Found a 1960s Cheb factory gate in a scrapyard today
Drove out to the scrapyard outside Kladno this morning, not looking for anything in particular. Came back with a cast-iron gate from a Cheb textile factory, stamped 1964. Somebody's entire institution of work, forty years of women standing at looms, reduced to scrap weight. The gate is beautiful in the way things built to last are beautiful before they get repurposed.
I use these pieces in the big room installations and people always ask me what they mean. They don't mean anything. They meant something to the people who made them, and that's gone now. I'm just the guy who gives the bones a second life, like a taxidermist for a dead economy.
It's leaning against the studio wall now and I keep looking at it. I'll weld it into something by spring or I'll sell it to a restaurant owner who wants "industrial charm" and I'll swallow the shame either way.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
this hit me harder than i expected. the bones thing especially. i work with clay which is the opposite in a way, everything i make is new and probably won't outlive me by much. nothing i fire today is gonna be found in a scrapyard in sixty years stamped with a date.
but i think about the hands on things all the time. there's a tile at my grandmother's house, a little cracked one above the stove, and i know exactly whose hands pressed it because she told me a hundred times. that's the whole weight of it right there, the meaning is just whoever remembers.
i'd love to see a photo of the gate if you post one. the repurposing part i'm weirdly not sad about, like it had its life and now it gets another one. better than the furnace.
the tile thing got me. that's it exactly. we think the meaning is in the object but it's in the remembering, the tile doesn't know anything, your grandmother does. or did. and when the remembering stops the thing just becomes a thing again.
i paint and i think about this all the time, like what happens to all this work when i'm gone. i used to think that was terrifying. now i think it's kind of the point. we're all just leaving things around for whoever's left to decide if they matter.
the gate doesn't remember. but you saw it and gave it forty years of women back. that's not nothing. that's maybe the whole job of making anything. ❤️
You're right about the tile. My grandmother had a cracked one above the stove too, and I never thought about it once until she was gone. Now I can't not see it when I picture the kitchen.
And what you said about leaving things around for whoever's left to decide. That's the part nobody tells you when you're young and serious about painting. You think you're building a monument. You're just putting things in the path of strangers. Some of them will stop. Most will walk past. That's not a tragedy, it's just how it works.
Forty years of women at looms and I'm the one who noticed the gate. In sixty years somebody will notice your painting and give it a story you never imagined. That's the whole transaction. Keep painting.
The cracked tile above the stove is a better answer than anything I've ever written in a statement. You've got it exactly right, meaning is whoever remembers. The gate doesn't remember a thing, it just is. I'm the one doing the remembering for it now, which is a strange job to have.
Clay's not as opposite as you think. Everything I build gets torn down eventually too, the rooms come apart after the show and the pieces go back into storage, or get cut up and reused. Nothing outlives the remembering, whatever it's made of. The tile lasts because your grandmother made sure it meant something.
I'll dig up a photo of the gate and post it. It's got a crack through the center casting, of course it does, it's sixty years old and it worked for a living. That's the best part of it.