Sometimes the process of unraveling isn't as far along as we would like and so we draw our attention to the breaking, bending, burning, rubbing, scratching, scraping, grinding, wetting, dissolving, tearing, please join with more...
...and plan ways to playfully include these types of transformation. As an example I might choose dissolving as my process and take an incomplete deck of playing cards and let the weather dissolve the surface of the cards for a season. Now I have elements for a new construction. I might attempt a house of cards; though I actually made a collage tryptic, with a prayer of mourning cut out in strips and pasted around the edges to commemorate a loss.
Transformation in the material world includes attending to the degree to which different materials come apart. I tend to notice what something started as and what it becomes. Transformation comes in many flavors.
Transformation Exercise #6: Talisman
Let us create one more object to remind us of the principle of transformation. Take a bit of something and help it along in its weathering. Choose one of the listed functions and set it into action. Place the material out into the world where the process occurs. Periodically check on it. Or set up a processing plant. Select from a roadway a piece of something that episodic pressure helps degrade.
Place this substance in a container. Leave it visible or wrap it. The contents exist under a certain layer of mystery. Label this talisman of transformation: nature at play.
I found in the attic an old blue upright Hoover and placed it for a season among the houseplants that summered outside. That old vacuum’s wonderfully cracked cord held my imagination. I remember a whitish blue surface and deeper richer blue in the cracks, almost like a ceramic glaze.
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