This week in the studio this...
Became this...
and this...
In my preparations for going to Sydney and Brisbane next week all of the tags had to be taken down. This was going to have to happen sooner or later as part of moving out of the studio anyway. It was a little sad. Mostly though it was scarey. As I took the 1,100 plus tags off the wall I was thinking of how to display them for the up coming exhibitions over East. I had no idea what I was going to do with them. To say that realization brought with it a sense of failure would be highly accurate. Here I've been collecting these stupid tags for months and having people all over the world also collecting them, I'm showing
Tete a tete as part of my installation on the East coast next week and NOW I discover I'm not really sure what I'm doing with these stupid things!
There's no telling how many hours I spent staring at a color coded mountain of tea tags this week. I knew what ever I did with them had to add to the story not just solve the issue of easily transporting and installing them. I mounted them on craft paper, sheets, glass, napkins, and stationary in various different shapes and configurations... it all looked fine but it didn't add anything. I piled them on the floor, tables. shelves, and chairs of all varieties... that didn't add anything to the story either or even look ok. I put them in tea cups, plastic containers, ziplock baggies, and boxes... that didn't work.
Then I counted out 60 of all the same, put them in a stack and covered it with wax. And it worked!
This whole work is about shared moments... how long is a moment? A minute, 60 seconds? An hour, 60 minutes? Both? Neither? However we define "moment" it deals with a measure of time, the number 60 is a big part of the way we measure time. So is 12. So 11 more times I made a stack of 60, covered it in wax, and tied the strings up like a ribbon on a package.
I love that they look like little present. What is a shared moment or an intentional conversation if not a gift? Wax, as a long standing phrase in my visual language, always refers to preservation. When you have that lovely moment of meeting someone face to face and sharing time with them you'll want to keep it.
Each stack has specific tags, some are the tags for specific people, that signify specific people or events that have marked my year here... churchfreo is one, there's one for my Artist's Way group and studio buddies, there are several for specific friends, all of my supporters have one, the class I took back in July at Curtain is one.
