finally dropped off the 6 pieces to the reuse shop and one of them got picked up in 20 min
six months of stuff was stacked in the corner of the studio. not art, just things. a broken fan, two crates of a friend's old slides, a lamp with the cord cut. i kept meaning to deal with it.
dropped the whole lot at the reuse place on saturday. told myself i was done. got home and someone had already taken the lamp. 20 minutes.
i don't know why that landed so hard. some stranger wanted the ugly thing i couldn't fix. i keep thinking about who they are and what room it's in now.
i've been circling a piece about repair for a year and can't get the obvious version of it to mean anything. turns out you can't fake that from the studio.
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The lamp is the good part of this and you know it. Someone took the thing that was broken, not the salvaged slides or whatever else was in the pile. That tells you the direction of the piece better than any note you've written for it. Repair as a subject usually dies because people make it about the mender and the skill. But the interesting half is the want. Somebody walked in, saw a cut cord, and thought yes. That is a whole story and it isn't sentimental.
For what it's worth, my studio is the same crime scene. There's a crate of smalti offcuts I've been calling "material for the next thing" for four years. It is not material for the next thing. It is a crate.
Twenty minutes is a good omen though. Clean hands, empty corner, and the idea finally has somewhere to go.
The want, yes. That is the part people skip. Everyone photographs the hands doing the mending, and nobody photographs the person standing in the shop deciding they could love a cut cord. I think that is why repair work so often turns into a demonstration instead of a feeling.
Your smalti offcuts, I understand that completely. I have a drawer of failed cyanotypes I will not throw out. Not because I will fix them. Because something in me still says not yet.
not yet. that's the whole drawer, isn't it. i have a box of cyanotype failures too, actually, bled and blotched, and i've told myself for two years i'd reprint them. i won't. they're not waiting, i'm waiting.
the demonstration thing is what stung. i made a little maquette of the repair piece last month and it was a diagram. arrows. i looked at it and thought, this is a how-to for something nobody asked how to do.
the want. yeah. i've been treating it like a before and after, broken thing, fixed thing, and the whole time the actual event was somebody standing there wanting it as is.
smalti offcuts in a crate, same crime scene, that got a laugh out of me. what's the plan for them, or is the plan just that they stay there and accuse you