Burning to Make Boxes

If I had to choose one art tool I couldn't live without I would have to pick my hot glue gun.  This is the case, even though every time I use it I burn myself.  Waiting for other glues to dry is just agony once you've gotten used to the fast-drying hot glue.  I have to transport my work to the Rider University Art Gallery soon, and my work is mostly fragile, unframed, and three-dimensional.  I don't think I could have made the oversized packaging I've made this week without that glue gun.
There are very few glues that work on styrofoam, and work quickly.  I needed to build cushions into the boxes with styrofoam pieces. Most glues will melt the styrofoam. A touch of hot glue will work.  It even glues the bubblewrap to the styrofoam.

Figuring out how to make packages for my work to protect, add rigidity, stabilize various elements during transport AND be lightweight was a real challenge.  I custom built 4 boxes recently.  


The hanging paper scrolls were a problem.  In order to make the big box a little smaller, I brought the bottom of the twin scrolls up by securing the   
endknobs with wire poked right through the box bottom.  Then I "rolled" the scroll up over a paper towel holder that I first covered with glassine paper for it's neutral ph.  Two cardboard fingers can be lifted up to release the scroll from it's packaging.

The bamboo at the top of the scrolls is tied into the box with wires also, and the porcelain end caps are cushioned with form fitted styrofoam.

Pieces like the porcelain LANDSCAPE LATTICE have boxes like that, and have so far survived a number of moves.  They are stored in the stacked boxes in my storage room.

The glue gun is not without hazard.  Almost every time I use it for a project I burn myself.  I had been lucky for several days, but today I was almost finished with one of the huge boxes, when I burned not just one finger, but some fingers, on both hands! As soon as I felt a finger burning on one hand, my other hand burned, and then a fingernail.  I must have gotten a flying hot glue drip.  It's like having hot candle wax stuck on your hand. After finishing the cardboard strip, the first thing I found to "ice" with was a package of old white chocolate chips in the freezer downstairs.  Then I also found a little cold pack.  Well something about the (cellophane?) packaging on the chocolate chips makes that NOT effective for soothing burns.  I tried to hold one cold thing on my fingernail of my left hand while holding another cold pack on two fingers of my right hand.  And I am impatient.  When I should have sat and waited, I wanted to check and answer emails.  Hard to type with hands like that!  An hour or so of an on and off approach, and the pain was calmed down enough to return to my packaging project.  What oh what would I do without my trusty glue gun?

My Mother, My Shadow and Me

One of the hardest parts of creating art is deciding when to stop working on a piece.  When is it finished?  The question also comes up when a piece is damaged.  Do you throw it away, do you try to perform heroics to restore it, or do you compromise and take the hint - see where the solving of that crisis takes the piece?  A professional art restorer is going to disguise the damage and try to get the piece back into it's original "finished" form.  An artist, however, has to consider all the options when it comes to damage on their own work.
If only I could get better at "seeing" what life literally puts in front of my eyes!  A couple of days after one of my artworks fell off the wall,  I visited Dia Beacon in New York, and was very interested to see Andy Warhol's HUGE installation of paintings of a shadow, in 102 variations. 
http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/98  I didn't even realize until just now, writing this, that seeing Warhol's shadow was a timely lesson for me: there are hundreds of ways to recreate a shadow. I only needed to decide on one - the bottom corner of my piece was smashed in the area where I had shadows from a white cloth.  I did not consciously realize this connection when I viewed the Warhol shadows, though; the lesson was absorbed completely subconsciously if at all!

(left: the undamaged bottom corner)
My large collage, "Biography of a Moth", had hung securely for months, waiting for it's exhibition in my show at the end of this month. My trusty E6000 glue, that has never failed me before, gave way, and the piece came down on a section of shadows.  I hadn't even heard it fall off the wall, and discovered it the next time I went downstairs into my studio.  It was impossible for me to ignore that the destruction occurred around the time of a particularly vehement argument with my daughter, and that the artwork has something to do with my own relationship with MY mother.  I know this in a way that is beyond reason.  I know this in my gut.  Oh oh, this is the kind of "knowing" that gets people into all kinds of trouble!  One person "knows" that their truth is THE truth even when it conflicts with someone else's truth, and they both "know it in their gut".  Therefore, I allow myself to indulge in my "gut feeling" about this artwork while simultaneously letting my big skeptic balance on my shoulder. 

Another aspect of something meaningful being in my face without me even seeing it was the title of the piece.  I had titled it "Biography of a Moth" a long, long time before I realized that that title is also short for "Biography of a Mother".  Am I going blind?  Really!  How much more obvious does my own creation have to be, for me to "get it"?  Duh!

(left: same corner, "repaired".)
I felt confident from the beginning of my damage survey that this smashed corner was something I could deal with, and that the artwork was no lost cause.  My decision was whether to entirely disguise the event or to embrace it in the repair.  I decided to add a visible rectangular layer of mat board to the front surface, but to restore with colored pencils the shadow images that had been there originally as a photograph. I guess it was a sort of compromise.  The surface is changed where the repair is, but I retained the content of the area.  In fact, when seen in the entire piece, I like the addition of that subtle geometry to the surface there.   I also added more support to the backside of the same corner.  Probably MOST importantly, I (bravely) drilled and screwed right through the front of the artwork, to attach a more secure wood strip to the back for a better hanging solution, and then concealed the screws on the face of the artwork.

A sideview portion of "Biography of a Moth" can be seen on the right side of the announcement card for my show, "Translating Nature".  The show will be at the Rider University Art Gallery, on the 2nd floor of the Bart Luedeke Center, Westminster College of the Arts at Rider University, 2083 Lawrenceville Rd., Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and it opens September 30th, 5-7pm. There is an artist's talk scheduled for October 7th, 7pm. The exhibition runs through October 30th.  My mother, my shadow and myself will all be in some form of attendance.