It puts itself together. In the studio after the holiday break, after examining the work in Earth-speak for grant writing purposes, and after seeing powerful art in Miami, in person like I did, and after cleaning the studio and emptying the mind of daily questions about the work by way of not reading, and instead relaxing with loved ones in better climate, together with ecstatic conversation, and maintaining meditation practice even when it feels dumb every time.  These ways the work makes itself shown to me.

I see monumental illuminated sculpture interposed on the empty studio room in the imagined nearbetween, like to-scale wire iterations of the architect’s scribbles.  They have aspects of over four years of investigations, one horribly failed grad school crit, experiments and performances, objects, inquiries, projects that until now seemed to have a thousand futures and only one dart, novice and naive forays into electronics, and lighting, with good luck and brilliant other people near and far.

The first run of my studio-made circuitry was less than two years ago.  90 minutes before opening, having barely hobbled through the important lesson, Soldering Takes Longer Than You Think, in all the wrong, inefficient ways, I positioned the newly minted LEDs in the giant suspended spiral poised to throw the shadows the people were coming to see.

With much chanting about ‘positive in’ and ‘negative out,’ I plugged the last lead into the transformer … and,

*PoP*

my circuits blew.

no lights, only the echoing electrical snap disappearing into mordant silence behind a curl of acrid smoke, and the woven wire sculpture, grey and unlit, like a Magritte hat hanging empty in the air.

I called the most fixity person I can panic in front of, who generously explained the workable solution.  A little over an hour remained.  Up and down the ladder, the room reeking of fried electricity, I undid the wiring of each of 16 LEDs, and bandaged them like a field nurse to individual AA battery sets, winding the electrical tape as tight as my hurried pinch, to complete each single LED circuit. luck and chance and stock piled batteries, let there be light.  All through the opening I had to keep squeezing the too-weakly taped ones back together.

3 years it takes to get from idea to deed. Because I have to see the shadow that is asking to come through. I walked into the lighting designer’s office and began at the beginning. ‘Please explain to me,’ I requested, ‘how electricity works.’ There were drawings, and poetic little words

watt

amp

volt

ohm

what I didn’t need to know about, and what I did, like Wago clips. And the work, sculpted mesh and wire, to shadows enhanced with paint, to glow in the dark paint, to mirrors, flashlights, gels, baffles, colored mesh, to shadows with light, to shadows with focused, layered, and sculpted light,  the place in Kentucky and this here shampoo, to optics, to discovering that all along I had been doing the light the Newton way, and the pictures of the pages of Newton’s lab notebook, to where am I now? I have finally learned these now-developing LEDs and they are quaking to become merely aspects of monumental sculptures. and plus I’d like a grant to go read Newton’s manuscripts in person, face to paper, even if it is through a sheet of glass, or someone else has to turn the pages with an inert baton, because those are some pages I want to look into like pools, like the eyes of The Other, such questioning, such questing, such drawing of the precise details so that I can tell, instantly, 400 years later, precisely what is meant,

‘it’s all studio work’