If potential actions are infinite, then a single decision to put two things together can be seen as profound. A world of care and consideration can exist in a single act of assembly. I want to know how things come together.
Jessica Stockholder and I take a similar approach. In the Art:21 episode “Play”, Stockholder describes her making process: she finds objects, brings them into her studio and “puts [herself] into situations where [she] doesn’t know what is going to happen”. But then again on some level she knows. I know. Somewhere deep inside of us we know that the seat of a grey stool (as seen in her 1990 sculpture Kissing the Wall #5 with Yellow) is a potential connecting point. I make similar purposeful connection points in my work. I seek out found objects that offer clear connection points through their own structure or design. It’s like I walk around with Richard Serra’s Verb List scrawled on the back of my hand. Objects call to me and say “use me to clasp” and so I do.
When describing his Prop Pieces in an interview with Hal Foster, Serra explained “rather than trying to make a vertical freestanding formal didactic statement I thought I’d just make these forms and arrange them—either lean them against the wall or disperse them on the floor. The arrangement was casual and open.” Sometimes I make casual connections between components. I do this by experimenting with placement and giving and sharing weight between the objects I want to fit together.
Other times I can’t find a clear path to making things merge and so I force it: I wrestle objects into knitted forms. Bits and pieces protrude through the loops of knitted containers as if to remind me that I have only temporarily removed the autonomy of the desperate pieces that comprise my sculptures. I relate to the way the artist Phyllida Barlow articulates the process of making this kind of connection. She likes to make in such a way where “the work fights back and begins to take [her] on a journey.”
The most magnificent connections I’ve seen recently have been temporary ones like the momentary point of contact established between two dancers performing an improvisational dance. There is so much potential in a temporary connection in no small part because of its fleeting quality. The way two components can come together and then diverge shows the transformational potential of putting things together, even for just a moment. There is another infinite world embedded in this kind of temporary relationship.
There is an entire trade dedicated to making things fit. Joiner’s build by connecting. What does it mean to center your life’s work on creating points of contact? I wonder if that is my aspiration. All I know for sure is that I want to know how the joining is done, how things come together.
-Katie Shulman, Summer 2020