured black ink over them. The concrete absorbs the ink. Then I've placed the inked letters onto a soaking wet sheet of watercolor paper, so some of the ink is absorbed into the paper.
When the paper dries, I’m left with a watery, ghosty impression.
In this test I’ve filled a rubber mold with melted wax, let the wax harden and then popped it out. These letters can then be recombined and melted together with a heat gun.
Another test using clay, pressing it into the rubber molds.
I have many other materials waiting for me in my studio: resin, sugar, paper mache, various kinds of self-hardening clays. I can use my rubber molds to make type out of all sorts of different materials. I'll be able to melt letters, mix letters, smash and break letters, adhere letters, use letters to build structures, etc.
I could also use the acrylic letters themselves as stamps. They have a different quality to them than the rubber stamps, because the acrylic resists the ink it doesn’t pick up as much ink. The acrylic slides across the paper smoother, it doesn’t have the vibration quality that the rubber has.
I’ve also been getting to know plaster. This is single drops of ink dropped into wet plaster. The ink spreads out on the watery surface, and then dries in place as the plaster sets.
This is a test forming plaster around balloons to get curved, cupped forms.
Here I'm combining plaster and paper together. Hardening pages of The Catcher in the Rye by submerging them in wet plaster, forming them, and then letting them dry in place.
The pages take on a fragile, dusty quality. You can no longer turn them, they are stuck.
I’ve made a few tests out of cut paper. Here I'm trying to create a net out of the words catch and meet.
Another test, this is a single piece of folded paper that twirls. You’re seeing four different views of the same piece. As you twirl it you can start to see the words Holden and hold on.
In this paper test, incising lines around the acrylic letter, than taking the acrylic letter away so the letterform is created out of these cuts in the paper.
I think this one gets really interesting when i manipulate the color, and the letter Z here emerges from the darkness. It's no longer paper.
And finally a test here starting to combine some of these images digitally. I think this is really important to explore, bringing this handmade stuff into the container of the computer, merging the two ways of working together. The crisp contrasting the organic. The illusion of materials in a reproducible, two-dimensional surface. Honesty in the way the images were made—they were actually built, not photoshopped.
I have all those material tests, ideas of things to make, and I have some more word pairs. Holden/hold on and real/ideal. Also, I would like to make more iterations of the first four word pairs. That's what I'm planning on doing next.
To try and sum it up, what is the point?
The artist/sculptor Louise Bourgeois said, "I am not what I am. I am what I make with my hands." I think the underlying theme to all of this work is that I want to be making things with my hands. I am a designer but also a maker. There’s a difference between the two.
Using analog processes and tools like collage and ink and scissors and plaster infuses a feeling of making into digital, reproducible output, that I can then combine with the slickness of the computer into graphic design objects.
One of my design crushes Hella Jongerius says "perfection is macho." I really appreciate that sentiment. The imperfection in making things with my hands is what I’m drawn to. It releases and frees me from the perfection in the computer, from the lack of surprise. Handmade images can then be re-combined with that perfection in the computer. This relationship is interesting to me.
Obviously this is relevant to my own process, but I also think it’s relevant to any designer working today. We all have to balance ourselves between the container of the computer and the physical world. I think working with materials and with my hands and with type is really exciting not just to me, but to many other designers.
So that’s where I am as of today. What do you think?