Presentations

Interdisciplinary Research and Production: Process Park > The Spiral Kiln

Presentation given as Critic-in-Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, April 2019

In 2018, I founded an experimental residency called Process Park v.1. Nora Khan and I co-directed the residency in a farmhouse in upstate New York with three artists:

Each artist came from different material practices but all used clay in some respect so we learned how to process clay dug from the woods.

The goal of the residency was to ground the practice of the residency — art-making and community building — in a philosophical progression that moved from the individual outward to the social while exploring the materiality of our practices.

There were six philosophical units:

Experience > Space > Time > Place > Object > Relationship

Each unit consisted of a cycle. The cycle began by making dinner together. This simple act was sometimes logistically challenging and interestingly the first sore spot that developed in the social dynamic of the artists in residence. One wanted to eat at 5, the other at 8. We compromised with 6:30 which satisfied none. After making dinner and eating together, we went around the table and read the reading for that unit. Usually, these readings were snippents from theorists or artist manuscripts. Sometimes novels and poetry.

What followed the reading was some casual reflection that usually lasted another hour or two depending on where the conversations led. After, everyone would disperse to their rooms and studios. The residents worked during the day and would come back together again for dinner. The second dinner in the cycle that comprised a unit, i.e.: "Experience" or "Object", was one for reflection on how the previous evening's reading infected the day's work. In this way, we wanted to develop a conscious engagement and reflection on how social and philosophical input could influence one's practice.

Process Park was also a teaching residency and each resident was asked to teach the other residents a skill that they use in their practice. They taught units such as 3D modeling, cheese making, and kimchi fermentation, each focusing on the process of material production so as to gain a greater knowledge of where the materials of consumption and production originated.

During the unit on Time, we read a snippet from an essay by Yann Chateigné on Smithson's journals from the Spiral Jetty.

Is the Spiral Jetty a romantic monument to constellational thinking? Or, what if his grand oeuvre was simply an immense image of time, a future time, that would escape measure, that would repeat without ever being the same, unfold into never ending spirals in an eternal wave: a message addressed to humans, as well as to the cosmos itself, in between warning and desire.

The passage stuck with me. The image of time moving forward as a spiral, not stationary, not merely repeating itself but versioning itself. Slight shifts precipitated by infinite interactions all while existing within the same contextual environment: the sun rises, the sun sets, same but different — it was an elegantly simple notion and remains for me the most beautiful way to conceptualize of time.

After the residency, I moved to Detroit into a house that was abandoned, reinhabited, taken by tax foreclosure, then revived by a tile artist who unfortunately passed away a few years later. All his tools, his effects, furniture and spices remained in the large, partially habitable eight bedroom brick house. Before he passed, he had replaced the sewer line, tempting a backhoe working down the street to drive to his backyard and dig up his line for a few hundred bucks. As a result, fresh clay dug from 6 feet underground lay in heaps in the backyard and had yet to be recolonized by sweet grass.

For reasons unclear, I started digging a pit. The sewer line had been filled in but all this fresh, gray clay lay waiting and digging into it's thick muckiness was a way to probe this new home I found myself in. Broken and chipped bricks, red and cream, littered the backyard so I started making a circular brick floor in the depression I had dug. I burned some wood there and had beers with friends. There was a old-style BBQ grill on the front porch and I got it in my head to try to make some charcoal. So I stacked a large pile of wood then covered the wood in straw raked from the abandoned lots next door that have since become seas of tall swaying grass that pheasants roam and covet with Jurassic screeches. I mixed water with the clay mud and started packing it around the whole of the pile then lit the wood. After it burned for a while I capped it off and let charcoal form in the reduction atmosphere.

It worked ok but the effects of the heat forcing its way through the wet clay — causing small rivulettes of mud to flow down the side, the yellow sulfide crystals building up around impromptu vents in the cone — that got me excited.

It was primordial and reminded me of hours spent out in rain storms as a child acting as a river god, damning ditches and diverting tiny reservoirs as the rain drained off our lawn.

There's a feeling of the Macro that you can only experience when noticing the micro. So I made another for ceramics, this would be Kiln v.1 and appeared like a crude volcano.

Kiln v.2 was a simple dome kiln that would fire pottery as if it were in a pit fire but be ever so slightly more efficient.

This one became a beautiful patchwork or smoked clay and darkened cracks as I tried to patch up the inevitable lacunas that formed from the water vapor pouring out of the wet clay.

I fired a series of third gender totems in it as at the time I was writing an essay called The Place of Gender in Technological Possibility.

This essay was a catalogue piece for Doireanne O'Malley's film Prototypes for which she won the Berlin Art Prize in 2018.

My essay focused on the experience of dysphoria and complicated notions of technology as a corrective measure when it comes to interventions with the self. O'Malley's film follows participants in the fictitious Institute for the Enrichment of Computer Aided Post Gendered Prototypes. The series of films depicts the legendary Hans Schierl as a psychoanalyst exploring the participants dysphoric experiences and eventually moving through the architecture of everyday life to a space of socially facilitated embodiment and community.

Ultimately, I argue, "it is only by retaining a sense of play within the moment of continued social(re)construction that the flexibility necessary to prevent an elongated state of dysphoria can exist. It is in that place where hybridity can be embraced, within a permanent architecture of experimentation."

I decided to build a functioning draft kiln. I had been researching anagama kilns for a few years, wanting to construct one someday, wherever I could find the space. Anagama kilns were large tunnel kilns built in Japan that would be fired for weeks at a time. Dug into a hillside at an incline, they created a natural draft that would draw the flame over the ware and as potash flew past, the minerals in the ash — calcium, phosphorous, sodium — would adhere to the molten silica of the ware causing a glaze to form. I couldn't build a 15 foot kiln in this backyard, but maybe I could do something in a 4x4' square.

I started sketching out ways to elongate the flame. Updrafts, downdrafts, up down, up down and back up. But there was something inelegant to theses box-like chambers. Then I came to a spiral design.

Heat would flow through the spiral, redistributing to the front of the kiln as it exited the chimney, allowing for a modicum of thermal mass to accrue.

The floor of the kiln was stacked to create a gentle incline, just enough to raise the ware into the path of the flame is it swept around the spiral towards the chimney in the center.

At the same time, Nora Khan was creating a set of icons to represent a reset with ideals for a future time after time for a group show at Performance Space NY called Wild Ass Beyond: Apocalypse RN. They would be fired in this kiln, a kiln whose form mimics Smithsonian conceptions of time.

She wanted to include the kiln in her presentation of this work and so inspired by the fire sculpture processes of Nina Hole and Fred Olson, we got some kaowool fire blankets and insulated the entire mass. We fired it wet for 72 hours, reaching a soaking temperature of approximately 1600 degrees Fahrenheit, Cone 012.

Rock is fused minerals. Clay is eroded rock, necessarily silica and aluminum. When the proportion of aluminum content approaches 20%, you've got great, workable, clay. The structure of wet clay is like a layer cake, layers of aluminum and silica suspended in even strata one after another separated by water, it bends as the bonds of the aluminum are strongly charged and keep the silica suspended evenly between them.

When you fire clay, the water is driven out and the silica vitrifies or fuses. It becomes rock and can last tens of thousands of years before eroding into clay once again, commingling with its environment, taking in surrounding cations, other positively charged minerals and reconstituting itself as something in waiting.