kellysearsmith
14 April 2008 @ 07:02 am
 
There's something wonderfully trangressive about transforming a utilitarian object, like a pail or a mirror, through art. There's the surprise of the sequined shoe; the glory of the art car and the concept car both; and then, too, as I'll demonstrate here, the lean beauty of the custom or art knife. Even in this age of high tech mass production, or perhaps because of it, the art of the smith continues, organized by guilds and transmitted by masters. For the custom knife community, magazines and conventions, websites and organizations bind together the few who make custom knife work their hobby, their profession, and for some, their obvious obsession and passion.

There are as many styles of art knife as there are types of knives. Pure ethnic, hunter (or rustic), and military styles I don't feature here, because, for the most part, they are about authenticity to a cultural tradition (a type of utility, but more sociological and psychological) or a functional utilitarian end that evokes a masculine culture that just doesn't interest me. Despite my love of the fantastic in the arts, I also pass over pure fantasy blades -- they are too over the top to suit my aesthetic tastes.

The knife smiths and studios that I feature here work in these styles, but have also created pieces that strike a fine balance between the cutting essence of the knife and its realization as something for the gaze, much beyond any practical end. In that sense, these are truly interstitial works of art.

[Rick] Dunkerley Handmade Knifes



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kellysearsmith
19 March 2008 @ 06:19 pm
Recipe for Life: Just a Few Conditions Short of Primordial Soup  
For years, science fiction narratives have duked it out over whether life forms elsewhere will be carbon-based, as we are, or something else -- say, silicone based. Who can forget Star Trek Next Generation Episode 17, "Home Soil," in which the intelligent sand aggregrate refers to our type of life as "ugly bags of mostly water"?

Today, we may be closer to an answer -- we have found our very first evidence of carbon on a planet outside our Solar System. Does that mean when we find alien life (at least life we recognize) it will be carbon-based? Hard to say, but the evidence of planetary carbon is tantalizing.

According to the BBC's science reporter, Helen Briggs, reporting a study published in Nature, methane (an organic--and so inherently carbon-based--compound) has been found in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a star that is approximately 63 light years from earth. The find was made by Dr. Giovanna Tinetti and co-authors Mark Swain and Gautam Vasisht from NASA's JPL (Pasadena CA) using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Why does methane matter? Briggs writes, "Under certain circumstances, methane can play a key role in prebiotic chemistry - the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life."

To date scientists have confirmed the existence of 270 planets orbiting stars other than Sol, our own. This most recent study also found water vapor in the planet's atmosphere, but scientists say they believe it is too hot to support life. Ah, but if not there, then where? and when?



source: BBC GCSE Science page on Atomic Structure and Bonding
 
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kellysearsmith
15 February 2008 @ 04:37 pm
Working the (Graduate) Program: Shootings at NIU  
I am saddened today by the shootings at NIU, shootings we now know were done by a former graduate student there (27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak) who had since moved here, where I adjunct and work (at the same university, btw, from which I received my doctorate) -- to our School of Social Work. I didn't know him, and I hope I don't know anyone exactly like him, but I understand the emotional pressure of graduate school, and I've seen many gifted minds crack under the strain. So I write this post to explain to others, who puzzle over why a bright young man with a bright future, in this case a successful student, might find working the graduate program too much. Which is not to say that graduate school pressures alone turn the trick. Those commentators who have already theorized about the American post-Baby Boom generational tendency to externalize blame, refuse personal responsibility, and turn to gun violence in extremes of emotion are not off the mark as to why such pressure might lead to what was historically an unthinkable result.
"By all accounts Kazmierczak was a good student. Serving as a member of the NIU Academic Criminal Justice Association and a teaching aid as an undergraduate. In 2006 he received a Dean's Award from the sociology department." [ABC News]
Graduate school is more of an emotional than an intellectual challenge, in my experience. It's about incredibly long hours, with little direct reward and no certainty of a place in the field. Grad students are poor, live poorly, and are low on the totem pole within department life. The value judgments of professors and, later, hiring faculty can sting deeply -- they can pierce the soul. And they hit right where the graduate student is most vulnerable, at the self-esteem that is so often mainly if not entirely based on intellect and a forming identity within a professional field. There can be a terrible loneliness too, for some -- away from home, matched or mismatched with other grads, some of whom find little time to socialize or make little time for themselves. Even when resting, many graduate students feel they are wasting time -- they could always be working harder, smarter -- getting ahead, finding an edge. And now for a more personal observation: The myth in popular culture is that book-learned people are often impractical, unable to make it in the real world. Not so much in my experience. But very smart people tend to overthink things -- they're often neurotic and unhappy. Their constant worry over the judgments of others (since their work products tend to be intellectual and conceptual rather than concrete and material) doesn't help.

Students who come to graduate study with strong family support and / or a positive sense of self weather these slings and arrows better than others (Steven's mother father had moved to Florida in 2004, where she passed away). For the rest, it's a constant struggle not to feel a fraud, soon to be discovered. And for many, this feeling lasts well into junior faculty years. I think the feeling is especially hard on students in fields that society at large does not necessarily applaud, those of basic science or social sciences or literature or the arts. Not only are they suspect, but their field is suspect -- of what value is it, aside from that they like it and are good at it? This lack of value is reflected back to them by undergraduate students who carry with them a social bias against learning for learning's sake and a desire to get to the real business of life, what they and others call "the real world." Those who can do, and those who can't...teach. It's also communicated through scarcity of funding opportunities -- summers without support, and having to teach (sometimes long hours) rather than research for pay.

It's not that I blame the faculty, not at all. The critical assessment of students in professional training for the doctorate is especially important. Faculty must have rigorous standards, both of the person and their demonstrated ability in the field, and most take their role not only as judges but mentors very seriously. And yet, the competitive job market, which has led about 50% of English Ph.D.s to die on the vine and go outside the professoriate for positions, means that only the most productive and polished have a shot at a position, let alone the plum positions that precocious youth dream of. And this means a drive to earlier demonstrations of professional accomplishment, and deeper and earlier feelings of worthlessness and self-recrimination. If the competition between school girls for differentiation and outside value too often results in anorexia and bulimia these days, the same amongst graduate students can lead to equally dysfunctional behavior.

We don't speak of the nervous breakdown -- we try not to stigmatize those already on shaky ground, but we can all tell who's losing it. The brilliant poetry specialist-to-be living in a house packed with bags of garbage he won't take out -- his friends hoping he doesn't commit suicide over break and can finish out his degree when he returns with a clearer head. The sensitive but bright Americanist who disappears in the night, food on the table, the lights left on, to turn up to everyone's relief months later in another city, her degree program in shambles. The articulate "life of the department" who attends lectures and functions and classes, but can't get himself to write a word. He's drowning in incompletes -- it's only a matter of time until he sinks to the bottom. The passionate union organizer who loses himself in local social causes, because they matter more than the academic work, which he can bring himself to do but not care for.

True, not everyone needs to finish the doctorate they've begun. There's a weeding process, in which the pressure in graduate school encourages those who don't have the drive, or the strength, or the sheer endurance to go into something that comes easier, that gives them happiness. But so often students cling to the program, because they have something to prove, because they don't want to be a quitter with their own world watching, and because they can't bear to give up on a dream to which they've already given so much of themselves.

What happens to a dream deferred, Langston Hughes once asked in a very different context. He warns us it can explode. In the case of the NIU shooter, that's just what happened. And I'm sorry, so sorry for everyone, that he didn't have a moment when he realized he wasn't pursuing his happiness, but a bitter and angry ghost of the man he dreamed of becoming, and now never will be. And yet, my greatest sorrow is not reserved for him, but for those many students he has hurt (undergrads in our care, and a fellow grad student doing the teaching gig)--and those who loved and cared for them--because he would not wake up and do what was necessary for his sake and theirs. They deserved a chance at their own dreams and lives, now cut so terribly short.
 
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kellysearsmith
13 February 2008 @ 12:37 pm
Wunderkammer Object No. 28: Leaden Hearts  
Imagine that as a young man in eighteenth-century England (though your story would have been the same well into the nineteenth), you'd forged a note and been convicted to life on the Hulks (a fleet that served as a floating prison), followed by exile to Australia. Convicts sent into exile bore a social stigma and had no rights; they were considered government property. These poor souls, in anticipation of being separated from those they loved, many forever, took up the practice of smoothing down low denomination coins (such as the 1797 copper cartwheel penny) and engraving them as mementos. Today, historians call them "convict love tokens"; in their day, they went by "leaden hearts."

According to the Pilot Destination Guide, "the inscriptions range from just the name and date of deportation to elaborate poems and etchings of convicts in chains and boats." Some of the inscriptions make political statements, while others focus on love. Many commentators note that not all coins were etched by the convicts themselves, who were often illiterate. Pilot adds, "Professional engravers were even allowed on board the hulks, and prisoners would commission them to craft a poignant keepsake on their behalf."

Witness here one such labor of love, posted by Objects through Time, courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, New South Wales). The reverse of the token pictured below showed a bird with a chain around its neck, symbolic of the jail bird.



crafted: Portsmouth, England 1786-1787


The National Museum of Australia, Canberra, which owns seven tokens, has an online exhibition of showing the three below.



Today, places like the Paramatta Heritage Center sell convict love tokens as souvenirs. Here's one in replica, embedded in the lid of a trinket box.



Douglas Burburry has shared some inscriptions from convict love tokens from The (Thomas) Millett Collection:

"Dear Father Mother/A gift to you/From a friend/Whose love for you/Shall never end"

"When this you see/Think on me/When I am in a far country" [my personal favorite]

"The rose soon drapes and dies/The brier fades away/But my fond heart for you I love/Shall never go astray"

"May the rose of England never bud, the thistle of Scotland never grow, the harp of Ireland never play till I, poor convict, gain my liberty."

Thomas Millett, a dedicated collector of the tokens, has co-authored a book on the subject: _Convict Love Tokens_, edited by Michele Field & Timothy Millett, Wakefield Press, 1998.

_____________


Objects through Time is well worth a visit for other such stories, embedded in material culture. What's more, their page covering this item goes into much more detail about the history of Australia as a site for transport; it's a bit of history everyone should know.
 
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kellysearsmith
12 February 2008 @ 01:05 pm
Return to Earth: Art Tile and Ceramics  
Followers of Dream Tree know that I'm a lover of art tile and ceramics, especially those that evoke the natural world in unsentimental and empirical registers.  Whether these turn to the scientific, the melancholy, the grotesque, or the beautiful, these are the pieces that I think reinvoke the world with a difference, the one we peopled as children and that we can walk again with greater insight as adults.  Not in the Wordsworthian sense of imagining some divinity within, but in that sense of wonder for what the natural world is in itself, and we as part of it, not wholly disconnected, if displaced.

Two of my recent finds illustrate this aesthetic.

Weaver Tile, where it comes as no surprise that artist-founder Scott Weaver received his training at Pewabic Pottery (located in Michigan), which I have featured (and purchased). 




 and

Alan and Ruth Barrett-Danes (Alan is now deceased), and their son Jon, who carries on in the best of their tradition, adding his own dashes of humor and whimsy.

 

Alan and Ruth



Cabbage Villa    source



Predator Pot  (1979)    source  


Jon


 
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