Recently I've had to face the fact that after the first one, my new series of bowls took a turn into a direction that sometimes seems totally absurd. In some ways they're quite fragile. Soft wisps of unryu paper are exposed in the second. In the third, a little flag of watercolor paper could be bent or crushed. With each bowl the copper mesh became less rigid.
With the first bowl, the copper mesh was very flexible until I added layers of unryu paper and acrylic medium. That stabilized it. By the time I finished the bowl, though, I'd decided to let the crystal sphere stabilize the whole bowl, holding paper/mesh and iron together by its weight alone.
Even this was unusual for me. I've always wanted my iron bowls to feel and be very stable. Rigidity seemed like the way to accomplish this. So if part of a bowl felt too flexible to me, I'd make a little tack weld to bind it to its neighboring part, so it would be firm and rigid.
Recently I've come to think that this "crazy" turn toward flexibility and fragility is my artistic response to the terrorist attack on 9/11/01. I'd already started the first bowl then, but I hadn't finished it or made the decision to let the sphere hold it together.
The later two bowls were begun after 9/11. So I think they express my basic emotional response to that day - a shocking, ongoing awareness of the fragility of life. Everything that seems stable and familiar can be gone without warning, destroyed.
This is an obvious fact of life - before 9/11. But like many people, I was not inclined to face it, to absorb it, to live out its consequences. So I made bowls that were rigid and sturdy, like the way I wanted life to be.
After what's stable and familiar is destroyed, is anything left? Only love remains - and sometimes, hate lingers a long time too. Both energies can be much stronger than any human structures.
So now I am making fragile bowls to express the fragility of life - and the power of love.
8:19:31 AM 
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