 After three years, it’s my last week as a Resident Artist at the Penland School of Craft.
For much of my life, I’ve had to be strong-armed through change—flailing, bawling, and dragging baggage like a newborn with colic and hoarding issues. While this drama has kept my parents and friends well stocked with blackmail stories, it has taken a toll on me, at worst trapping me in paralysis and at best bookending positive experiences with corrosive misery. How, then, does the imminent end of my appointed time at a magical place find me relatively calm and cheerful? I think it’s down to the fact that I’ve spent so much of the last three years carving, which is to say: I’ve been practicing how to transition from one plane to another. When I start a carving, particularly if I’m working with a piece of material that’s already a square-ish block, I often draw the front view on one face and the side view on another. Then I saw around the first outline, carefully keeping all the sawed-off bits, tape the bits back together, and saw around the other outline. The unwanted material falls away like the segments of a weird orange, leaving only a rough, Lego-like version of my design. This is the fastest route I know of to jump from a block of wood to a blocky but recognizable version of the shape I have in mind. The speed of this transformation is gratifying, but with their sharp corners, flat sides, and starkly differentiated FRONT and SIDE views, there’s something aggressive and unsettling about a piece at this stage, like the sculptural equivalent of a mugshot. But then comes the part of the process I love best! I get to coax those standoffish planes into conversation with each other. It’s so much more than simply rounding the corners; the way that one plane slides or stutters or leans into its neighbor is more like the dynamic between two dancers or the movement from one musical note to the next. The transition is everything, not something to rush through or endure. For most of my life, change has felt like one of those blocky roughed-out forms: like Front and Side, Before and After seemed completely separate, the line between them painfully abrupt. Carving has taught me that change doesn’t have to have such hard edges, that a beautiful transition carries Now into Next, making them an integral part of each other. My favorite way to look at a sculpture is to walk all the way around it, appreciating how its contours and features interact. It’s impossible to create those interactions without appreciating the power of transition, and it’s impossible to appreciate them without moving. Like one plane flowing into another, my experience of Penland won’t so much end as alter. I’ll never enjoy moving but now I can embrace transition as a chance to shape the relationship between what came before and what comes next.
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