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Description
A bee staggers out of the peony., is a curation of fragments, an assembly of moments whose temporal roots have been dug up and grafted. The results of this process present themselves as decontextualized familiarity, the details of which, concrete and known, become obscured when considered in the overall presentation. From this obfuscation, like the bee, meaning emerges, staggering. The title of this thesis, a haiku by 17th century poet Matsuo Basho, exemplifies the formal simplicity, vivid imagery, and emotional depth possible when one becomes a master of their craft. This body of work nods to the history of craft, its dedication to material, design and the discipline required to be a lifelong student of the practice. A dear friend once told me that in order to find happiness, one must ‘first get a grip, then let go.’ While this work is steeped in an awareness of craft history and material sensitivities, its primary exploration lives within the moment after skilled hands let go. Each piece presented in this body of work finds itself in freefall, an amalgam of social histories, personal memories, Platonic abstraction and the present. Now equally weighted, these fragments engage plainly in an honest dialogue between past and present, mind and matter. By breaking these delineations, we can begin to investigate what it means to experience, not as unidirectional linear beings, but ones whose memories and histories are constantly being filtered through the objects and people that surround us. Through this, we learn how those imbued objects are used to derive and communicate meaning internally and interpersonally. The purpose of this project is to follow the bee-to attempt to tie a thread between its staggers, dips, drops and flutters-to glean meaning when and wherever possible-to follow its drunken freefall as it attempts to discover what lies beyond the peony.
