Aldwyth: Fully Assembled

<Aldwyth> I'm constantly thinking about what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it and when I'm going to do it and if I'm going to do it.

And if I don't do it, why not?

I mean, get on with it.

What's keeping me from doing it?

Is it me that's keeping me from doing it?

It's something that's always there.

I'm either doing it or I'm not doing it and why am I not doing it?

To me, if I know what it's going to look like, I don't want to do it.

I mean, that's the whole purpose is to see what it's going to look like.

What's going to happen?

mellow music I love seeing the sunrise and I take a picture of it every morning and I use that as a way to connect with my granddaughters.

I send them a picture, my friend Betsy, my sister.

It's a means of communication as much as anything, and I get my exercise.

Good morning.

Wish you all could be here.

Beautiful morning.

Good.

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders.

I take an ant out of these books.

I've been through I don't know how many books.

I've got to order some more.

Because he talks about the story of the ant that, inspires us all.

And this is the only one.

That is the spore that grows out of his head when he impales himself up in the top of the tree and the spores rain down on unsuspecting ants below.

The metaphor being we are all inspired by others' work.

And are impelled to make work ourselves, and climb up to a tree, and rain spores on others.

And, so, where should the ant go in this collage?

Okay.

Now, this is very important, finding the right place.

He's done his work.

There.

<Aldwyth> I'm constantly thinking about what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it and when I'm going to do it and if I'm going to do it.

And if I don't do it, why not?

I mean, get on with it.

What's keeping me from doing it?

Is it me that's keeping me from doing it?

It's something that's always there.

I'm either doing it or I'm not doing it and why am I not doing it?

That's two things.

And things come to me all the time, ideas, and I write them down and lose the paper promptly and forget about it.

But every once in a while, what the nice thing is that you can all of a sudden find this thing and say, "God, that's a great idea, " [laughing] and start doing it.

To me, if I know what it's going to look like, I don't want to do it.

I mean, that's the whole purpose is to see what it's going to look like.

What's going to happen?

upbeat music This started out being a...collage about red, which is my favorite color, and incorporating things like Guston, who used a lot of red in his later work, especially in his abstract stage.

And so this is also sort of a homage to Guston, in that I included a lot of his work in here, and then this around the edge of the centerpiece, this is a lecture he gave talking about painting and art, which I won't recite right now.

Then around the outside, and I started up in the upper left hand corner, started numbering my days, which were black and blue, every other day was alternating black and blue, which is symbolic of, some of them are, some of them aren't, but on the Okawara paper, and then came to the end of a year, I did a little red mark.

So after doing this on a big sheet of the Okawara paper, and I probably filled up half the sheet, I decided to cut them into strips.

And those are the strips that I wound around the outside of this, starting with my first day going on around and around and around and around.

And I don't remember now whether I just decided it was the right size or whether that... that probably came to the end of the numbers at that point.

The numbers had continued around here, continued around, there are four parts to this piece, and the numbers continue around the outside of that and end up, the last bits of the numbers falling out of that last cabinet there, and then my granddaughters are to continue, if I keep going and I can't put the numbers on there, to put the numbers on there until the end.

I think it makes ...a good framing, this is...My life is art, and this is the art that has inspired me, thrilled me, mystified me.

My son built this contraption here as a way of making... of storing things and yet making them accessible.

So, some flowers, this is all right now, is we're making some flower bouquet collages.

Whatever I'm working on, I can organize it to fit the things, because trying to put it all out all over the tables is not very practical.

This is where we get more specific to things like brains and skulls, large things, and then we have lots of eye pages.

And this is supposedly alphabetical along here.

And like I say, a lot of this stuff, I never have used and I never will use, but when you go through a magazine, you tear it apart for some reason.

Other than throw it away, you think, "Well, you never know when you need it, and then you've got to go look for it in a magazine, so why not?"

The center section is a collection of, I collect images that I like and pin them up on my wall.

This wall here is just a blank wall that I put anything up.

But most of the time, it's little things that I cut out that are not probably any use, but I just like them.

And have every variation of just about anything.

In fact, there's even an old painting of mine right there that has disappeared and I don't know where it is.

This was kind of like taking them off my wall and cutting them into squares.

Squares are a necessary part of my art.

Most work is either a square or a double square or multiples of an even square.

So, the whole section, middle section, are black and white mainly, images that either I like the images itself or it represents a particular art or artist that I admire.

This is Twinkle, Twinkle and it came about because I wanted to see if the Okawara paper with black just so I could make it totally blackened out, which it did.

So then I added the holes to make light come through, and therefore Twinkle, Twinkle.

And it's about all the art stars and the constellations and the art, you know, the movements, the different movements.

There's you, and there's me and there's them.

and then there are the big dogs.

There's Henri Matisse and Philip Guston.

Two reasons, paint, because I do love paint, and red.

Picasso, Pierre Bonnard.

And then we have the constellation.

Here's the Dada constellation, Fluxus, happenings, architecture, neon, pop.

And in the middle, - you recognize what this is?

This is Duchamp's last piece with the eyes, these two little holes that look through here.

This is his box opened up, up here.

Duchamp is the light at the end of the tunnel.

He enjoyed what he did.

You know, he did these things that he didn't care whether anybody didn't get it or didn't like it.

They amused him, gave him pleasure in finishing them.

And...that's what I like to do about art.

He didn't agonize over things, and he had a great sense of humor.

And what we have here too is museums all around the edge with telescopes, looking for art stars.

Oh, Catharine Rembert, that was my first art history teacher in college.

She was fabulous.

She'd been everywhere and taken all her own pictures.

And when she talked about art, she had seen there, she had been in front of it.

There are so many people who are artists and so many different kinds of art and so many different ways to do it that I'm just one little twinkle in that sky.

I mean, I don't feel like I'm a Duchamp, but then Duchamp's not me.

So I mean, I'm just another artist.

And each artist, I think, is so individual that it's not something you can spend time worrying about.

<Mark Sloan> She is certainly consumed by her own work, as many artists are, but in her case, there is a tenacity and a kind of an intensity to that obsession that is a little startling to people from the outside.

For example, the piece which is called Casablanca Classic is made up of artists' eyeballs.

Now, it's important to her that all of the works in all of her collages come from original source material, printed materials.

She does not use copies of things.

She does not use anything off the Internet.

It has to have been printed in either a book or a catalog or a magazine.

Casablanca, what was the most famous line from that movie?

"Here's looking at you, kid."

So, it's all of the artists' eyeballs looking back at you.

So she cut out Dal and Picasso and Duchamp and all of these people and has them looking at you.

Now, where this crosses into the obsessive, she knew that you were going to ask the question, "Well, whose eyeballs are whose?"

And so she created a glossary, an index, so that you can see whose eyeball is whose in this seven by seven foot collage.

<Aldwyth> It says, "Casablanca, classic version, 2003 to 2006.

Okawara, silk tissue, jade adhesive, miscellaneous papers."

It's just sort of looking at art and the eyeballs.

You go around, you gather, some places you gather up other eyeballs along, and they get bigger and bigger towards the end.

And then the really big ones at the end, foster smaller ones, and sort of you absorb it and then you pass it on, what you know about art and things you enjoy.

And they're all pieces of art that I either have seen directly, been lucky enough to be in a place that I could see them.

What I tried to do, I tried to get an eyeball of that artist next to the particular work of art.

And it's not every work, so it was artists that would have their pictures in the magazines and things were the easiest.

I'm not supposed to use scissors.

It ends up being very painful, but try a little thing like that.

I don't have anybody else around to cut.

That's good, I like that.

I cut all my own stuff for a long time.

And then I developed costochondritis, which is inflammation of the cartilage between your ribs.

I understand golfers get it, and I could not use the scissors.

I mean, I might use it for just one little snip and then that night I might have costochondritis.

It's very painful.

It should last, sometimes, a couple days.

Anyway, so I was going to give up doing collage, but I still had a lot of things I wanted to do, and very fortunately, I got a wonderful grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation, Eben Demarest grant, and that enabled me to hire somebody to do the cutting for me and I was able to continue working on it.

I don't print anything out.

It makes it too easy.

If you can rearrange it and do it and print it out, you can make it do anything you want it to.

You have the idea in there and you do it, and I like the search and the surprises and the things unexpected, that - I don't dictate it, it sort of dictates itself.

It didn't go the direction I wanted it to.

I'm happy with it, the way it is.

I sort of like some of the interaction.

I haven't used people that much in things.

Eyeballs, which are part of people, are much more adjustable.

You can turn them and do anything you want with them, but people have a direction, pretty much.

<Mark> She has a piece called We Regret to Inform You.

So, I wrote a letter to her and asked if I could do a studio visit, not knowing, just based on that one thing.

So a colleague and I drove down to Hilton Head and she lives on an island.

We went to her octagonal house, 800 square foot house on the marsh, and looked inside and saw this treasure trove of these amazing collages and assemblage works, and we were looking around and it was all crammed into a very small space with drawers and all this.

And I asked her, I said, "This is an amazing studio.

Where do you live?"

And she says, "Oh, I live here."

And I said, "Well, I don't see a bedroom or a kitchen or anything like that."

She says, "Oh, I have a foam pad I roll out when I get tired.

And I have a hot pot and a microwave and a coffee pot.

What else do you need?"

She saw that I was very excited about it.

She said, "Well, this is just amazing because I thought I was going to die and my granddaughters were going to have to figure out what to make of grandma's stuff.

"No one was buying it.

No one was showing it.

There was no interest in it.

>> Is she an outsider?

Is she a folk artist?

Is she a craft artist?

That is a really hard thing to answer because there isn't one art world, and to the extent that there is an art world, say the commercial gallery art world, that is changing and evolving.

<Aldwyth> The four corners, the winds that are blowing me around, are the men in my life.

My marriage, my father, my sons, and a good friend.

Good influences and bad.

I remember one thing, you do something to make friends.

I think it must have been like the third or fourth grade, pretty early, but I found out that I would draw horses and I could either sell them and give them to girls who'd love to have these pictures, and I could draw naked ladies, and the boys [laughing] would either pay five or 10 cents for them.

[laughing] My father was stationed at Parris Island and I went to high school there for a year and a half.

And I can remember in the summer going to the beach, which we would have to drive by where Sam Doyle, who is one of the grand people of folk art, lived.

And Sam Doyle painted his friends and neighbors on pieces of board or roofing tin.

Whatever he could find to paint on, that's what he would use.

And he would set his latest painting out by the road.

And he very often would be out there by his newest painting.

And so when we'd ride by, you might say, "Oh, what is that, Sam?"

And he'd tell you a story about crazy Mary or some person like that.

He was an artist, but I don't think I really thought about it in terms of that, as much as he was giving a story of his life to anybody that would pay attention.

I guess I always knew I'd major in art.

The summer that I graduated from high school, I went to American University, there in D.C. for two semesters and took painting.

I really loved to do painting.

This is where things get a little sticky.

[laughing] I got secretly married.

I just turned 18, my birthday was in November, and we were on a church getaway up in North Carolina, and North Carolina has an easy way, and I thought I might be pregnant.

And I wasn't.

[laughing] [interviewer] Do you think you would've gotten married if you knew?

<Aldwyth> No.

<Aldwyth> No.

And I didn't tell anybody.

And so then, oh, I did talk to a psychiatrist, neighbor, maybe, and I did tell him, and he told my father, Because when they got transferred to Hawaii, they asked me if I wanted to go, and I said yes.

My sister and I have always wondered why when they knew I said I wanted to go and leave South Carolina and this jerk, why when I got out there, they didn't help me get out of it?

I guess my father being a chaplain, he didn't believe in divorce, which I know he didn't.

But anyway, so eventually Tommy came out to Hawaii and we got married again.

And I came back to the University of South Carolina with him.

And we lived unhappily until I got a divorce, which was 20 years.

This is a photograph of the tombstone of the great aunt I am named after.

And so I was Mary Aldwyth.

Unfortunately, I often make my boxes to prove a point about something, and NEA or somebody was saying you couldn't use lead and you couldn't use cadmium red, and I made a box made out of lead, and you opened it up and there was a little bottle of cadmium red paint inside, and I called it Safe.

And an unnamed South Carolina curator was going through the show that it was in and just talking about things and said, "And this is a bottle of menstrual blood saved in a safe."

Ever since then... Nobody would have, he would never have done that if he didn't have the first name of Mary.

So I dropped the Mary and I've been Aldwyth ever since.

I've done a lot of things.

I've been a secretary, I've been a mother, done all sorts of things.

And all the time, I've made art.

And I don't feel like I'm any different from anybody else.

Some people do it by wrapping up Christmas presents and making gorgeous arrangements of something, or they put on dinner parties and do a wonderful spread and these beautiful food things, make beautiful clothes.

I mean, everybody makes art to a certain extent, you just have a little choice.

And I make things that nobody else wants, [laughing] but I like them.

If you make something that somebody wants then you have to make the decision of giving it up...So - For a long time, see, I didn't - I wasn't in a position to make art.

It was not something that I could do.

Art wasn't a part of my life as long as I was married.

It was a competition for my husband, and so he expected me to be the - I was his secretary is what I was.

So, it wasn't until after the divorce that I began to paint again, work.

And when I finally was on my own and was able to do what I wanted to do, it took me a while to find exactly what I wanted to do and to find the thing that gave me great satisfaction.

<Betsy Chaffin> I guess it was probably two winters ago, and Aldwyth and I went up to Charleston for her to give a talk to the entire arts program.

I was invited.

She finishes the lecture with the slides.

There's some questions, and after answering a couple of questions, this one girl raises her hand, said, "Well, you haven't talked about the obstacles in art."

And Mary thinks for just about a half a second.

She said, "Well, I got rid of him years ago."

[laughing] [birds squawking] My husband and I were married November 1, 1969, and moved immediately to Hilton Head.

Mary, at that point, was raising three boys and it was a very different life.

Even though, she wasn't maintaining an artistic practice, she was very, she had that sensibility.

So between that and our playing tennis together, we started a friendship.

<Aldwyth> It wasn't until after the divorce that I began to paint again, work.

Well, I always considered myself a painter until all of a sudden, I wasn't.

The last work I did with paintings was painting a lot of watermelons and a lot of eggs, and they were experiments, and the watermelons were you take a straight line, a horizon line, which I've always liked, and I liked squares and a watermelon fit on a double square.

So, they were all 8 by 16.

They had a horizon line, and then they had a curved line for the watermelon.

Red's my favorite color.

Then you act within those things and see how many variations you can do, and there's just no end to it.

And they were the one thing that somebody bought.

I was able to sell my watermelon paintings, and I needed money, so, I had child support and I had to more or less take care of myself.

I was the queen of part-time jobs.

I read electric meters, had a route that I read once a month, got my real estate license and I hated it.

Cleaning was the big thing.

I cleaned for other people.

Yeah, that's easy.

Well, I was very fortunate in being an artist in the Red Piano Art Gallery here in Hilton Head and the owner, Louanne LaRoche, became a very close friend who exhibited my work.

And I met with a group of professional, retired, illustrative artists who were also fine artists.

I learned more from those guys about making art than any other art teacher.

<Louanne LaRoche> When I first met Aldwyth, I had just purchased the gallery.

It was the first Thursday meeting that I would host.

I was 26 years old.

She was one of the few women that were there.

<Aldwyth> It was a real education.

I had always considered it my MFA.

Ted Wolfe, who was a writer in New York at the time, wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, and he did an article every week, and that was first thing, we sat down, and Joe Bowler would read that whatever the article was for that week, and that would start our conversation.

And we may discuss it for the whole time we were there, hour or two hours, or we might just talk a little bit and it would lead into something else.

<Louanne> She was beginning to go to New York, go to Kansas if there was a show there.

She'd just get in the car in the middle of the night and drive 12 hours to see a show, bring her coffee and her banana and her lunch, see the show, pick up all the free literature that was possible.

And then she'd come to the next meeting with a stack of wonderful material and we'd pass them around.

Some of the artists there might have seen her as a hobbyist painter initially, somebody who had raised their kids and did all of those things.

and she was not a draftsperson.

It was the process, the power of what she found or what she applied or what evolved, and so what I believe to be highly respected over time was the perseverance and the dedication to her craft.

<Aldwyth> I never missed one, unless I was dying somewhere, [snickers] openings, when one of the artists had an opening, you saw everybody, because everybody came.

The biggest thing I learned, that art is work.

I mean, it just doesn't happen.

It's not all inspiration.

You might get ideas, but it's work, and you have to put the work in to get a result.

If you're a painter, you get up and paint.

If you're a sculptor, you get up and you sculpt.

And sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not so good, but you learn to know the difference and you look at other people's work.

You look and look and look and work and work and work, and that's the formula.

<Mark> Aldwyth had applied for the South Carolina Fellowship, which is an award given to one artist, And you have to submit a work sample and a resume.

And Aldwyth submitted a work sample that was a resume.

So it was a three dimensional resume.

My friend from the arts commission called me and said, "We have something that doesn't technically qualify for our purposes, but we thought you might like it."

<Ellen Cassilly> It has little mini cubbies and each one is an art milestone that many respected artists would aspire to, like getting an NEA grant or getting a Guggenheim.

<Ellen Cassilly> MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the MoMA collection.

<Frank Konhaus> The Whitney Biennial, a mortgage.

<Ellen Cassilly> And she has them all meticulously listed.

And on the glass, has an X. Nope, nope, haven't done that, haven't done that, haven't done that and then over here, there's one with a check on it.

And you look at it, and it says work.

She works.

And she has accomplished many wonderful things that haven't necessarily been recognized.

<Mark>She got a lot of rejection from the art world and that became the fuel, if you will, that fueled her career.

And you could look at it like the irritant in an oyster shell that creates the pearl.

<Aldwyth> Try for shows and you get rejected and you want to go to residencies or something and you don't get selected.

And you realize, finally, you say, "Well...you've got to make work that somebody wants to look at."

So spend more time doing the work and finding out what you really want to do.

Then...and that worked.

<Aldwyth> Oh, that's an idea.

<Lori Vrba> Yeah.

<Lori> I have to...

I really actually just have to take it in for a minute.

<Aldwyth> That's all right.

I haven't seen it in a long time.

I haven't seen it since... <Lori>Doesn't it feel good to see it?

<Aldwyth> Yeah, yeah.

This is my first big collage and, <Lori> - Wow, what a way to get it started.

Oh my God.

It's really, it is... <Aldwyth> The Zell Encyclopedia, which I think is a wonderful name.

Way back, my sister gave me a two volume encyclopedia, the Zell Encyclopedia.

In an old encyclopedia, some of the things were very obscure.

You know, old kind of equipment, things that grow, the obscure spores or something like that.

The very beginning, it was the world according to Zell.

I mean this is, everything in the world was in this encyclopedia and there it is.

I used everything.

That was my goal, to use every picture out of the encyclopedia.

It was fabulous when the Ackland bought it.

That was the first big sale I ever made.

I didn't know what I was going to do at all.

And I had the little frozen dinner trays, a lot of those, and I started just putting in, - birds would go in this one, people would go in that, and then, of course, there got to be too many people in the thing so it started to divide naturally into men and women and then big and little, and so it just sort of naturally, as I was cutting, and I was cutting page by page.

I would tear out a page and check both sides before I started cutting to make sure I didn't, and if there were two things, I would have to decide which one would favor, but then I would save something from the other.

In other words, if it was a figure, maybe just the head that would be on the other side that I would use, but I would use something from every one.

<Lori> Do you remember this?

<Aldwyth> The...monkey with the gun?

[laughing] <Aldwyth> Well, I told you, it's my boys.

[laughing] <Mark> She has a piece called, We Regret to Inform You, which was the way so many letters started out to her.

She would apply for a show and she would get the letter back, "We regret to inform you, your work was not included."

So she would take that line out of that letter and then she would hammer it with a giant rusty nail into this totemic shape.

And then it has hundreds, maybe thousands of nails in it, so that's a visualization of her rejection from the art world.

<Aldwyth> I didn't have a desire to paint abstractly.

I didn't have a desire to paint more realistically.

I was just sort of in the middle there, and I was using as many paintings to make into three dimensional things as I was paintings just to hang on the wall.

So it just sort of evolved.

<Beryl Dakers> You are an assembler?

<Aldwyth> Right, I guess you could say that.

<Beryl> And we can call these assemblages.

<Aldwyth> Right, right.

That's what they are.

They're made out of things I find.

Most of my boxes are not.

Once in a while, I'll take a box and make something out of it, but most of my boxes I make from scratch.

<Aldwyth> The next phase of my art was when Hugo hit and I went to Charleston and picked up all the debris and brought that back and started building boxes.

<Aldwyth> This box is made out of old shutters, the green Charleston shutters I picked up off the street that were broken, and in sanding a couple pieces, I found that going through the paint, that there were layers and layers of all these several, like four or five different colors of green, which gives that look, and the whole thing is made out of different parts of the shutters, and down in the base, the numbers are carved in the base that say where this shutter fit into the house.

Each shutter was always numbered because they were handmade.

And then I shot a couple rolls of black and white film, and through sending the black and white film through the poor color process, and then by sanding it, I get color into the film.

<Beryl Dakers> So we have an ocean.

<Aldwyth> So, we have the ocean, and then if you turn the shutters, this side over here is already turned, each one on the other side has some of the boats, the wreckage of the boats strewn up along the shore.

<Aldwyth> I didn't have to worry about sales because nobody bought the other things.

I just did things for myself out of curiosity, and I was going to New York on a regular basis, back then so I was exposed to a lot of the work that was being done then, and so that drove me on.

I was not copying, but I was transferring those methods and experimentations into the materials that I had.

<Betsy Chaffin> You want to feel this piece that she's done.

You want to touch it.

You want to open it up.

You want to see what is inside of it.

There's a patina to them.

If I was thinking in terms of Japanese, I think of that term wabi-sabi.

The beauty in something that has been damaged, that is not necessarily blooming in the Spring, but it is faded in the Fall.

And that sense of beauty, I find in the materiality of what she selects to use.

<Oriane Stender> Her work is very well crafted, but still kind of funky, very handmade, and sort of mysterious, but also very smart.

She achieves this thing that I've thought about a lot, because it's a goal of mine in my own work, and that is it's a really good balance of the craft and the conceptual.

It's, on one hand, very sort of visceral.

You look at it and it's very dazzling and wow, but it's also very intellectual.

<Mark> We don't really have the right container or the right lane to put her work in.

It doesn't neatly fit anywhere in anything we have existing, but there's so many different reference points in her work to feminism, to outsider art, to obsessive art, to folk art, to craft, all of these things are incorporated and enveloped.

<Mark> She is a huge critic of art history.

She's a huge critic of the male patriarchy.

Yet, if you talk to her about this, she does not necessarily come off as someone with those views, but it is completely embedded in her work, and I think that's one of the wonderful things about artists is that they're often a great contradiction.

and she is certainly one of those.

<Aldwyth> Residencies have always been starters for me, for some reason.

I go and they have something different, to offer you, and I try different things.

<Betsy> Aldwyth goes to Anderson Ranch.

She had plans to paint and she gets there and one thing leads to another and she ends up wanting to do experiments, and wanting to do experiments with clay, with metal, and she starts on this remarkable tour de force, this evolution of a species.

<Aldwyth> So I started making things out of clay, and the easiest thing to do was to make a little figure out of clay.

This is one of the early ones.

Since I was not a clay person and trying to get it to work, I put wire inside of it to hold it so it would stand up.

And then, of course, when I fired it, it all cracked and everything didn't do so well.

But anyway, I like the way it looked.

It was a learning process and that was part of the learning curve.

So this whole thing is filled.

And so that piece right there is, these are the clay figures, so this is the page that is for that piece.

So it describes it, everything down to how I took the photo, what kind of film I used.

Tells the size and where it is stored.

It's stored in the black box, ta-da.

<Betsy> It's about craft.

It's about her wanting to experiment and seeing how far she can go with that.

It's about her knowledge of art history, whether it's Dada, whether it's conceptual art.

...Even though, again, there's the materiality that has a romantic quality about it, the ideas are extremely contemporary.

<Aldwyth> Everywhere I go, I make eyeballs.

This is an Anderson Ranch eyeball.

And I made one piece of box that was filled with eyeballs.

I call it 23 Eyeballs and one (beep).

And on the bottom of the eyeballs, I put...the artists that I love, and I won't tell you what's on the bottom of the (beep).

[snickers] <Aldwyth> ...this is an eyeball I made at Kohler.

I made a number of them.

Kohler has two sections, it has an iron section and the porcelain section, and I wanted to do something with clay, wanted to make eyeball, so I went down to the porcelain section, and they gave me a bucket and pointed to a faucet, like a fire hydrant would hook up to it, and they said, "Be careful now, it goes fast."

So I had to put the bucket up under this thing and it has a handle.

I'd go whoosh, whoosh and the bucket would be full of liquid porcelain.

It would come out so fast, and then I made some molds and poured the liquid in and made the eyeballs, and to fire things, they have, it's like a train that runs through the middle of the factory.

The cars looked to me like about the size of train cars, but I don't think they were really quite that big.

But they would pile all the things that needed to be fired on there, and the loader, the guy that was loading the cars, took my eyeballs and put them around, put them on the edge of a sink and a tub, all around, all over the thing, and it takes about three days, as I remember, for it to go from one end.

This is a huge kiln.

It just goes through very slowly like this.

They tell you what time it'll come out.

Somehow, the word got out, and it seemed like everybody in the factory was there waiting to see my eyeballs come out on the other end.

[laughing] <Tori Lusik> Good morning.

How are you?

<Aldwyth> Did you have a good trip in?

<Tori> Yeah, the traffic was weird, but it was overall good, but I picked up the photos, so you want to?

<Aldwyth> Oh, good.

At the drug store.

<Both>Yeah >>Okay.

<Tori> You want to head off to work?

<Aldwyth> Yeah.

<Tori> Then I'm ready to start gluing and I can work on the flap while you line up and measure everything.

>>Okay.

<Aldwyth>This one doesn't have it.

This one needs it too.

<Tori> Yeah.

<Aldwyth>Oh, he does have it.

<Tori> It does?

<Aldwyth> Yeah.

<Tori> Oh.

Oh yeah, okay.

So, we're just doing this?

<Aldwyth> Just that.

<Tori> Okay.

<Aldwyth> I'm working on a collage that I started, how many years ago, which took me forever to figure out how I was going to make it work?

I had the idea in my head.

I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn't figure out how to make it visual.

It's about the book Pictures of Nothing, which was put out after Kirk Varnedoe, the curator at the Museum of Modern Art, gave his series of lectures at the National Museum.

<Kurt Varnedoe> Our starting point in the mid '50s then seems simultaneously to present a new form of abstraction and a new kind of challenge to or resistance against its premises.

<Aldwyth> He died like three months after he finished the last lecture.

His friends and his wife put together the book.

<Mark> She went to the national archives in Washington to watch the videos of his lecture.

Some of the images that were minor players in Kirk Varnedoe's lectures actually become the largest illustrations, and likewise, some of the most important ones just get short shrift.

So that was of interest to her, it was a wrong that needed to be righted.

<Aldwyth> I decided that I was going to make the lecture into a visible work.

<Mark Sloan> And so she bought all these different copies of the book.

She cut it up in different ways.

She envisioned it as a three part piece, a wall piece, a floor piece, and maybe an interactive piece, a performative piece, and she worked on it - She has been working on it now for years.

<Aldwyth> So, in the book I'm working on, it's every slide that he showed and every word that he said.

In the opening statements by, I consider them, his - sort of his family, I write a little letter to him saying that I understand exactly why they made the changes that were necessary to do.

My work is not to criticize that, my work is just to satisfy what I want to see myself.

And I'm thinking about how can I make it visual or touchable or whatever?

How can I turn it into something that somebody else will sit and look at and say, "Oh, I get it.

"How can I do it?"

I woke up with it.

I went to sleep with it.

I'm working on some other thing, thinking, "Can I translate this into Pictures of Nothing?"

<Betsy Chaffin> I think her work is about work.

The working of it, the doing of it expands the idea.

And the other is a Jasper Johns quote, which is paraphrasing, You take something and you do something to it, and then you do something to it again.

And then you keep doing something to it again.

And I think that, I've always thought of as an underlying theme of what her work was about.

<Aldwyth> My personal life, it has been pretty hard, but as far as my work, it really hadn't affected that any.

<Aldwyth> I'm getting close to the end of "Pictures of Nothing".

Nothing I've ever done ever hinged on any one project or any one work.

Everything's sort of a work in progress.

And I'd like to see it finished.

I don't know if it'll ever be finished to tell you the truth.

Did you see downstairs?

The number of encyclopedias I have down there?

I love what happened with Zell and I want to do something with the encyclopedias without repeating Zell, you know which is... that's my next big project.

closing music [APT jingle]