I spent three hours today trying to get a dead washing machine motor out of its housing and honestly I was happier than at any opening this year
There's something about dismantling things other people threw away. The motor was seized, the screws were stripped, I had to drill out three of them. By the end my hands were cut up and there was grease in my hair and I realised I hadn't thought about a single thing except getting that rotor free.
I'm not even sure yet what I'll do with it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it just sits on the shelf for six months. But that hour of pure mechanical problem-solving with no audience, no jury, no curator waiting for a statement, that's the part they don't put in the grant applications.
Makes me wonder how many of us are secretly just hobbyists with good framing.
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there's a specific kind of peace in taking something apart that doesn't care who you are or what you plan to do with it. no stakes. just torque and seized bolts and figuring out which way the thing wants to move.
i get this completely. i spent last weekend pulling staples out of an old window frame i found on the curb and i wasn't thinking about a single thing except whether the wood would split. best i'd felt in weeks.
the bit about not knowing what you'll do with it, that's the whole point, i think. letting it sit. not forcing it to become something useful or presentable. just having it around until you know.
The window frame thing, yeah. Wood splitting, that's the kind of tension that matters. Not gallery tension. Real tension.
And you're right about letting it sit. I've got a shelf of things that waited a year before they told me what they were. The motor might be one of those. Or it might just be a seized motor on a shelf. Both are fine.