mending
how do we begin to process and engage with mending?
What makes a good question?
Asking the right elemental question is incredibly important if we want to go places together. A good question intersects with a good metaphor. A good question is often one already found in work being created by contemporary artists. Both will bring extra bounce and sometimes a splash of glitter to any conversations that follow.
What are you making, mending or repairing?
This question or any part of it is not too personal but very likely to spin into some interesting conversation. The dialogue might easily diverge into an alternative one about tools or process or perhaps might take us to a place of understanding that we are making nothing and repairing nothing and forgetting to ask, why?
Directions: Mend the broken cup with materials provided. While mending the cup think about mending the world.
What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms @ SFMOMA features the remarkable work of a number of contemporary artists. Yoko Ono’s MEND PIECE invites visitors to a participatory artwork of mending to mend the earth. “Mend with wisdom, mend with Love. It will meant the earth at the same time.”
As a Yoko Ono fan I needed to visit and to see and hopefully experience MEND PIECE. I wanted to be immersed in the artists version of a prompt I remixed and used with Bay Area and educators on several occasions.
My social practice and my persona of worker took me into learning spaces where I supported (TK-12) educators with strategies for building community and weaving creative practice into curriculum. I enjoyed the challenge of providing an art practice that even a person who does not identify as an artist or a creative person could successfully engage with. A making prompt that a classroom educator could use with their students to expand upon the spectrum of metacognition and engagement already present in the room. A invitation to reflect + make that provided space and time for ideas, crafting of self, belonging and understanding.
After introducing Yoko Ono’s MEND PIECE, I replicated it with some minor changes. Mismatched colorful ceramic pieces were collected and smashed, replacing Yoko Ono’s all white form. A mixture of fibers and colored tapes were made available and of course, a teacher and any resourceful student will always hack the materials provided.
I believed the mend piece was an opportunity: A restorative practice and an experimental art making cycle. As a facilitator, it was intentional to invite educators to engage with an unconventional practice. I understood how very unusual it was for educators to have an art making prompt without an outcome or product in mind as well as being a bit risky to engage with the sharp edges that were a part of the process as well as a wickedly perfect second metaphor.
Mending the impossibly broken
Selecting pieces to reassemble. Struggling with an initial desire to bring the pieces back to their original form. Struggling with the materials available to form and connect pieces.
Providing limits is an important part of this project. Not having access to hot melt glue or super glue was extremely challenging for some. Not being able to re-make the tea cup in a tea cup shape was at first a frustration, then a freedom, a recognition that of course, the mending would result in something entirely different or new. Each of the fragments were artifacts of a distant memory that was inviting in a poetic re-imagining.
With educators I provided fiber and clear tape. I also provided malleable bees wax and wax strips to be warmed in our hands and held tightly to stitch or mend odd shards and pieces together.
After assembling and fabricating these 3D pieces writing prompts are provided:
free write, without edits and without pause: the story of this object
identify 3 words that describe its function or ability to mend or repair
a title
short paragraph about the process
followed by a gallery walk
Educators leave comments on sticky notes or index cards using the See, Think, Wonder protocol. Have you ever used a protocol like this after engaging with a creative practice?
What do you see? What do you think? What do you wonder?
about mending systems, the earth and our relationships?
As a facilitator it was very interesting to witness how each person was figuring things out and to listen to the problem solving dialogue and watch the slow assembly. Both were woven into the more pragmatic dialogue that happens when we are working with out hands, discussions of school systems, certain students, and the potential of another strike action.
Visiting SFMOMA and seeing some completed objects arranged on the shelves I missed the bright colors and the reflective, accompanying text that is a part of my practice as a facilitator. It is the space that repairs the world, the opportunity to connect ideas and witness each other’s process.
Unfortunately, the day and time I was visiting SFMOMA did not allow for MENDING only observation of the potential to mend. Days later I continue to imagine what the activated space would feel like and what questions would arise.
In these turbulent times I look to what contemporary artists are saying and doing. I search out cultural institutions that are gathering work that sometimes cries, work that invites you to make a noise, and work that isn’t too worried about the sharp edges.
In the exhibition, What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms MEND PIECE was one of 9 selected works. I highly recommend a visit if you are in the SF Bay Area. If you let me know I might just meet you there.
I was able to pluck the lovely minimalist felt instruments of Naama Tsabar and I was mesmerized by the smoke and whistling performance/film that moved forward and backwards in time by Lorna Simpson, Cloudscape featuring Terry Adkins. A roomful of 3D architectural maquettes reference buildings but are also sculptures. Monotype maps mark the perimeter of Black Towers/Black Power by Walter J. Hood who is applying a radical imaginary to a West Oakland neighborhood using principals of the Ten-Point Program developed by the Black Panther Party. The wall text includes this artist quote:
maybe it is possible to re-imagine ourselves in new spaces and then find ways to get there
More durational observation was required for the 3-channel video …three kings weep… by Ebony G. Patterson. I sat and took in the intensity of the three black men, their finery and their tears. An intentional witness of vulnerability and impressive, regal, creative essence. I was there early, mid-week and very grateful to have the space to myself. For me to hold the grief and, mend.