Unexpected Form

Life takes shape in ways that are often different from how I plan. It’s challenging, especially because I spend a lot of mental energy developing those plans, working toward them, only to experience outcomes I wasn’t expecting, or things not materializing at all.

I make plans because I want to make progress in my life. At the same time, I have to learn to cope with change and with the world moving in ways I can’t expect or anticipate. Both things seem necessary and true.

Like making my bed. The plan is to make it every day. But after it’s made (if it gets made), my dog brings chew toys onto it, getting drool and crumbs all over the sheets, then rolling around and tearing everything apart. It seems like a futile effort, but when I put Pudge in his crate and return to a made bed after leaving the apartment, it makes me feel better in some strange way than if I had left it in disarray or simply left it untouched after a Pudge tornado.

Humans are so weird. To prefer a bed with sheets flat and folded, pillows resting at the head of the bed. That there is a top and bottom to a bed. All of this is so weird.

Do wild animals care how they leave the place where they sleep? Do they care about how the environment looks as they eat their prey? If they can see color, do they have a favorite?

Why am I so weird?

As strange as I think it is to care so much about cleanliness and how much my environment impacts me, I think it’s quite normal to desire order over chaos and clutter. It’s why I love staying at hotels. When I enter the space, it’s perfectly organized. The bed is made. It’s free of clutter. When I leave the room to do whatever it is that I do, then return, the bed is made.

There is a crisp reset to hotel spaces. And that feels wonderful to me.

I find it easy to keep things clean and organized in a hotel room because there aren’t many objects to interact with, and each has a clear place.

It’s simple.

On top of that, someone skilled and efficient comes into the space every day to refresh and reset it. It requires effort. And the skill to do it well is trained.

But in my own space, no one has trained me to keep an ever-evolving space clean and organized. That’s something I have to learn how to do on my own. Creating the time to think about it, follow through with the plan, and then do it consistently is hard.

A home isn’t like a hotel room because it isn’t temporary. It’s a place where accumulation happens, where things need to enter the space and leave it. Some with regularity, and others randomly.

There are so many decisions that need to be made, and I’m easily overwhelmed by the complexity of it.

My mom always tells me that every object needs a home. But that requires me to consider: Where should each object live? Once I’ve chosen a spot, is it the best spot? What about that object’s spot in relation to the other objects, and the placement of storage and space I have? How often do you use the object? Where would be more convenient if you needed to access it more? If it’s on the counter, does it make things feel cluttered, or is the convenience worth it because of how frequently it is used?

When every object has a home, it can be returned to that place when it is moved. The deciding is hard. The effort to ensure those parts are always in their place requires a discipline that I haven’t cultivated consistently enough yet.

My adorable little puppy plays antagonist to this desire for cleanliness and order. When I enter my apartment, I immediately go to him and his needs and wants rather than sorting through the clutter I just brought to my kitchen counter from the outside world. I leave things there to marinate while I play with Pudge.

The intent to live in a space that is completely organized all the time is in contrast with the reality of lived experience: a little chaos sprinkled on top of a perfect plan.

This was a “normal cylinder” until I attempted to center it on the wheel before trimming it and f’d it up. My first inclination was to swear, which I already did. Then I sat with the slightly damaged vessel in my hands and contemplated its future. Do I fully smash it and let it go, or try to deal with its newfound imperfection?

I took a sharp tool and began to carve away the blemish, then moved around the top in an organic fashion. And then I played with that line, making it more oblong and uneven, because even unevenness isn’t necessarily attractive.

What a strange thing that is.

That there is, at least for me, a quality of unevenness that is more attractive than other states of unevenness.

I probably took 15 minutes to shape the top, even though it looks like it happened in an instant. The damage did. But the “fixing” took much longer.

And most of the fixing was deciding. Figuring out what to do when something unexpected happened.

Ceramic vessels, once glazed and fired, are given the opportunity to last for thousands of years. Even if the vessel isn’t cared for and is eventually found broken among the ruins of our civilization, the fragments could be uncovered and studied like an ancient Roman artifact. 

This permanent record of a moment that blends plan with improvisation is something special. I will most likely create more vessels that have organically shaped tops because, aesthetically, they can be appealing. But those vessels won’t be like this one. Their fluid asymmetry may become “better” in shape and aesthetic with practice, but they will not carry the same moment of discovery that this piece has.

Bob Ross would be pleased with my happy accident.

This note is also reaching you much later in the day because it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t written and then scheduled for release like the others.

Life in the past week has gotten a bit crazy, and it’s only going to get crazier. September is going to be dynamic. It’s a combination of things that have been planned and worked on for years, along with a lot of improvisation.

Deciding to take the opportunity to have an exhibition one month before it opens is madness. Usually, one month from the event date, you begin promoting it. Not planning it.

But the stars seemed to be aligning for me in Detroit in a very different way than during my highly productive years there. Lots of effort, lots of projects, but no real plan for career growth beyond hoping that being busy would attract bigger projects.

This time is different.

I’ve been planning and developing projects for the past two years while living and working in LA, rather than focusing on the more practical, everyday art-business sort of things. I took a step back from constantly doing and making so that I could think about why I was making, and what the purpose was for the things being made.

In the past two years, I’ve only made a handful of tangible works of art. But at the same time, I’ve been creating the work that will build my future. I gave my art space. I gave myself time to reset and refresh in LA.

And all of a sudden, somehow, through planning and a little improvisation, things are taking shape in Detroit.