Recycling an art practice

–
Print Friendly

 

Keepers.

A few years ago, when I still was making and exhibiting sculpture out of Lego pieces, I typically dismantled large-scale works after they were shown so that I could reuse the bricks for new installations. There are a few things that I saved, including a blue pedestal and an irregularly shaped sculpture that people usually say looks like a chunk of dirty ice. Nowadays, it’s more like saving bits of ideas and groups of words that serve as springboards–think sour-dough starter–for new writing.

Since more or less quitting studio to take up reading and writing, I’ve discovered all sorts of connections between making things out of Legos and making things out of words. And, since moving to Michigan and buying a wood-burning stove, I’ve discovered another kind of stacking, editing and consuming/recycling project that involves pieces of wood that my older son, my neighbors and I gather.

Anyway, last night and today we’re having our first real snow of the winter–it’s January 2, for crying out loud–and we’re in an awkward situation, wood-wise. Although the weather has been relatively mild, I literally burned through the two small wood piles I so proudly stacked back in September. It occurs to me that I’ve turned into a 21st-century reincarnation of Hestia, constantly encouraging new fires, sweeping the hearth, etc., while my husband occasionally steps in and my sons generally ignore this end of the process.

Those two blue patches are the tarps that cover our remaining piles of wood.

That leaves me contending with wood that, at best, is seasoned but wet. It sits in two substantial piles in the back yard. Not that we’re in trouble if the stove goes out, because we’ve got electric baseboard heat. Plunging hands into hot dish water is another strategy for staying warm, and it gets the dishes clean. So is downing hot toddies, which I’ve been doing since Rainey reminded us of that treatment on facebook–although four a day is tops.

But we really don’t want to pay heating bills this season. At first, not using the utility was ideological and I imagined myself bundling up and never, ever, flipping the switch to ”on”. But I’ve decided that this first stove-heated winter is a learning experience and that there’s no point in freezing–especially no point in my children freezing–just to prove that we can live off the grid.

We’re bundled up anyway. Actually, for the past two days–now that the holidays are over and we don’t have to go out and we’re actively discouraging guests–I’m betting that all of us have been wearing the same clothes for at least 48 hours. At least I have.

This isn't really a stump. It's a cross-section of a small tree trunk. But I think of it as my stump.

Both yesterday and today, I’ve layered my vintage Husky jacket over my current ensemble, pulled boots on over the socks I’ve been wearing to bed, and gone outside to sort wood. Some of the dryer pieces have been too long to fit into the stove and other pieces have needed to be split. So I’ve swept the snow off of the stump I’m using as a base for sawing and splitting, and gone to work. I’ve got a terrific, Irwin hand saw, and a splitting maul from Menards, our regional derivation of Home Depot. It feels great for a while, being out in the cold, clean air. After about 40 minutes, though, I’m ready to get back into the warm house.

This process has produced a modest stack in the mudroom, of small pieces of seasoned-but-wet wood, slowly drying out. And I’ve encircled the stove with other pieces of wood that are drying out more quickly thanks to, yes, the heat of the stove.

Using the stove to dry out wood to put in the stove.

That means I’m going outside and getting cold, to collect fuel so that I can go back inside to be warm. This suggests that, if I weren’t using wood to stay warm, I wouldn’t have to go out and get cold. Additionally, feeding the stove to dry out wood that I’ll be using to feed the stove, suggests some kind of vaguely ironic circularity, in which the warming of family is a collateral effect. The obvious analogy is young,  middle-class men and women getting MFAs so that they can network and maybe find jobs teaching in MFA programs, so that they can earn a living that allows them to make and show art in their abundant spare time. Ditto for art historians and theorists.

This business of messing with firewood–much as it satisfies my need to glean and stack pieces of things that are less uniform than Legos–confirms my belief that we are a lot like bits of oak and maple and birch: we prepare ourselves to serve as fuel for a system that consumes us in order to produce more of us. For most of us, however, it’s what we know how to do and somewhere in the midst of that process we find satisfaction. Which reminds me: it’s time to check the stove and get back to work on a paper I’ll be presenting in Milton Keynes this spring.

 

 

also by Janet Tyson

Leave a Reply