At the Baukunst Creative Technologist Conferences in San Francisco and Boston, we invited Hudson Valley-based ceramic artist Eric Ehrnschwender to develop an interactive installation that would give each conference attendee the opportunity to create their own piece of art to take home with them (far more exciting, we think, than returning to the office with a generic piece of swag).
Before we dove into making our own pieces, Eric spoke on his practice and process — a launching point of inspiration and a reminder to feel our way through each step, to not overthink it, to be with it, to do it, and not worry too much.
An excerpt from Eric's talk, Object Poetics:
In my work, I rely a lot on fuzzy translations, bad translations. I'll start with a diagram that’s trying to make mechanical sense of an awkward situation or an emotional hang-up. Then I’ll take some elements out of those drawings, and I’ll make them into volumes. These volumes are often in clay. I like to think of these volumes as words. Sometimes, they’re related in meaning. Or maybe they’re mispronunciations of each other.
I usually set out and I'll make a series of what I think of as the same word. I’ll allow the meaning to drift a little bit. If I work quickly enough, very often I get this nice drift where there’s a bit of slang or an accent on the word and that becomes what the thing is. And the forms adjust. Each piece moves off of what the preceding piece was. I get to this place where I’m making pieces that were never drawn, and where I probably wouldn’t have been able to get to with my brain. And then, the dust settles and I have this kind of vocabulary. I try to see what kind of sense I can make out of that vocabulary.
But really, I don't care about what sense it makes. I did that already. I start by thinking about things, over-analyzing things, worrying about coping mechanisms. I iterate and iterate and iterate, and I wander away from the sense of the thing. I’m translating into a unit of feeling, not a unit of thinking.
I’m starting by thinking. I’m remembering what I was thinking. Then eventually that memory is getting deeper, and I’m not remembering it so much as my body is remembering it. So it's becoming this deeper memory. And in this process, I accumulate a whole bunch of words. Then I see what sorts of phrases I can make. I see how they interact with each other, which I think is one of the most fun parts. I take all these bits of meaning, these bits of feeling, and I pile them together into these vocabularies.
One of the good parts about this system is that it allows for a lot of entry points, because it has drifted away from a specific meaning and is more about an association, or a tone, or a feeling. You can have a form that’s hard to name. Maybe you can name it, but the name is wrong. And that's okay. That's good.
So get in there. Handle the pieces. Notice the feel of them. Notice their weight. Notice their texture. And don't worry about it too much.
