I’ve just finished installing my solo museum exhibition of all-new sculptural works— including a huge experimental immersive site-specific sculpture. And the whole experience has offered boatloads of my favorite aspect of being a visual artist: creative problem-solving.
And now I need some naps.
If you’ve been following along over the last year (especially via my instagram account or my Tiktok account), you will have seen lots of videos of the process.
I’ve made a separate page about the behind-the-scenes process of making the huge stitched sculpture so I won’t go over it again here. But suffice to say it’s been a true adventure and worth all the blood, sweat and tears. Not a lot of blood in volume, more in quantity of times stabbing myself with sewing needles (way more than I do with felting needles).
Spending time in the pink glow next to my trusty scissor lift. So glad I had access to the scissor lift.
I embarked on this adventure of making a monumental industrial felt sculpture as a means to see if I could go bigger with my concepts, to make the experience a full-body affair. All of my material knowledge and construction techniques and hands-on practice up to that point told me that I probably could, but I had one year to get a lot done without any guarantee of the results. It’s scary and exciting and it’s what keeps me coming back to sculpture. I like being on the knife-edge of using my unusual materials to create meaningful embodiments of ideas, sensations, and complicated emotions. It’s a lovely blend of the logical and emotional parts of my brain and body and hands, plus what comes out of it tends to be objects that sometimes resonate with other people.
Foreground: ‘Vessel’ at the Triton Museum of Art.
Besides the immense stitched sculpture I was also committed to a gallery full of freestanding and wall-based sculptures that would also push me in challenging directions with my use of pigment and reflected light. Deadlines are key in life, aren’t they? Having a set timeline and sharing it with others can be the push that gives you that extra bit of courage to, say, use an airbrush to apply (permanent) pigment to a sculpture you’ve spent fifteen hours shaping already… never mind that you’re new to using an airbrush, and it’s a temperamental one at that. But if nothing else, I maintain faith in myself to solve my creative problems, even though I’m creating those ‘problems’ myself.
‘Bowery,’ an experiment in translucency and airbrushing pigment.
Fresh in my mind is, of course, the act of installing the stitched columns of undulating felt forms. I’ve already taken the excellent advice of making notes for next time while I remember everything.
Here are my biggest takeaways from making a HUGE piece for the first time:
Expect for things to take longer than you expect. I worked hard to front-load my working schedule and boldly take each step without spending days or weeks second-guessing myself. I think it may be kind of like that ‘fail fast’ concept in tech: I tested parts quickly and moved along, realizing there were some things I just wouldn’t know yet, but I’d need time later to deal with the unknowns.
Be flexible in your plans as you gather more information. After some tests I had predicted that the felt would behave in particular ways thanks to its density and firmness and the way I stitched pieces to each other. In reality I ended up having to embed more structure onsite: metal wire ‘ribs’ stitched in key areas to open out the curtain-like forms. It was a bit disappointing yet enlightening to learn how much the weight of felt over sixteen feet of distance would affect the shapes, but now I have visceral knowledge for next time.
Mock up as close to reality as possible. I was able to hoist my full-size stitched columns up their full 16 feet in the hallway outside my studio, but could only do one at a time. That meant I wouldn’t know how they might work together until I was onsite. In future it would be ideal to be able to prepare more fully, but available space is, of course, never a given.
Accept that you can’t control everything, and compromise. The intensely bright fluorescent pink paint I sourced for the wall behind the hanging sculpture was ideal in terms of color. It was less then ideal to apply to the wall. The paint was incredibly thin, translucent, and watery so at first it showed clearly the path of the roller used to apply it, and the drips that accumulated. After seven(!) coats applied with rollers and no real improvement I came up with the approach of sponging a few layers of paint on to create an evenly uneven mottled effect. It’s likely that most visitors won’t even notice the paint on the wall, as it’s the reflected pink light that steals the show. But it felt good to find a way to make things better through accumulated artmaking techniques.
Know when to stop. I could have probably kept adding metal ribbing to the sculpture for several more weeks to get a smoother, stretched effect. But at some point you have to make peace with the nature of the beast, and I must admit that the folds and drooping in some areas— the effect of gravity— are a lovely metaphor for the same effect on the human body. May we all come to accept and even appreciate our imperfections.
Get help with big jobs. I was a bit overwhelmed at first to work on something so large that I would lose sight of it all by getting up close to work on it. I had to use a scissor lift and work on only one side at a time, then get down and take a look from across the room. Happily, I had a very skilled helper in my fellow artist Amy Brown aka who helped me over several days. Next time I would recruit help sooner and do more delegation- although in this instance I was learning on the job in the moment, so delegation was often impossible. The museum’s curator Vanessa and preparator Bryan were also incredibly helpful in facilitating the successful installation, so perhaps the caveat to ‘get help’ is to make sure it’s also good quality help!
Fellow San Jose artist Amy Brown is a whiz with a needle.
All told, I will absolutely keep making things up as I go, learning, and creating objects and experiences that have never existed before. A lot of life is in how you frame it: “what am I learning from this” vs. “why is this so hard!?” It’s worth it to keep accumulating useful and interesting skills and ideas. That’s what makes me feel most alive. What about you?