In September 2019 I was invited to participate in two shows hosted by EC Brown and Catie Olson. This was my first foray into the art world. The first was a show held at their house. The outdoor portion of the event, called 6 Flags, included several amplified wind chimes and live DJs performing along with the sound sculptures. The second show was ASCII 8, a group show in the back yard of Garden Apartment Gallery in Chicago. The pieces there were all wind chimes of one sort or another, some audible and some not. The art was to be exposed to the elements and left to decay over the course of a month.
I’ve long thought of my instruments as creating their own aesthetic. They are sculpture as well as practical items. Generally, I believe that with instruments form should follow function. I’m inspired by the wind instruments I work on every day. Every part of a saxophone or flute has a practical purpose. Likewise, I keep my instruments simple in form, with little embellishment aside from occasional color choices. I believe that interest derives from the grace by which an object fulfills its practical purpose.
The sculptural piece I created for 6 Flags didn’t serve any predetermined purpose, so I had the liberty to explore with materials and let the form evolve during the building process. Normally I work deliberately from a strict plan. I won’t even join two pieces together until I have purchased and received all the parts I will need for the entire project, with a plan for how they will all fit together. With this instrument, however, I decided to work completely intuitively. I knew from the beginning that I would use a few misfit saw blades, but otherwise I didn’t plan more than a few minutes into the future. I think of it as the sculptural version of a sketch. I thought of the early days of working with pitched metallophones, when I would explore the sounds I could create with objects but attaching them to whatever structure was immediately available. I built a frame out of scraps of wood: some old fence posts, spare parts, and pieces cannibalized from an old bike trailer. Within this, I suspended seven saw blades with nylon and cotton cord. These were curious-sounding blades; the pitch depends on how hard they are struck, and they immediately drop in pitch when the sound decays. They aren’t useful for playing melodies, but playing rhythms on multiple blades gives an unusual-sounding “drum beat.” I hung two plastic mallets hang from one side and invited guests to play.
With Harp, my piece for GAG, I had more time to prepare and I was more deliberate with my planning. Since there was not a specific musical purpose to the sculpture, I wasn’t burdened by any a priori ideas of what “playability” means, giving me space to focus more on pure aesthetics. I wanted to create something flowing and graceful. My raw materials were 37 terracotta hats left over from my partner Vesna Jovanovic’s group show at Slow Gallery in December 2018. During the gallery opening, I discovered the unique acoustic properties of the hats. When they are supported in the center they have a timbre that one can only hear from ceramic objects—imagine the sound of tapping a finger on the side of an earthenware bowl. I was particularly reminded of terracotta flowerpots, which are becoming a common sighting in contemporary percussion. I first saw them in an amazing performance by So Percussion of David Lang’s The So-Called Laws of Nature. The piece called for four flower pots with slightly different pitches that created beats that changed patterns as the sound resonated throughout the concert hall. These ceramic hats, arrayed microtonally through an interval about an octave, create the same effect. I imagined visitors to the show interacting with the hats, revealing the relationships between the hats in the ways they create beats.
I planned to suspend the hats with sash cord that ran through the tip of each one. To prepare the hats, I had to cut off the tops, leaving a hole of exactly 1/8”. This was a challenge, because the shapes were so heterogeneous. Some had a large mass of clay at the top, while the cavity ascended almost to the tip of others. I devised a primitive depth gauge out of a mallet and a block of wood. While resting the hat on the block of wood, I raised the mallet shaft, which is about the same diameter as the cord, until it was wedged in the top of the cavity. I measured the length of the shaft with a T-square, marked the hat at the same height, and cut with an angle grinder.
The next step was finding the right arrangement for the hats. The curator at Garden Apartment Gallery, Marlene Krygowski, offered me a few potential spaces for installation, including the supports for a large swing. The metal beam was about eight feet wide, just enough room to suspend the hats in seven columns. I arranged them in stacks of unequal numbers, evoking the shape of a concert harp, with each column as a string. I fashioned a “sound board” out of a thin sheet of plywood that each “string” would attach to.
I measured the pitch of each hat with the spectrum analysis feature in Audacity. They all fell within about an octave, D5-D#6, with most of the clustered in the center. Arranging them in stacks by note created a graceful normal curve, seen in this real-life bar graph.
I installed the piece at Garden Apartment Gallery in steady rain on a Saturday afternoon. It look over three hours to finish, so I was thoroughly soaked by the time I left. I left out several pairs of percussion mallets for guests to use. One theme of the show was decay, and I wanted to explore how humans contribute. To that end, some of the mallets were too hard for use on ceramic objects. I fully expected some of the hats to break by the time the piece came down.
The opening that night was likewise soaked through with rain. The closing the following month was colder but much more pleasant. The artists broadly interpreted the meaning of wind chimes, with pieces that were audible or inaudible; metal or textile; natural or artificial; static or interactive; ornate or minimal.
Marlene generously allowed me to keep the piece up through the winter. When I took it down in March I found that one of the hats was cracked, audibly though not visibly. The sound board was warped, with moss starting to grow on the underside.
I was pleased to be able to leave part of the piece behind to permanently decorate the yard. I left two stacks of ten hats each suspended from either side of the support structure, hanging in the spaces between the posts and the swing. I left a few mallets there, too. If you find yourself at Garden Apartment Gallery in the future, please try it out.
