Design Blog | Janice Arnold Sketches | Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

felt! “with natural locks @ back”! i have always been interested in medium; in the art i make or enjoy i’m attracted to natural materials like silk, cotton, wool, and wood; and i try to use these kinds of things in place of plastic and metal in my life/art wherever possible. but i had no idea how viscerally, sensuously appealing it would feel to be surrounded by felt. especially felt with woolly locks coming out of it.

somehow, i’m going to recreate one of the panels of the palace yurt as a curtain in my room. materials i am considering: silk gauze, silk organza, lightweight fusible web, and/or crocheted something or other. my project will probably not involve any actual wool felt (i’m not equipped to MAKE it), but i hope it will have the same luminous quality.

or perhaps it will be a case in which i find i’ve recreated something to the best of my ability and yet lost the magic of it.

i made an informal rule for myself that if i bring art-project material into my home, i have to make that project within the week. last weekend erin and i went to twin island, off orchard beach in the bronx, which is more or less paved in sea glass. i collected a small handful to make a mobile to put in my window.

i successfully made the mobile within the week. but it’s not that great. i don’t love it. i could live without it. the idea was nicer than the realization.

that’s a problem with the one-week rule (i made it in less than an hour, not enough time to make it perfect) and also a problem with my sense of myself as someone who can make anything. i tend to think things like, i have never made a sea-glass mobile before but i have materials and a good eye for aesthetics and composition; surely i can pull it off. and then i realize that just attaching all the pieces to each other is so finicky that i have to focus on that and leave the actual placement primarily up to chance.

i made the mobile with the belief that leaving the composition up to chance would create a finished piece with an organic beauty. but now i wish i could redo it with more control over placement. e.g., i’d prefer all the pieces of sea glass to be closer together (there are about 7 pieces). and yet i have no desire to go back and fuss with it any more.

i guess the rule is a mixed success so far.

last night i realized i’m a great big fat minimalist.

i’m not sure why this felt like a revelation. the most inspiring aerial piece i saw recently was performed to a metronome. i’m wearing all white in my favorite self-portraits. i stood in front of sol lewitt’s wall drawings at dia:beacon for ages. when last night’s MC told the audience, “you can clap when you see someting exciting. it’s not a beckett play,” i protested to a friend, “mine’s a beckett play!” (though i felt warm and supported when the audience clapped for me.)

but i realized it last night because while the other aerialists in the show were beautiful, strong, talented, and fantastic, i wasn’t creatively inspired by any of them. too much makeup, too much costuming, too many props, too much melodrama, too much showiness compared to what i’m interested in creating.

of course, minimalism isn’t the only aesthetic that appeals to me. but my attraction to it is a good thing to remember about myself. i’m working my way through twyla tharp’s painfully annoying the creative habit, and i give her props for helping me listen to and understand what inspires and motivates me as an artist.

when i was beginning to conceive of this trapeze piece at the end of december 08, i made a list of my goals.

1. unusual transitions/drops
2. more postmodern than classical circus; tricks invisible
3. easy and joy, flow; light, sweeping, free
4. include tricks i want to show off
5. air, openness, space
6. repetitive patterns

i also made a list of tricks i wanted to include. the final piece includes very few of the orginally listed tricks, but meets all of my goals (as far as i can tell from my perspective), even though i haven’t looked back at that list all month. i feel immensely satisfied about this.

last week, watching a video of myself rehearsing the piece, i thought maybe it was about uncertainty, exploration, hesitance. i’m in an uncertain, exploratory phase in my life right now, so that made sense. but today i realized that over the past week my movements have become much more sure. even though the choreography still hints at indecision, when i move i feel a sense of ease and grandness. first i thought i had accidentally gone in the wrong direction over the past week, and then i realized i’d arrived right where i’d planned to be. ease, joy, flow. running the piece feels good. it feels like dancing.

i conceived of this piece on a formal level and i’m still not sure what it is on a human, emotional level. i think that even without my having a specific intention there, it is something. it’s me being human on a trapeze; there’s no way for it to be emotionally blank. but what is it? am i okay with not knowing? will i find out once i perform it? is there perhaps value to not knowing — allowing the peice to be free to  resonate however it may with each individual?

i’ve been thinking about the relationship between making a solo trapeze piece and self-portrait photography.

for the trapeze piece i’m making i decided to wear white bloomers and a white tank top (though they will have colored crochet pieces embellishing them). it’s the same costume i wore for a series of self portraits five years ago.

and while this video frame is not indicative, i think the trapeze piece creates a similar mood to those old photos.

it’s a peacefulness, an innocence, and a certain amount of twee. i’m surprised to realize that i’m making the same thing now as i was then. i’m surprised to see how, in both cases, it’s about evoking a mood or emotion without words, through the use of costume, scenery, props, body position, lighting. i never thought of them as connected for me personally.

i have been trying to understand what i can give the audience as a solo performer. unlike the ensemble work i’ve done over the past couple years, i can’t perform love, trust, support, and lack of these things by the way i interact with another person.

my point is a little fuzzy given that the 2004 photo above IS with another person. but these are the same issues i grappled with when i was doing a lot of self-portrait photography. the why, so what, and what are my options?

i get great satisfaction from packing my laptop lunchbox these days.

i thought i’d use this blog to talk about the creative process while making, say, a trapeze piece. but i’ve been making a trapeze piece over the past month and it’s been too confusing and fragile a process to talk about publicly. i will share more about it here soon, but in the meantime, here’s the other thing i’ve been making: lots of laptop lunches.

i work in an office three days a week and i have packed my LLB 90% of the time. the one time i didn’t this month, i found myself extremely angry at not having had time and having to buy food out.

my favorite foods this year (as you can see) have been:

• greek yogurt with pomegranate arils
• citrus of all sorts, especially blood oranges. i’ve been craving citrus nonstop. and of course kumquats: half citrus fruit, half magic.
• walnuts. everytime i eat one i want to tell everybody in earshot how delicious it is.
• brussels sprouts. i made this epicurious recipe with some added turnips and would keep thinking about how yummy it had been for about an hour after eating.
• baked sweet potatoes, omg so satisfying, how did i not know until now
• quinoa salads are always ftw.

i’ve been enjoying delicious food and i’ve also been enjoying the ritual of planning and packing a lunch, snapping a photo of it, eating it slowly of the course of the workday, and then uploading it to flickr in the evening and annotating it. it’s good to have a new ritual.