Tin Foil Assignment

I had a very different experience working with tin foil than the other students in the class. Due to my absence because of my (amazing) visit to the Winter Olympics, I was unable to collaborate with other students in the class. Consequently, I worked on the assignment on my own, and it is still a work in progress. There are a lot of things I find compelling about tin foil as a material: its lustrousness, its fragility, its malleability, its surprising strength. I chose to explore all of these properties in the project I am working on, in which I am wrapping thin strips of tinfoil around each other to create a large cylindrical/conical shape. The result, I hope, will display the tinfoil's malleability and lustrousness (the edge of the tinfoil as it is wrapped around itself bends in different directions, creating a multi-faceted surface that reflects light in an interesting manner), as well as its fragility and strength (the thin, delicate-looking edge of the tinfoil will be exploited to create a thick three-dimensional structure that should be able to withstand an unexpected amount of pressure), very well.

On a related note, I was able to see the other students' pieces in class on Wednesday and was incredibly impressed at the diverse ways in which my peers handled the tinfoil in order to produce beautiful works of art.

Faculty Club Lunch

Oops. I haven't posted in a while! But I'm going to catch up today. The lunch we all shared at the Faculty Club was great. Not only was the food delicious, but the conversation was also stimulating. I sincerely enjoyed being taken through the Bilt website by Alex, Pete, and Miles, and getting a firsthand explanation of the furniture they have built together. I additionally enjoyed seeing Richard's work, although I do wish he would have finished the slideshow - I always find the different processes and approaches that disparate artists take with respect to their work to be fascinating. Finally, I just wanted to briefly reiterate some of the thoughts I had about our conversation about the class. I agree with some of the opinions expressed that working on a large-scale, open-ended collaborative project too soon would probably turn out to be a negative, rather than positive and inspiring, experience. I think it would be best for all of us to get a feel for the materials we enjoy working with most, and also to learn more about each other before we embark on such an ambitious project. Additionally, materials that I would like to explore further within the context of the class include video, sound, and FABRIC, as well as any exceptionally bizarre materials suggested by other students.

Class 2

I had a much better experience working with the dough yesterday than I did last class; looking at how the pieces I made on Monday turned out helped me to focus my efforts immediately. I had made a dough ball in which I stuck little pieces of blue glass, and then stretched a thin layer of dough over it. When baked, the dough ball looked like a blueberry muffin top. And although these results weren't particularly impressive, seeing the piece made me realize that I was interested in exploring the translucency of stretched-out dough a little more. I was much happier with the knives that I made in class on Wednesday than with anything I made on Monday, even though I couldn't bake them. I also enjoyed getting to know my peers a little more.

Class 1

You Are What You Eat

For this assignment, I made beet soup with crème fraîche and pear garnishes. To make the soup, I boiled two pounds of beets, peeled and diced them, then blended them with a cup of chopped shallots (cooked with a quarter teaspoon of fresh ginger and lots of olive oil), 2 cups of vegetable stock, 3 cups of water (reserved from boiling the beets), one cup of red wine, and some red wine vinegar. I also mixed the crème fraîche with horseradish, lemon juice, and red wine vinegar, and tossed the pears in water I reserved from boiling the beets.

I think the product was relatively successful (although I'm sad that less than half the class actually tried it). Approaching the assignment, I thought about the meals that I enjoy most and what I like about them. My mother is a major foodie (and an amazing cook herself, I might add), and my father is very knowledgeable about wine, so my favourite meals tend to take place when I'm around them - whether I'm eating a family dinner at home or out at a wonderful restaurant they've discovered; my mother knows about all the best foods - the kind of food that melts in your mouth - and my father knows the perfect wines to complement them. When eating these meals, the air usually seems to become more viscous (if that makes any sense), with the delicate, buttery food, the wine, and the candlelight all blending together. I thought that soup might be an appropriate representation of such an atmosphere, and chose to make beet soup because of the time of year (beets soup is a very wintery dish), as well as the fact that I've been on a bit of a beet kick ever since this past summer, which I spent studying in Poland (the country in which my father was born) - beets are emblematic of my tastes and my experiences. I also thought beet soup would go well with red wine, i.e. I could add some red wine to the pot as a sort of symbol of my father and the soup would still taste good.

If I could do the assignment again, under different circumstances (say, at a dinner party in my apartment), I would probably have chosen a different presentation. The aesthetics of a dish can influence whether or not a person wants to eat that dish, and I would have preferred to present my soup in low bowls rather than Dixie cups; people would have been able to see the beautiful pink of the beet soup, the bright white of the crème fraîche (which I might have placed on the soup with a more graceful hand), and the pear cubes would not have sank to the bottom of the soup. I also wish the soup had been hotter and the crème fraîche a little cooler; balancing contrasting flavours, temperatures, and textures in different ways can make a good dish a great dish.

Bread Exercise

I think that the combination of the cooking exercise and the bread exercise brought into focus for me the idea that art can be made from any kind of material. I've always subscribed to this concept, and had the utmost respect for chefs as artists, but I've never worked, as an artist myself, with media like dough. I guess my definition of art was a little more limited than I believed it to be, and hopefully, now, it has been somewhat expanded.

But, to be honest, I hated the texture of the dough (I tried adding water, adding flour, etc. but none of these additions changed my opinion of the dough), and I find that if I don't connect to the medium I'm working in, I don't produce very good work. I kind of shut down a little bit after realizing that I wasn't particularly interested in making anything with the dough, and shifted my attention to the dyes. My treatment of the dough became more painterly than sculptural. I might focus more on this "property" of the dough next class (the dough as canvas), unless the texture of the dough has been altered in some way.