Fall 2015

Sweet Tea Garden

The object of this installation is a poetic expression of the unexpected. Through this art I can make visible the invisible, express alternative ways to think about things, and show multiplicities that play with our consciousness.

This piece is the irony that coexists in my world between the art of Zen mindfulness and the heredity of my Low Country culture. The balance of the two makes difficult things simple and poetic…a world worth thinking about and being open to.

I have been influenced by Xu Bing, who explains, “I think a good artist depends on whether he can find a balance between the artworks that he is doing and the times he is living in and how he can deal with that interaction.” He explains how he measures success. “Success to me depends on whether I can undermine our attachments to thoughts, ideas, concepts, theories, and text…to direct the audience to forms of awareness beyond these things.” See my blog on Xu Bing.

My other powerful influence is Ann Hamilton, who knows how to transform a space through minimal means into meaningful experiences. She explores the sensory and spiritual dimensions of our bodies with the spaces we inhabit, delving into ways of seeing and touching that are tactile and immediate as they are subconscious and invisible. See my blog on Ann Hamilton.

Sweet Tea Garden is being constructed to implicate the audience as active participants. To walk through this installation is to experience the influence that will amplify and extend consciousness in different meaningful ways.

I began with a sketch and reference materials to help guide me through this three-month extensive project. Thinking about this began last summer as I created the three mandalas. They were all products of meditation and mindfulness found in creating sand mandalas designed by Buddhist monks. I will present them lying flat on three standing desks I am building to replicate the tables used by the monks while making mandalas. See sketch to see where they stand in the Sweet Tea Garden. I am trying to visualize how I was going to make the prayer flags out of T-shirts I saw in a dream. A long line of white T-shirts lying on my 30-foot hall floor helped me determine the scale. The 20 long and 20 short sleeve white Ts were bought by the pound. I alternated the sleeve length to make the distance between the backs of the shirts perfect. Showing transition, I dyed groups of eight T-shirts in five colors each. Symbols on their backs represent specific prayers, or purposes. Each flag documented the wearer’s journey. (See part of the Lino cut on the shirt to the right). The combination will represent all of humanity, in much of the same way that a tassel uses all its individual strands to make one unit.

This week I finished the pieces I need for my “gateway” through the Sweet Tea Garden. My Fiat was used as a printing press. I inked the OSB, covered the board with canvas and blankets, then drove the car over it. The canvas was printed one tire width at a time. After they were printed and cut into 24 x 24″ pieces, I drove over them one more time to emboss the tire prints. [I haven’t decided, yet, whether to leave the embossed tire tracks,]. Finishing the canvas pieces required that bias tape be sewn around the edges and non-skid material added to the backs. By the end of the week, I had two sets of the T-shirt “prayer flags” finished and started carving the third Lino cut. The two I finished representing the ocean, implying rebirth and the cranes representing both long life and good fortune.

This week I turned my attention to the 6′ x 3′ bookcase I picked up at surplus. I started the design for the focal point; based on Xu Bing’s Background Story: Landscape Painted on the Double Ninth Festival, 2013 (see blog). I completed the scaled drawings and collected the materials to build out the “painting”. I sanded the 6′ x 3′ clear acrylic sheet with my rotary sander to get the “frosted glass” look. I completed two bindles by “ragging out” burlap and lining them with pastel cotton. There will be five bindles (found in the bottom right-hand corner of the initial drawing). I finished the third set of T’s; the parasols represent protection.

The first faculty critique is next Friday, and I’ve decided not to show any of the incomplete parts of the installation. I finished making the other three bindles, which completed the iconography I am using to show “baggage”. Professor Hans Mortensen and I have worked on our collaboration with this sculpture using augmented reality. I completed building the three standing desks by veneering edges on the natural tabletops and shelves and sanding all the parts. I completed the tabletops and shelves with three coats of polyurethane. I primed the bases and continued gathering natural plant material and drying it for the focal point of this project.

This week I finished painting the three standing desks for the mandalas and assembled them. I also finished one more set of T-shirts representing the gateway (the way to enlightenment) and started carving the last Lino. On Friday, we had our first faculty critique of the semester. I put together the bindles and added an old sample luggage (picked up at a garage sale) to convey the same thought I will enforce at the entrance to my installation. Leave Your Baggage at the Door deals with the concept that history happens in our life and baggage is how we judge that history. Baggage is a metaphor for carrying disappointments, wrongs, and trauma, which cause our heavy loads. By leaving your baggage at the door, you allow yourself to experience new opportunities and to know them for what they are. It allows you to live in the present moment, which is the ability to live in grace.

The collaboration with Professor Hans Mortensen went well. Through the augmented reality via the app DAQRI, the faculty could see the name of the installation, the concepts expressed in the piece, other artwork, and connect to my website. See the photo above to see the app in action.

I completed the last T-shirt set this week representing balance as Yin/Yang. All eight sets of five shirts were tacked together at the sleeves to give the illusion of prayer flags once they were strung onto clotheslines along the 16-foot gallery wall.
I harvested and dried more plant material. I harvested Spanish moss on the Moon River banks this week to be used as a major signifier of my low country heredity in my “landscape painting”. I cleaned the plants in the microwave to destroy the red bugs found in this epiphyte (air plant).
I constructed the base of the “painting” cabinet and attached the frosted acrylic to the bookcase.

I moved everything from my home workshop and studio to my studio on campus. Dropping one piece, I had to rebuild one of the standing desks. Luckily, everything else arrived safely.
I bought electrical lights, wiring, and other parts and drew the schematics for wiring the lights in the focus point. Then, I purchased the two 6′ poles for the prayer flags and drilled holes to run the clothes lines for the T’s. I painted the poles and rackets white to blend into the walls.

Nov 1, 2015

This week my focus turned to the Low Country Landscape “painting”. This literati painting has the feel of an ink painting but will involve the use of light and shadow cast onto natural dried material collected in the maritime forest on my island. Using Xu Bing as my total inspiration for this piece (see my blog and the photos of Background Story: Landscape on the Double Ninth Festival, 2013), I plan to replicate my experience with the low country; this focus piece will be my background story. We installed and wired six fluorescent lights in the bookcase part of the “painting”. I then installed it onto its base with wheels. The base is in the starting phase of being dressed in Luan. The remaining cabinet will have to be built in the gallery next week because of its gigantic size, 4’ x 10’.

Nov 8, 2015
On Tuesday, I moved the parts for the “literati painting” into the gallery and completed building the case on site. I then started playing with the dried material and figuring out how to “paint” the low country landscape by using light and shadows. At the end of the week, I was still trying to solve problems.
I brought in forty T-shirts and arranged them on clotheslines strung from one dowel to another to form a community of “prayer flags”. A balance between orderliness (as in a set of prayer flags) and randomness (as in the human community) was the goal.
I placed the “baggage” at the entryway to the installation.

As you can see from the photo above and from my original sketch, I edited out some pieces as I worked within the space allocated to me in the gallery. The photo above is the final presentation of the installation. Last Thursday, I defended this presentation and thus completed my 30-hour review with the graduate studio committee. They recommended I continue in the program as a candidate on track to complete the thesis portion of my MFA degree. So, my studio work will continue for another year and a half while I build a thesis topic defending my practice.