There are times when you purchase an item, or 2, that you have no idea what you are going to do with, but it, or they, are just too good to pass up. They are placed into a drawer, forgotten, or even worse, they sit on the shelf in plain sight mocking you. The box mocked while the ceramic head lay in wait. In truth, 3 boxes mocked and 4 heads chatted together while exiled. All were thrift store finds so that makes it better, right?
When making a piece like this I have to think 3 steps ahead to make sure I do not attach a part to soon. The time turner, disassembled from a travel Boggle game, is a stand alone mechanism. (I thought it was unusable but in actuality I had not fully released it from the plastic holder. In a panic, I now have a 4 pack coming from the Netherlands to sit on a shelf and mock) It is created and attached with no other pieces affected by its placement. The book on the other hand is interwoven to the moving parts as well as the placement of the head. The head also determines where to place the peep hole for her face, which has to be cut before all is connected. When the handle is turned the book opens and closes a bit. This "bit" is gauged by the depth of the box. I have to figure out, usually by thinking backwards, where to start. In this case I had to start with the head, moving to the size of the book, which told me where to attach the wire mechanism. After all the thinking and attaching, it did not work. The string, which is connected to the book covers, kept wrapping itself around the wire and aggressively jamming the book to the box. Not what I was going for. It took a while, sitting in silence, wrapping and unwrapping, again and again, because, as we all know, if you keep doing the exact same thing over and over you will figure out the answer. Well, in this case it worked . It was a tension thing. Once the book was held tightly by the string there was no slack to wrap. And now the music can be turned back on.
In a song by the group System of A Down they sing "Between the sacred silence and sleep". I love this time, not awake or asleep, because I this is where my creativity flows. Somehow I can see the patterns moving throughout my pieces, the connections become clear, ideas become sharper. I am not granted this enlightenment every night but I use it to the fullest extent when I am aware enough through the sleepy haze. And then there are those times that the most brilliant ideas fade away into dreams.
The rain has stopped and the sun is out so it might a day to see parts of the world other than my workshop. I really love being in my workshop...maybe I will just open the window and let the world come to me.
Peace,
Hilari
