I’ve grown a habit of only writing in ridiculously short spats, mostly through pads of the thumb to the phone’s Notes app, so that sentences are always jarred from their context and belly up. This way I can mix the words in among other material practices, other insolvencies, urging a thought to phase-shift into a wiping of surfaces, a sculpture, a way of putting the pillowcases on.
The sculptures are the real enablers of this habit– heavy things so far from writing, all form and dimension, nothing but presence– they lure me in with the promise of new geometries to think in. With a spool of greenyellow string I’ve been tying knots around pieces of stuff I’ve collected on walks in creek beds, years of rocks and rusts I’ve decided were mine. From a scaffold of found metals I’ve dripped these clotted strings– these strands tangled with aesthetic compulsions, my encounters with a Good Find, with a something that made me want. This compositional practice pulls a thought out beside itself, hardens it into my grip, coils it with excess and weight, throws it into tension, into gravity, to the edge of a snap.
The sculptures are a lithic and plastic assemblage, a trashy geo-riparian techné, a composition made of weight tensed into a float, and a question about the technicity of a useless ensemble. They’re what happened in some spent-up dawns.
While working I’ve been touching things in new ways, getting sensitive to weight in my palms, getting choked up around the fingernail by thin string and wire. Going looped. Pulling tight around all these things I’ve wanted, stitching them together, letting them fall.
Each strand is a sentence-like thing on the vertical, hung together into sequence the same way words I’ve held in my neck for many years sometimes get expelled into my present as I adhere them to one another or a page. Snared in the mechanics of the knot, lines turn long and conjunctive. In writing or in sculpting, form is imposed by some mash of a method, some way built of propensities and whims, impulses towards movement and relation.
I take a sentence in my mouth and spit its body out and string it together through my fingers and release.
The things I had wanted (beautiful rocks, beautiful words) had been stuck deep in my throat and the creases of my room, congealed still into the pure and stagnant desire-forms of ‘stuff’ and ‘idea’. Accumulating dust and giving me a cough. A real slog, really heavy in the body.
It’s taken this pulling apart of writing and context to wear a want or a thought into something thin and transparent, something bared in its simplicity, something creased into clarity by certain effort and specific pulls. A lace of inky swags, a delicate stitch. A precarity held up by working knuckles. With this new method of expulsion I’m getting it out through the fingers, through the nails, which knock back and forth between a sticky keyboard and this lot of stringy stuff. It’s a transversal method, a gesture sustained between media, spraining a sentence into a perfect harmless fragment and a string into a hooped spine. It’s a method happening through the hands, which have taken on new crooks and calluses, unfit now for long planar tasks.
It’s a method of prying stuff out of the world and sitting it into stuttering ligatures. Of coping with abundance, with bad arrangements. Of being hell bent things need agitating. Of sifting out a form from the tangled and crowded tenderness of a collector or a writer. Composed of doubt and urge strapped together into enduring pulls, these patchwork lines hum of process and pinch. It’s a thing I could almost move to, the stilted buzz of it on the psyche.
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