Love and Labor

One morning in Kohler, when I had NPR on, an interview captured my attention. In it, a woman with a microphone traveled the country asking people from all walks of life to answer three simple questions for her: "What do you live for?" "What would you die for?" and "What would you kill for?"
Aside the philosophical/existential comments of highly educated and little-lived 30-somethings, most answers had to do with family, one's partner in life, and achieving fulfillment in one's profession or job. But mostly, answers named a person (or persons), loved by and cared about deeply by the interviewee.

The radio piece made me think then, for reasons that only became clear to me much later.
For a while I've been digesting the same topic: Love and Work. Emotional and physical attachment. How they are fundamental to us, human beings; to our being human. How they each can become the driving force and the end result of one another. The expression "Labor of Love" kept floating through my mind.



Love is hard work, a constant maintenance in the same way one might tend a garden, build a house, bake a pie, keep fixing the same rotten junk of a car, or make a piece of artwork.
Labor we think of as the tool, the means to get to something, the token. I wonder if work is only satisfying, only fulfilled when it comes from loving what we do.
Many examples come to my mind for how Labor and Love are intertwined in immensely complex ways. I watched my mother grind her body with repetitive, "dumb" labor for decades; first in a factory, then at home with housework, then in the few different but always physically demanding jobs she held before finally retiring. I can't say she loved these jobs, but somehow the motions of doing them brought a kind of affirmation to her life. Athletes understand intimately how love and labor depend on each other. Distance running is like that for me.


The finished project may feel like a kitchen sink of these ideas for now.
I had made all the pieces at Kohler I felt necessary for an installation that addresses the relationship between Labor and Love. The glazed ceramic pieces are the casts of the broken plaster molds. They look like a field of semi-precious gemstones, partly polished, partly rough. I can also show them on pedestals, isolation and elevation making the individual objects even more precious-looking.
There are accompanying text pieces on tiles, on plaques that attach to the pedestals, and as free floating gold lustered ceramic calligraphy on the wall.
It will be a while for the installation to be shown in its entirety. By then, some things might change, I may have more clarity or at least a better way to talk about it. But I think I've got it right for the most part already.

Here are some images of the finished work (photography by Jeff Machtig of John Michael Kohler Arts Center). Please visit my website timeatihanyi.com for more.

hundreds of pieces of glazed vitreous porcelain cast from the broken mold fragments. the smallest fragment here is about 2" and the largest is about 20"

Repetition

Repetition is in the heart of casting, while repeatability is the cornerstone of any manufacturing process.
Days and weeks blur together during art residencies, losing the track of time completely. Much happens during a workday, sometimes by mid-afternoon it feels like I've lived three full days since the morning.

But much of every day is a returning pattern of getting up, biking to the factory, casting, glazing, cleaning, assembling, moving, finding people to do some kind of specialized task for me, (one of the perks of the factory is the experts crew of workers doing spraying, epoxying, finishing work etc. who would often times help out with things like covering the large surfaces of my pedestals evenly with glaze, fixing pinholes and glaze faults after the firing, or would cut fired ware with a diamond blade to the size and shape I need), having it done, loading or unloading the kilns, more glazing, more loading and unloading and finally biking home to crash for a few hours in the horizontal position until the alarm goes off.
On, and on, and on...

One of the side projects is this large tile with a pattern made with hundreds of barcodes I had fished out of a dumpster (work in progress. the yellow color is that of the plastic film of the barcode decal)

In the final two weeks of the residency this pattern seemed to be on a fast forward. I completely divorced from the circadian pattern and set on a pattern of kilns firing up and cooling down. I would leave the factory at 3am or 5am regularly, returning again at the start of the workday (9am). On one occasion, on the final week, I left at midnight to take a quick nap at the house, then went back to the factory to get something out of the kiln at 3am, which I glazed with gold luster until 9am so that I can pop it back for the next round of firing. Then I stayed on working for an entire day, leaving again at 11pm exhausted to the point of not remembering where I left my bike when coming in.

The nature of my projects dictate a certain kind of repetitiveness too. For the installation, I wanted to create as many pieces as I possibly could, resulting in a series of processes done over and over. However, as much as I had expected the final weeks to be repetitive and predictable to the point of boredom, the numerous side projects I had started but haven't yet finished, and the new ideas for pieces to add to the installation that seemed to uncontrollably flow out of me in the last minute created a welcome break from the predictability (but added to the burden of multitasking).

hospital ware molds on the casting floor adjacent to the A/I studios. look at these perfectly organized rows of molds

the same great form, but each mold has a different personality that is only known to the caster working with these molds

casting cones

The casting floor is a striking visual environment full of repetition. I finally managed to take some images (see above and below)  and got an OK on using them in my artist lectures. Whether it is the gigantic molds laid out in neat rows, or greenware on the conveyer belt, or the casting cones stacked on their racks (plastic cones to be inserted into the pour holes on the molds to store extra slip in order to create a positive pressure in the mold), this visual repetition is seductive to me and my artwork and aesthetic sensibility clearly reflects this fact.
The repetitiveness in the making process or daily routine and the repetition in a visual pattern is attractive for the same reason: There is a promise of organization with a hint of chaos. There is a huge seductive power to the organized pattern that is almost, but not completely, the same throughout. Small distractions, misalignments, and flaws make the uniformity of pattern even more obvious and the tension between the perfect and the almost perfect both jarring and irresistible.

more cones on the rack

more repetition of molds and finished casts  (the ware from the previous day is drying slowly under the shrouds. what was cast today is still in the molds)