INAE Enterprises

I decided to make “a couple” small bottles for ceramic glaze testing. “A couple” became “a few” then became “many”. I originally called them 100 Bottles of Solitude but changed their title after completing over 200 with endless permutations still in my head. Ultimately, they have taken on a life of their own.

Selections from 1000 Bottles of Solitude

I consider the bottles three dimensional sketches and the entire series a sculptural journal. I particularly enjoy using random events (dropping, throwing or shooting) and domestic items from my daily life (spark plugs, forks, bones), as this allows me to distill that moment in time. Taken out of context and made permanent in high fired ceramic, they become compelling in ways I hadn’t planned, expressing the melancholy, whimsy, despair, absurdity or preciousness hidden within the mundane, the common and the every day.

And yes, I’ve read 100 Years of Solitude. I didn’t like the book, I do like the title.

“Solitude is unAmerican.” Erica Jong

Detail images of a few of the bottles:

Camouflage Hat

Life size and wearable.  Silk velvet, camouflage polar fleece, camouflage twill, lace, grouse wings, muskox fur.  Machine and hand sewn from self pattern.

Digital Hat

Life size and wearable.  Velvet, leather, cotton shirting with circuit board pattern, chicken wings, circuit board, electronic parts, beads and feathers.  Machine and hand sewn from self pattern.

Topography Hat

Life sized and wearable.  Silk velvet, hand painted silk with topography map pattern, arrow heads, camouflage silk mesh, silk mosquito net and hand made copper snaps.  Machine and hand sewn from self pattern.

“I myself have 12 hats, and each one represents a different personality.  Why just be yourself?” –Margaret Atwood

What is this?  What I am seeing?  What does it mean? Ooooh.  For more information, see the Week 3 Sketchbook entry on this blog.

Time: 6 hours.  Paper:  Sennelier pastel card.  19 x 26″.  Media:  Black, white and gray pastel.  Actuals: a standard laptop run amok on MS Vista and a bonsai root trained on a circuit board:

Process: I love drawing on pastel card, basically like drawing on sand paper. It allows for many clean layers of pastel.  If only it came in 54″  x 10 yard rolls.  First layer:

Second layer.  Drawing from bonsai, overemphasizing the circuit board and linear perspective because I liked it that way:

Third layer.  Printed out bits of my Perl program (CTRL + PRTSC) graphically enhanced,  (Print Mask for GIMPs).  Pastel on back of print, then traced with ball point.

Most my artwork of the last 10 years falls into this genre so it was no problem coming up with an idea for a class sample drawing.  I was looking forward to doing this assignment, completely prepared.   At the very last minute, I mean the nanosecond before putting pastel to paper, I changed my mind, inspired by the paper size.  I love drawing on Sennelier pastel card but the largest available size is 19 x 26″.   I felt restricted by the small paper.  It reminded me of the laptop I inherited which is a standard sized laptop but feels like being in a doll house compared to my big screen, wireless mansion of a desktop.   Furthermore the laptop was already loaded with MS Vista: windows popping open, scroll bars, some sort of MS designers gone mad translucency thing that has to be seen to be believed, I mean, totally anathema to anyone who knows how to micromanage their computer experience.  Ubuntu, BSD, Perl anyone?

Since 2001 I have grown ficus retusa bonsai over circuit boards, real plants grown over real pieces of circuit board, and made the ceramic containers for them.  Right before I started the drawing, I attempted to email an image of my bonsai using the laptop.  Who knows what happened.  The image broke into multiple windows on the laptop screen, probably nervous pastel coated fingers on that itty bitty fingerpad and the whole mess looked like….well, a potential drawing.  With the thought that it would be easier to create a program for sending images than using someone else’s idea of an image sending program, I added a bit of my own Perl code, a program that admittedly I never got to work correctly, digitally speaking, but has its uses as a decorative element.  The best laid plans and all that.