![\"SONY](\"https:\/\/bsterlingcasselton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/DSC00583-1024x681.jpg\")
Both writing and sculpture are ways to express story.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Both writing and sculpture are ways to express story.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been familiar with deconstruction, good at it even, the whole life. It started with story, and a sort of sense-making. Breaking down the stories, relationships, and memories and refitting them to new use \u2013 a private, personal assemblage.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve long had an interest in sculpture. Now I am acting on that interest – mostly assemblage, involving wood and rusty stuff \u2013 where I need only barely draw a straight line and worry about fasteners. A late bloomer as an artist, I just needed permission, from myself, to take the interest down from the shelf. \u201cDon\u2019t call yourself a hobbyist, you\u2019re an artist,\u201d a friend who is the only real sculptor I know said to me recently.![\"SONY](\"https:\/\/bsterlingcasselton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/DSC00605-681x1024.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Deconstruction and assemblage are more than reuse or recycling. Assemblage begins with the intended, consequential, accidental, careless, and careful deconstruction. Deconstruction begets assemblage. For me, the result is the formation on new objects full of meaning.<\/p>\n
“An expressive act,” wrote Parker Palmer, “is one taken not to achieve a goal outside oneself but to express a conviction, a lending, a truth within. An expressive act is one taken because if not taken would be denying one\u2019s own insight, gifts, or nature. By taking an expressive act, an act not obsessed with outcomes, one comes closer to making the contribution that is one is to make in the scheme of things.”<\/p>\n
Endowed objects. These are items that have an added layer of meaning, a sort of shorthand for feelings or meaning. Objects in fiction can be endowed with special properties, special memories or special significance. It just comes down to cracking the code of what the thing means. Just as we are collectors of things, things are collectors of meaning. We have the human drive and capacity to invest inanimate objects with meaning \u2013 to instill ordinary things with extraordinary significance, significant objects, so we do.<\/p>\n
Meaning is both inherent in the world and invented\/imposed upon the world. What are we imposing when we repurpose scavenged objects into endowed objects? Emotional, longing, satisfaction, wholeness, surprise.<\/p>\n
Quiddity \u2013 the essence of a thing \u201cthat which differentiates a thing from other things.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fiction, the endowed object can speak volumes about a character. Also, the object can be used to create narrative continuity. Generally, the writer makes the object significant to the reader; as does the artist. These objects exist in story because they exist in real life. We collect and employ objects to help tell ourselves first the story. The cool thing is that in sculpture, the endowed object is the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could draw anything, but drawing doesn\u2019t make you an artist, art is in your head. It\u2019s how you think, and what you think. Artists work to complete themselves. The art completes whatever is missing, whatever is not there.\u201d Beverly Pepper<\/p>\n \u201cSimply put, the things that matter to you, the stories you have to tell, exist to be shared.\u201d Ted Orland<\/p>\n \u201cThe origin of a story is always an absence.\u201d Jonathan Safran Foer<\/p>\n \u201cHow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.\u201d Annie Dillard<\/p>\n There you go: absence, deconstruction\/disassembly, being who you are. Go figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Both writing and sculpture are ways to express story. I\u2019ve been familiar with deconstruction, good at it even, the whole life. It started with story, and a sort of sense-making. Breaking down the stories, relationships, and memories and refitting … Continue reading ![\"scancafe2](\"https:\/\/bsterlingcasselton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/scancafe2-036.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n