making and community

the State University of New York (SUNY) school of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) has been working on a biomass project with willow trees for about twenty years now.  Shrub willow, it turns out, is a pretty amazing plant.  Rapidly renewable, a good source of heat, a great candidate for phytoremediation, there is a lot to recommend it.  It also grows long and straight, and is very supple, which makes it a great candidate for weaving into furniture and other things, which is what I spent yesterday morning doing.

We have an event on campus called S U Showcase, which showcases student work from all over the college that has happened this year.  Last year, there was also an official opening of a rain garden that had just been completed on campus, that had been designed by ESF students.  It happened to co-incide with the time of year that the Willow Project folks are cutting down, or "coppicing" all of the willow plants, so that they will grow back the following year.  So we got some of the willow up here and I worked with faculty and staff and students to make a hollow form to celebrate the garden.  We all had fun (though it was cold and rainy), and the end result was pretty good.

Alexandra Fiust and I getting the basic structure in place.

This year, Dr. Rachel May, who ran the Showcase, asked me to do another structure, this time on the quad.  Of course I leaped at the chance to play with twigs again.  I went down and got three thousand or so stalks of purpurea, a species that grows long and straight and makes great furniture as well as sculptural objects, and then found a willing student to come down and help me start weaving them together.

One of the things that happens when you are doing something weird in public (like on the quad of a university) is that passersby fall in to one of three general categories: 1) too cool to even acknowledge that anything is going on; 2) interested but unwilling to engage, afraid that they will be tainted somehow by the weirdness; or 3) interested and engaged and willing to jump in and be weird as well.  It is interesting to me how many people fall in to category 2.  We had a bunch of people who stopped and watched, but when I asked them to weave a twig in they backed away as if I were handing them a basketful of slugs.  These folks are the well-trained products of a system and culture that teaches us that we can not be makers, that we have somehow been divested of permission to be a part of a creative experience unless we are specifically trained to do so.

But then there were fair number of people who fell in to category 3, who grabbed a twig and added it to the form.  One only needs hands to make this kind of thing, so no knowledge of special tools or techniques is required.  I tell folks that the only rule is that they weave the twig in , and if it stays, they have done it right.  They usually laugh and say something about how they will probably ruin the structure, to which I usually crack wise and try to get them to laugh, so that they are more at ease.  Some people actually get into the process and start to weave more and more twigs in, which is when I really feel like things are progressing well.  I got to meet a lot of people on the quad yesterday morning, people I would never have met otherwise.  I met a Spanish teacher, an art historian, a grad student who is the assistant coach for the cross-country track and field team, the administrative assistant of the math department.  Once they understood that there were no rules, that the twigs just get woven in and that is that, they were a lot more likely to join in.  Which was the point, after all.

This kind of project is always about community to me.  The individual twigs are very supple and have very little inherent structural integrity.  But as they get woven together, they start to support each other, just like people in a successful community.  Like people in a successful community, the twigs come together to create something that is very stable, and that is stronger by far than any of the individual twigs.  Like people, they all have to bend a little, but not break.  They all have to interact with the other twigs to hold them up and be held up by them.  And the material really dictates the finished form.  Though I start out with a basic idea about what I want it to be, each stick adds its own voice, its own pressure, altering the whole a little bit.  The finished form is actually quite strong, and may be close to the original idea, but is shaped by the multitude of voices of the twigs that make it up.  Beautiful, really.

The finished structure.