It’s a feel when a pallet of raw material arrives with a plonk, and just sits there, awaiting transformation into… something.

Back in 2014 when I was spooling up for A house made of air, a flatbed truck arrived one afternoon and dumped 55 sheets of 4’x8’ plywood off the back end. It landed with a ka-bam.

Richard Swayze, the artist-craftsman advising on the feasibility of the sculpture I had in mind standing up properly, looked at me like I was nuts. He cocked an eyebrow that asked, pointedly, do you really intend to rip an absolutely mental amount of ply into this multi-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle you’ve (somewhat vaguely) proposed? I did. He didn’t know me yet; there was an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it-Kristin vibe. I looked at me like I was nuts too. So it begins.

Wish I had a pic from that day. By the time of the above work-in-progress shot, the stomach-churning pile of ply (at left) had dwindled.

This one shouldn’t be so difficult, are my famous last words every time. But really, this one should be much easier….

Pictured mid-coffee break. People wax on about the flavortudes of wine, which is a topic I should theoretically know something about, having been to idiosyncratic wineries on a majority of continents. It’s very nice, is my opinion. Coffee, on the other hand, is high-stakes and a matter of the utmost discernment. I get wistful thinking about 2013-era Kuma, in those days a did-it-when-he-felt-like-it roaster’s roaster (literally, that’s who my roaster friend fan-boyed for) in Seattle whose beans bloomed like liquid magic. We never know what the next cup might bring.

Still bugged by the eternal Brancusi, as ever marvelling. Making a bit of a study of the images he made of his work in situ around his studio, as if he’d set in motion a metaverse all his own. “Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it,” he said. Which prompts a bit of musing for digital art, where 3D renderings are generated through the abstraction of a camera. There’s nothing else quite like these in the history of either sculpture or photography.