My Turn

I haven’t really settled back into turning since my return, because I am busy moving into a new studio. As wonderful as my current situation has been since I began turning, it’s time to make a change. I did enjoy the companionship of sharing a workshop with other turners this summer, and I’m going to try it for a while longer. A good friend who is also a turner has offered to share her studio, and I’m excited about the synergistic possibilities.

The timing of the move seems right. Moving is always a cleansing process, and coming off of this summer, the cleansing feels apropos. I’m beginning by sorting through my huge store of wood, determining what is worth moving and what to throw out. I shipped wood back from Philadelphia too, my beloved pear and some holly, and I’m eager to make the physical and mental space for it.

My work flow will be entirely different too, as it was in Philadelphia. It is a chance to reimagine and reorganize everything. My lathe has been against a wall, somewhat blocked in. Now it will be freestanding, with room to move around it, allowing me, I hope, to work more fluidly. And many of the tools I have will be more accessible because they will all be in one place.

I’ll keep you posted on how the reimagining goes, and maybe have some pictures next time.

I went hiking in the desert today for the first time in almost three months, and I finally feel like I made it back home.

The desert is as green as I’ve ever seen it, deeply so. The prickly pear are ripe. Fishhook barrel cactus are blooming. Creosote blossoms are turning to their woolly fruit. The whiptail lizards, even the spotted whiptails, are huge—12 inches and longer—and more numerous than I’ve ever seen. No bobcat or deer or javelina tracks along the trail, but in the underbrush, cottontails and chipmunks and round-tail ground squirrels and white-wing doves.

The summer monsoons must have been heavy. Not only is everything deeply green and lush, but half of one of our usual trails has been erased by a new flood, and other trails are overgrown. Sabino Canyon Creek is running strong. A fecund season. So much life to come home to.

A poem from before I left:

Ocotillo aflame

Blooms lick the sky.
Limbs stretch and sway,
lit,
longing.

All the ITErs were asked to write artist statements for the exhibition. I have asked for copies of everyone’s statements from the Wood Turning Center and will post them as soon as I get them. In the meantime, here is mine, expanded from a previous statement, published on my website:

Simple and sensual, my work is about form and substance, containment and expression, the interplay between lift and mass.

As an art medium, wood is unique in that it once lived, and lived long, rooted in the earth, formed as much by the tree’s own life force as by the external forces acting upon it. Wood can be treated as an inert material; it can be cut, carved, colored, bent, planed, pulped; like any other medium, an artist can impose on it whatever form and texture its physical nature will allow. But like a human face, its deepest beauty lies in its record of survival, in its singularity of being, and if an artist chooses to address that aspect of its nature, then the treeness of the wood, that original life energy, can live on in the made object. This is what I try to achieve in turning—to approach the wood as one vessel of energy to another and to make of that interaction a literal vessel.

The quality that I strive to achieve in each turning is presence.

I believe that an object made so, with reverence for its source, retains the spark of that source. Such objects when held or beheld can remind us of our connection to the numinous and the material, the spirit and the earth, a healing connection that grounds us and elevates us and restores us to the whole.

For me, the ITE has been precisely about healing, about transforming brokenness, integrating it into the beauty of the whole. In the work I have produced here, this has involved playing with brokenness in many forms: sometimes deliberately breaking the surface or the wall of a vessel, sometimes working with an existing break, sometimes responding to an accidental break. In various pieces, I have used the brokenness as a feature, exaggerated a break, excised breaks, mended breaks. In the process of this work, I have been transformed by the ITE, both artistically and personally, and I expect the exploration I have begun here to continue for a long time to come.

Saturday, August 4, the Wood Turning Center had a members’ meeting and lunch, which Jean-François, Peter, Sean, Siegfried, and I attended, followed more in-depth gallery talks by each of us. That marked the official end of this year’s ITE and the last time we were all together as a group.

Afterward, Jean-François, Sean, and I headed off to Jane’s house for a celebratory dinner, while Siegfried and his wife, Gudrun, went to Phil and Monika Hauser’s, and Peter went to play with friends.

Siegfried and Gudrun left Philadelphia on Sunday, August 5, I believe, for three weeks or so of travel in the U.S. before they return to Germany. Sean flew home on Monday, August 6. I spent Monday cutting and packing wood to ship back to Arizona (mainly my beloved pear and a holly tree I acquired the day before, thanks to Jane), then headed off to New Jersey for a week at the shore with my partner and her family. Jean-François’s wife, Marie-Claude, arrived Tuesday, August 7, for a few weeks’ visit, mostly in the Philadelphia area, most of which they spent as guests and then housesitters at Jane’s. I believe they will be returning to France this weekend.

And that’s how the ITE ended, folks.

But as Albert likes to emphasize, the ITE isn’t just an experience; it’s a beginning. So stay in touch. I’m sure there will be plenty more to come from each of us.

The opening was a tough night for me. My vertigo was very bad, and it was all I could do to stay upright and smiling, so most of the photos below were taken by Jane, and I can’t tell you a lot about the events of the night. Vince’s films were screened, as was my video of the artists talking. Each of the ITErs talked about his or her experience, and each of us signed a plaque from a Stubby lathe that the Wood Turning Center (WTC) is raffling off in October. Also signing the plaque were Jane, Gus, Fleur Bresler, and other WTC board members.

After the opening, the WTC staff, the ITErs, and several esteemed guests (chiefly the WTC board members) went out for a celebratory dinner at the Pub restaurant, courtesy of the WTC. Elisabeth couldn’t be with us, as she had to leave town right after the opening, but the rest of us had a good time letting down and letting go.

The morning of Friday, August 3, we made one last field trip, to see one of the largest pipe organs in the world, the Wanamaker organ, right in the heart of Philadelphia, at what is now Macy’s. Our guide was Scott Kip, who had substituted for Jane as shop supervisor for a week while she was on vacation and whose day job is working on restoration and maintenance of the organ. It was a fascinating visit, one I would recommend to anyone in Philly.

Here is the facade of the organ. None of these are working pipes. The actual organ is housed behind the facade, spread over seven floors.

Charlie Brown was visiting Macy’s at the same time, for some kind of anniversary.

Every one of the nearly 29,000 individual pipes of the organ can be played from this console. (Every note of every simulated instrument is a separate pipe.)

Some of the variety of pipes that make up the organ. Material, length, diameter, and other factors create the tone of each pipe. Each pipe must be tuned separately.

The organ depends on an extensive network of wooden channels that move the air that make the pipes sound.

This is truly an awesome instrument. I wish I could convey how amazing it was to see how it operates—and then to hear it played. There are daily concerts at noon and, I think, at 5 p.m., so check it out for yourself if you can.

Tuesday and Wednesday, we mostly spent cleaning up the shop. What a mess we had made! We swept up bags and bags of shavings and scraps and dust. And we had to sort through all of the tools and equipment and materials to separate what belonged to the Wood Turning Center and what belonged to the university. We also went to the Wood Turning Center to turn in our artist statements and corrections for the labels and to check out the installation. I had one piece, called “In Her Dream,” that required special installation, as you can see below. The shadows in the photos are distracting, but I’m really pleased with how the piece and branch seem to float.

I also videotaped Sean, Siegfried, Jean-François, and I talking about the work and our ITE experience, which I later turned into a Quicktime movie. I lack the software here to convert it into a format suitable for uploading, but I will continue working on that. It is available for viewing at the Wood Turning Center.

Thursday evening, August 2, all of us except Lesya—Peter came in from New York a day early, and Elisabeth pulled herself away from the museum—met with Albert at the Wood Turning Center. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss what single piece represented for each of us our ITE experience. The Wood Turning Center was acquiring a piece from each of us for its permanent collection, and the input from us would be considered in determining what those pieces would be.

To backtrack a little, Jean-François, Siegfried, Sean, and I had met individually with Albert on the previous Sunday to discuss our ITE experience and the work we had produced. Speaking for myself, it was an enlightening conversation. Talking through my pieces chronologically with Albert helped me see my experience as a whole for the first time. The conclusion I reached in that conversation was that there were two pieces that represented my experience—“Offering,” the first spouted vessel I turned, and “Learning to Cope: Pear Incognito under a Mantle of Cherry”—and I leaned toward the latter as the ultimate choice.

The purpose of the meeting wasn’t for each of us to say what piece we would choose for ourselves, but to hear what everyone else would choose for us—that is, to hear how our fellow ITErs perceived our work and our experience. The discussion was fascinating. It was a challenge to look objectively at each other’s work, to set aside our personal preferences and look at the work in the context of the individual artist.

Being away from the rest of us gave Elisabeth and Peter interesting perspectives. In particular—though perhaps not surprisingly, given her training—Elisabeth seemed to see each of us the most clearly.

Some of our views were widely divergent to begin with, but in the end, we seemed to reach consensus on everyone. For me, the piece everyone settled on was the cloaked pear bowl, and that is the piece the Wood Turning Center did acquire. I hope that the Wood Turning Center will indicate on their site which pieces were acquired for each of us, because in the blur of the opening, I didn’t register what they were for the others.

Tuesday evening, July 31, after a day spent cleaning the shop, we drove to New Jersey for a nice, relaxed, and tasty dinner with Phil and Monika Hauser. Phil is vice president and treasurer of the Wood Turning Center and is himself a turner. Phil and Monika are Swiss, so Siegfried had a good time speaking German for a change. Phil also generously gave us some chunks of coolibah to take home and turn.

Lesya ended up doing dances with one of Sean’s pieces, one of mine, and Peter’s chainsawn bench. Sean, Siegfried, Jean-François, and I also participated in the dance with the bench, with Lesya directing us from the sidelines. Vince filmed all of the dances on Saturday, July 28, and the finished videos were shown at the opening and are available for viewing at the Wood Turning Center throughout the “allTURNatives” exhibition.

I have embedded the finished videos here. They can also be found on Vince’s website. If the embedded video does not appear below, click here to view the videos on YouTube.

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Well, I’m finally back to wrap up my documentation of the ITE. Reentry has been a challenge—more about that perhaps in a later post—and between the time lapse and my vertigo, my memory of some things is a bit blurred. But the photos aren’t. So I apologize for the delay, but I hope you enjoy the posts that follow.