Vessel #1 (Dad)
This is the first completed piece in a series of vessels. The original idea came from my notion to produce sculptures based on drawings I’ve been making since I was about 18. The drawings are intuitive but basically consist of vessels with things sticking out of them. These pieces are unplanned and a cohesive arrangement forms out of whatever weird things emerge from my pen on paper. There are consistent elements such as pipes, tentacles, and body parts that repeat from one drawing to the next. The drawings feel like pure creative output to me as they were made without concern for a space to exist and I started making them at a time when I wasn’t influenced by the art world or an artistic career. Revisiting them feels like an opportunity to collaborate with a different version of myself and the drawings themselves read to me as puzzles I left for my future self to resolve. The collaboration transcends the limits of linear time as there is a back and forth between the past and present self. Additionally, I imagine my future self will have an opportunity to reinterpret down the road.
This first completed vessel in the series is not actually the origin point. I began work first on a different vessel by collecting materials, constructing parts, and taking notes as ideas came to me. I was following the intention of interpreting the original drawings into 3d sculptures, but I was also intuiting details and allowing for reinterpretation and invention along the way. The process felt very intuitive as if the sculptures wanted to be created and I was there to translate them from the imagined reality where they already existed into the concrete reality in front of me. I was also reading a lot about the UFO phenomenon and this felt like an integral piece of the puzzle. There was a motherly quality to the original vessel and I began making an association between searching for my own biological mother and my relationship to UFO’s which was reflected in the creation of this piece. I started describing what I was working on as “Quest for the Feminine”.
At some point it became clear that the notes and materials I had amassed were describing more than one vessel and it was actually a different vessel I was supposed to make first. The Quest for the Feminine vessel came to represent a mother figure and it was birthing other vessels before allowing itself to emerge. As I shifted my focus to the vessel that would become the first completed piece in the series, I realized it was about my dad, or my notion of my dad. And as I physically put it together, it emerged that it actually represents a more complicated idea as it takes from notions of my dad who raised me, my biological dad whom I have never met in person, and myself (a dad as well). The piece is about the connections and space between these ideas, these entities.
The materials are specific, but don’t require an interpretation by the viewer that is exactly in line with my own. The symbols bounce between universal, personal, and intuitive. The narrative described by the sculpture is about searching, surprise, and the absurd, but it is grounded in very real, recognizable objects and nods to an extremely earthly creation point with almost elemental materials like a tree trunk and metal pipes. It was formed out of a time that is not linear and operates with rules based both in reality and absurdity. It is in large part made up of visual references to the UFO phenomenon and reflects the hyper-object nature of that phenomenon with its inconsistencies that are strangely cohesive and it’s existence as both solidly real but also completely interpretable by the viewer.