VSC Day 5: Bubbles and Herpes

On Monday afternoon I took a short jaunt to Johnson, VT’s local hardware store to order a sheet of plywood. (They deliver to the studio’s for free..!) I saw some neon twine and bought it on an impulse. Later that evening I was feeling incredibly restless, so I grabbed some scrap metal, painted some of it neon orange and paper-clipped it together, and folded the rest into crude geometric shapes. Perhaps like a spider frantically spinning a new web after the old one had been destroyed, I threw up a three dimensional interpretation of some paintings I have been working on.

A friend of mine is interested in commissioning a painting from me, so rather than crankin’ something out that isn’t really related to my professional interests, I decided to develop some ideas. They are essentially spatial studies/excercises, and are tied closely to processes I use in the sculptural/object-making side of things.

And with my recent Sci-fi infatuation I had some ideas of objects I wanted to work on during this residency. The pyramid was an accident that occurred while cutting pieces of wood at the wrong angle, but I decided to finish it anyway. The sphere is a study of a 20-sided shape, the icosahedron. Adhering to the lo-fi construction techniques, and really having no idea how I would clamp the damn thing up, I chose between sewing it or notching it together. Glue is for sissies. The pedestal-looking thing is a study of the vertices of the icosahedron, and the orange, shiny column of stacked triangles are badges for the crew of my space ship.

Lastly, in a triumphantly accidental study on geodesic shapes, I filled a plastic cup up with water, dropped in some water color pigment, and stuck a hose connected to an air pump into it. After letting it bubble for a little while, while I was in fact blowing bubbles, I decided to pour some of the soapy bubble-blowing solution into the water.

It was a great reminder that there is nothing high-tech about geodesic domes. As a matter of fact, the icosahedron shape is the same shape as the herpes virus, and some curiously strong hint’s of it are found in the shape of the space-aged equipment that NASA sent to the moon during the Apollo missions.

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