Jackbird Arts

Dies Mars
Luna wx 94%v

I remember the day, the moment when I dug in and said NO.

When I looked at felt through all the things I had chosen to do with the time I had had so far, and wrenched myself away from the judgements WASTE OF TIME, WORTHLESS, LIVING IN FANTASYLAND, POINTLESS, CRAZY and said FUCK NO…I’ve done things in my life and seen things and know people the likes of which 99.9 percent of the population never will. Fuck, they make movies and write books about people like me. My road has been windy, sideways, and unique. My needs and goals have drastically changed, but that signifies the completion of a path not the devaluation of it.

I remember the day when I picked up the disk and it was HEAVY. For a long time. So heavy I got so depressed I couldn’t leave the house or eat properly and thought frequently that maybe I’d be better off dead. I also remember what it was like before picking it up. It was better to pick it up, though it had FAILURE and WORRY written all over it.

I remember listening to a coworker on a touring show go on and on about how anyone who doesn’t own a house (like she did) is stupid and basically a loser, and how bad that hurt and how deeply that went in. Ditto for rants about people without college degrees. Or “real” jobs. They only wounded me so deeply because somewhere inside, I agreed.

That sort of thing would now only piss me off and make me all the more determined to dig in and do my work. “Dig in” is the perfectly appropriate way to put it, too. The part that needed addressing wasn’t the worth of my doings but the reckoning with the reality of the World, with the way things work in the material.

I remember being told no, I can’t go to school like I had hoped. Which at first felt like the punitive voice of God saying “you fucked it up the first time when you didn’t know what you were doing, and now you don’t get to go when you really want to”. I may never be able to walk in through the front door like everyone else seems to get to do. But I’ll be damned if that will stop me. And the right people keep showing up, and a way to keep going to the school even if I’m not “in” school is found. And if not that, some other way. Fuck you, God.

I also remember the day that the pilot light came back on. It’s a complete mystery why it did, and though that lamp is in a camp I travel away from now, the important thing is that it did come back on.

I remember the day I learned what the names of the sphinxes pulling the chariot are, that big ol’ fixed square in the kerubic signs in my chart, the parts of me that keep me forever in the doorway and never quite passing through. The parts that seemingly at best immobilize me and at worst pull me all apart. Like that librarian. It was a good piece of time between knowing their names and being able to coordinate them in actuality to make the whole thing move. But now it’s a wheel.

I remember leaving that piece I made in the Museum exhibit, with the fake tag and artists ID, and I remember the Museum giving me the six of hearts in return. Literally.

And now the whole balance is still fragile, any number of things could happen to blow these things I’ve built away, tender and green as they still are. My heart still teeters on the edge of doom and despair even while I’m breathing the air of the rare heights for the first time. I can’t help but be afraid of the great motions going on on the world and my country (though I have to admit that I have a little instinct that being well-set up materially is no guarantee that a person will come out of this one allright, so maybe I didn’t completely mess up by not having that already).

But I can stand with that.

I am a needle of many Norths,
A kingdom of many Kings
I know where my holy places are,
And where to go for refuge.

I fear the wastelands, but I keep going.

V.I.T.R.I.O.L.

Dies Luna
Luna wx 26%v

Have of necessity been going back and forth between 2d and 3d work, probably for the first time -effectively- ever. Finding that I need a bit of a buffer activity between the two kinds of action. Beyond the physical clutter & space issues associated with a back and forth, there is a distinct difference in mindset and operation that at least at this stage, are not compatible in the same space (the same tabletop).

I can’t be physically sawing or cutting or otherwise working on a piece while stopping to sketch or draft. Necessary to do like operations all together-

Ex. today: morning, 2d work for PNP transfers, design begun for 3rd box, more image refinement for six-wings pendant.
buffer: to kinkos for more image refinement, cook dinner, clean kitchen, poke around on the computer\
this evening: saw work for demo ARARITA ring, sawing and filing of sides & lid of 2nd bronze box, cut new locket base from brass tubing, practice rivets if time
buffer before sleep: watch some episodes of City of Vice with T, read in automata book.

Stages, 2d:

The design (sketching) stage done with very few tools- sketchbook, pencil, eraser. maybe a straightedge, but lines are almost always freehanded at this point. Can be done just about anywhere- coffeeshop, home, work. Mental/psychic aperture wide.

The variations and blueprint stage: needs to be done at a clear, clean table with good movable lighting. Home studio. Need above plus mechanical pencil & sandpaper, straightedge, triangles,compass. Sketches are scaled and redrawn, retraced, and redrawn again until all necessary variations are gone through. From the several variations one master is chosen. The master is recopied once more and inked if necessary, final adjustments and minute improvements made by hand as the copying happens. Mental/psychic aperture narrows.

The patternmaking stage: Selected blueprint master is hand copied onto tracing paper. Master parts on tracing paper are affixed to material for a cardstock/cardboard mock-up or the final materials for the actual object. The pattern will of course be destroyed in the fabricating, but as long as there’s a still a master on file, no worries. Screw up, just make another one. Mental/psychic aperture narrowly focused.

Copying is done by hand and preferably all in one session or on the same day. Xeroxing is possible, but hand copying improves drawing skills and leaves me with no worries about whether the line will be “alive” or not. Also, xeroxing onto tracing paper more often than not jams the machine due to its slipperiness and thinness. Vellum is too expensive to be a throwaway material. Regular white paper obscures the edges too much when cut, and gums up/dulls the saw too quickly.

Reckon the materials with the design via the pattern- once cut and fit it will be clear whether the design works.

– BUFFER – THE DIVIDE-

3d processes vary widely depending on materials, but the mental/psychic aperture progression reverses the above in stages, where initial bridge between 2d and 3d maintains very tight focus and once form is established in the material as a viable, working piece aperture opens out somewhat.  As space is created in the object and gesture/rhythm of pattern becomes apparent and firm, the piece itself has more to say about what it is/will be. Active/passive relationship of artist and created shifts more and more the nearer to completion the operation gets.

All phases of work require that I be alone, or at least not be expected to engage in conversation with others.

phase one/2d – Head leads, body following its instructions to mechanically generate sketches & drawings on paper.

phase two/3d -Body leads, acting on materials to effect spatial & formal changes, head following. Mind as sentinel of attention continually drawing actions back to conform with design as well as mediating messages from the material itself, facilitating necessary adjustments.

The alternation of thes two parts of the self within the two phases “warms” the heart and produces a third thing essential to viable, living works.

Dies Saturnus
Luna wn 92%v

Having a little difficulty in choosing the sequence of the various cube nets for Number 32. Which in consideration uncovers information that jumps back and prompts a revision of the original premise/conceptual elements. Was settled and comfortable with there seemingly being only ten possible nets, ten possible ways to unfold a cube. Upon further examination, there are eleven. Both are accurate, but what are the defining restrictions, the qualifiers for each? What is the difference between the world where there are ten ways and the world where there are eleven? And upon learning that, which do I then use?

Oh, how I hate to have to revisit an earlier premise to re-examine a foundational part of a piece I already thought I had a good deal figured out about! But necessity dictates…

The difference in the query is: how many ways can it unfold in actual 3-d cube-space rather than how can you slide the squares around once it is already unfolded in the 2-d. If actual unfolding, then there are eleven legitimate ways it can happen without completely severing and reattaching any square (thus moving it through another plane temporarily, “cheating” :). If rearranging an already flattened cube, only ten.

Interested in actual unfoldings rather that rearrangement. So back to the drawing board. leave the question of sequence for later.

some clues as to what this piece will touch on:
-The relationship between the six and the ten.
-What part motion and mutation play in that (the eleven)
-Paradox of stability vs. movement within the element of earth
-The path light takes through matter.
-Stacked/layered visual images that illustrate a variety of manifest form (multiplicity of the different shapes of cube nets). These images all  made with negative space in the matter (“holes”)

some facts:
-The cube nets are all 3 wide by 4 long.
-There is no standard starting point- the unfolding may begin by a division of any edge, any one square may be the one that doesn’t move in any particular unfolding (there is always one that doesn’t move and five that do)
-When layered on top of one another, there is no “window’ of cube square openings straight through all of the layers. To trace a path through all of the layers, that path has to wind, to deviate somewhere.
-When finally lashed together, all of the layers will move slightly will not be in a fixed position directly over one another. Though a perfect alignment is possible, it would occur only briefly, occasionally (non-static).
-There are many, many reflected right angles and two tapering planes that become two loops (the band that wraps around the finger)
-It will resemble a tower, albeit a wiggly one.
-Am going with the all-copper construction over the alternating layers of copper and brass. Seems more right at this point.

Dies Saturnus
Luna wn 92%v

“However, nets are not quite as simple as the diagram in Figure 3 suggests. Strictly speaking, a net requires instructions concerning which edges on the boundary of the polygon that forms the net are to be pasted together.”

– from Unfolding Polyhedra by Joseph Malkevitch (CUNY)

If all you are given to begin with is a net like the image on the right, where do you get the instructions, where do they come from? Are they QBL, “received”  or are they hunted and captured directly? (& ultimately is there really a difference?)

If I had possession of the shape the lines of the cuts of the particular edges make, like a sigil in 3-d, I might could figure out the instructions. It would be a like a little deformed pipe-cleaner animal, but it would be a key.

Sometimes one net can be folded together in varying ways to make differently shaped solids.

“Figure 4 (This diagram shows a collection of 8 equilateral triangles, which when folded together in one way yields the regular octahedron while the same collection when folded a different way yields a non-convex octahedron which, consists of equilateral triangle faces.) Without the gluing instructions, we do not have enough information to guarantee what polyhedron the net really defines! (One can find examples of polygons (nets) without the gluing instructi’ons that can be folded to form two inequivalent convex polyhedra.) ”

Thank goodness I’m only having to deal with a cube here.