Meaning in Materials and Autobiographical Art

With college comes a slew of self-reflection, and I have the privilege of being in a class called “Ideation and Interpretation” which prompts this reflection through art. My most recent piece represents a huge part of my life, and while I won’t be sharing the details online for obvious reasons, I will share the generalized takeaways that those who know me could more accurately interpret. I hope they take it well, and not with regret, as (like a sea turtle) I am so much stronger because of my experiences.

The Assignment:
Our task was to create a diptych (set of two pieces that inform each other) related to Ecclesiastes 1:9 (What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.) a kind of desperate cry about the omnipresence of the past, versus Isaiah 43:19 (Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.) praising an ever-new present. The pieces were to be based off of an artifact (beit from a museum or our own lives) as it relates to time. The prompt was generally percieved as a “What did this used to look like, and what does it look like now?” relation to time, going as deep as the artist wanted it to. Some toys, items from their youth, or things significant to their parents were common. Lots of colorful pieces being compared to a worn, old, used look of the second—a fair representation of time.
Once I understood the prompt, an item popped right into my mind: a spyglass.

Choosing your Materials
Something rightfully emphasized in the introduction to this project was the importance of the materials for informing the piece. If you choose wood, perhaps the idea you are trying to portray is reliability, frequency, or even flammability. How smooth you render the wood can communicate the age of the item, or how much care was put into its production. Is the wood painted? stained? partially burnt? chipped? sanded and left natural? sharpied? marked, beat-up, missing? Every little detail can communicate something in the final piece—and that’s just talking about wood! What if you chose clay? plasticine? wax? glass? sand? canvas? paper? metal? an old blanket? Every material can communicate something wildly different from the others—and still be interpreted differently by each observer because of their past experiences. People may someday interpret my works (as I expect they will be primarily cardboard) and think… “now why is it made out of cardboard?” unknowing that I simply just love cardboard. Any elaborate explanation they came up with might mean something to them, and be a valuable learning experience… but I probably didn’t intend it. I have used cardboard from meaningful boxes in the past, for projects like the Surebonder Commission:

The Surebonder Commission/Trade

I used not only random boxes I already had, but a box that Surebonder used to send me their glue guns. This can be seen by the visible text to the right of center.

But, most of my projects are made from cereal boxes I’ve collected from my family, friends, and my community, which I almost said means little to the project, but that would be incorrect. Even just using the cereal boxes I’ve collected translates to: something from a community of people I care about (the box) is used in this project, no matter who is recieving it. Materials mean something, whether or not they are intended to mean anything at all.

For this assignment, I chose wood for one figurine, and plasticine for the other. Completely intentionally. The intentions may be made more clearly shortly, in the explanation of the project’s completeness. But first,

Some Benefits of Autobiographical Art:
I’m no therapist (yup, that’s right. DEFINITELY not a therapist). However, even I can tell you how surpressing the past doesn’t help with either the present or the future. You (yes you) are always going to be a culmination of your past, and will always be looking to repair broken relationships or fix things you broke while trying to repair broken relationships, or at the hindsight of realizing you didn’t actually fix it and you made it worse and now you have to do your very best to fix THAT all the while learning how to LIVE LIFE *gasp*. (Anyways,) Wherever you go, there you are, and your past is what makes you, you. Now back to art! Art is a fantastic resource to work through the past on your own, but also with other people. By explaining your work and giving them a way to visualize it, you open a path for them to relate to you and help heal the hurt or celebrate the joy that is communicated through your work.
What I’m learning more and more being around the art department is how little the (what I’ll call) “percieved skill” in a work matters. I say this to denounce my past interpretations of all modern art being “stupid” because it doesn’t look like a photorealistic elephant made from crayons. Instead, it is an artist trying to communicate something; often an abstract idea that can’t be put into a recognizable image. It instead needs to be relayed through a combination of feelings and expressions communicated through materials, shapes, colors, and way more thought than you could think would go into it. And yet still more thought can always be taken from the final work than went into it. Not to get too off track, but we had a group critique of our first project, and our professor had us first describe what we saw and try and interpret the work before the artist themself spoke. It was eye-opening, because it made hugely obvious the inability of any artist to communicate one clear message through a work. I know what I was trying to accomplish with this piece…

An assignment for Amazon. Mine did not win, but I mentally won because I learned more about perspective and informing the viewer in ways more visually intuitive than the little paragraph of words you attach. 

…but everyone interpreted it differently. Did they all see the footprint I spent an hour carving out? Not necessarily. Was everyone’s attention drawn to the same thing? Nope. Did they overanalyze my use of red (when I just like the color)? Of course.
WOW am I off-topic. This was not an auto-bigoraphical piece, but it was interpreted by different people differently despite me having one (and really only one) idea of the message I was hoping for it to communicate. So while your art may communicate something to you, it may communicate something entirely different to someone else. When it is from your own past, however, the most valuable part of the process is putting on paper (or in sculpture or other medium) how you feel so that you can analyze it. It is the most self-centered art, but that is often the most beneficial for the artist themself. They can finally release something into the piece that they’ve had to carry with them for so long. While the past will stay with them, now they can view it in front of them and make more sense of it. Improved clarity on the topic is attained.

“Reality is a One-Way Mirror” — My Project (finally)
As I’ve mentioned, these pieces (plural because it was a diptych: two sculptures contextualized by the window) are meaningful beyond explanation to me. But I’ll do my best to explain some of the meaning that may resonate with somebody somewhere.

My item was a spyglass I recieved right before entering middle school from an incredibly influential person in my life. When I was given it, they told me they would be there to guide me through the trials of middle and high school and pick me up should I stumble. Well, six months later they were out of my life and unreachable. They simply weren’t there. Not dead, just not present. The spyglass was put in a box for a move and didn’t receive much attention for those six years I had hoped for mentorship and didn’t receive it.
My project reflects this in a way that relates to any past experience with a window of one-way glass showing how we view reality. We can look back all we want on the past, and what we have experienced, or others have experienced, but no matter how hard we try and look into the future… a mirror stops us. You can’t see the future.
On the side of the past, happily looking towards the future is perhaps the most innocent boy I’ve ever been, expectantly imagining a future in which joy is all I see.
On the side of the present, looking back, weeping, sobbing, reaching desperately towards the glass, longing to warn or change or prepare… is me now. It’s me after the experiences (beyond just the spyglass) I could’ve never expected or planned for.

Perhaps my future self will look back at me now in pity, experiencing greater joy than I could ever think possible. Perhaps he will think of me as lucky after he has undergone worse. I can try to prepare myself, but

I will never know my future; only my past.

…That’s a bit of a dark ending. How about a joke? Who just spent their precious time reading this and will never get that time back? Hah: You. But I spent even longer writing it.