It seems fitting that we were first introduced to Elyse Graham’s Geodes during our Hotel California show at last year’s Noho Design District. After all, there’s something distinctly Californian in the born-and-bred Los Angeles artist’s work. In her Geodes project, for which Graham casts layers of colorful urethane around a balloon mold, there are hints of the desert, psychedelia, yoga, and the wind. If that all sounds a little fuzzy, the objects themselves are not: Sawed open, they reveal incredibly beautiful swirls of color and texture that are the result of a process that’s somehow both carefully calibrated and entirely left to chance. We asked Graham herself to explain how she achieves that effect, and to take us through her entire process.
“I always wanted to be an artist; I just didn’t quite know how. I also make jewelry, and for a while my game plan was that a jewelry business could support my art practice. But I found that starting your own business really takes away from art making! About three or four years ago, though, I realized I could make jewelry and sculpture from the same material: I was doing some experiments with resin, and I found this urethane that I now use for the majority of my work.”
“The Geodes project actually came out of being a young woman living in Los Angeles with no prospect yet for a husband or kids. I wondered, ‘When is this stuff supposed to happen?’ I wanted to find a way to quell my panic and anxiety about the future, so I decided to find a way to stop time. I started with the most basic thing — the breath. I would blow up these balloons and watch them shrink over time. Blowing up balloons and expelling this breath or fear and watching them slowly change over many months kind of gave me a sense of peace. Like, ok, I’m changing, time moves slowly, everything’s going to be ok. After I spent some time making these temporary sculptures, though, I still wanted to see if I could truly capture that breath — if I could save time, find a way to seal it in, make a moment last, do the impossible, really. I started experimenting with materials and I came across this urethane, which is meant for casting. It’s a very quick-setting plastic that’s used for making things quickly, like if you need to see a prototype really fast.”
“I started brushing it on and pouring it eventually, and I found that because it sets so quickly, I’m able make it stick to the latex of the balloons, which usually don’t stick to anything. I was able to work quickly, which is important to me; I’m just as impatient as can be. It’s taken me quite some time to get the hang of it. When you start using a material that’s not supposed to be used that way, typically when you run into problems, people are like, ‘Uh, I don’t know!’ So it’s been a lot of trial and error. But part of what’s exciting to me is that it’s experimental. I’m making something that I have no idea what it’s going to look like in the end. That’s a really important aspect to my practice. There’s a certain moment where I have to just give it over. I can make the shape and then I have to wait and see what the shape becomes.”
“I was given geodes as a child, and I always thought of them as these magical things. Living in Southern California, my family would take road trips in the summer and we’d drive through this area outside of Death Valley called Red Rock. There were these amazing desert formations. I would sit in the backseat and dream. I knew there had to be geodes out there, and I’d fantasize about finding one and being able to crack it open, a treasure that no one’s ever seen before. That really excited me — the idea that there could be something that had been there for thousands or millions of years, and that you’d be the first person to see it.”
Graham begins the process by blowing up balloons and clustering them, then painting on an initial layer of urethane. “Sometimes the balloons do pop because the plastic is hot. I try not to blow them up terribly big, because there’s this fear, ‘oh my god, is this going to explode hot plastic in my face?’”
“I once had this idea that I could put one whole balloon in the middle and cover it in little tiny balloons — kind of like a stylized Buddha head. I made this big thing that took me months and when I finally cut it open, it was so ugly! It looked like a giant sunflower. I’ve never shown it, it’s hiding in my back room.”
“I think what is interesting me most now is I’ve gotten to be more of an expert in color mixing. I have a limited number of dyes and pigments. So trying to stretch those and see what I can do with a little bit of black; mixing a fluorescent pigment with a primary colored dye and seeing if I can make a really beautiful pastel. That’s really where my experimentation is going right now.”
“There’s a fine line between having the fluorescents be really interesting and having them be garish, though. I’ve had some nasty color experiments. It’s hard because it’s not like you can see halfway through the process that you’ve made some heinous error.”
Near the end of the process, Graham adds a layer of corrupted plastic, which gives the geode its rough exterior texture. “I was mixing the urethane with some sand once, and the urethane just bubbled up like baking soda and vinegar. I realized it had to be the moisture, so I began adding a little bit of water. Actually after I talked to expert, he was like, ‘Oh yeah! That’s how you make foam.’ I really love the volcanic look of it.”
“The corrupted part is all gray and then I paint over it again with smooth, colored urethane, but because the corrupted part is still reactive it makes these other bubbles. It looks kind of like a ceramic glaze, like Adam Silverman’s for Heath. It makes me wonder what he does.” Above is a completed geode. “I build them up layer after layer, and I totally forget what I’ve put in. Every time I open one it’s a total surprise.”
“There’s a whole secondary process to this project as well. I had the lucky accident of having a father who had an x-ray machine in his office, and I’d always wanted to do an art project involving x-rays. I started x-raying the geodes before I cracked them open. I can’t even explain how thrillingly exciting it was to see their insides, and my dad was like, ‘Well, if you think that’s awesome, do a CT scan — you can actually move through it.’ He hooked me up with some guy who thought I was crazy.”
“I thought, ‘What can I do with these x-rays?’ I didn’t want to show them because they were like my source material. So I decided to make cyanotype prints. I love the deep indigo color, but I also like that it’s a contact print, so it’s a 1:1 ratio just like an x-ray. I wanted to keep the negative space of the x-ray, though, so I scanned my negative, reversed it in Photoshop, and printed that out in transparency.” Graham then bathed a piece of paper in the two-part chemical, exposed it to light, and watched as the pigment turned a dark blue.
“From there I made drawings on the cyanotypes just to further my imagination. Most of them I made after the geodes were opened, but I tried to only imagine what layers were in there.”
A view of Graham’s studio, which is covered in colored resin drips.
“I think this is the next series for me. These are single poured coats of urethane over a balloon structure, and the balloons are then removed. I think of these as exploding landscapes; they’re kind of Los Angeles moments for me. I’m really interested in these subtle colors, which are evocative of a winter sunset or these tulip magnolias that you see in spring. I’m interested in the subtlety of seasons in Los Angeles, which is almost the same thing as my interest in time — I like to say that my work is a practice in paying attention.”
As traditions go, you can't get much better than the one that will commence this Friday in the window of the tiny Great Jones butcher shop Japan Premium Beef: An annual display of custom meat-themed installations, rendered in various incongruous materials. It started during the 2010 Noho Design District, with the delicate glass sausages that won Fabrica's Sam Baron a similar commission for T magazine earlier this year. And it will continue for 2012 with a series of inflatable meat balloons — whose prototypes are pictured above — that are being specially created for us by the Chicago designers behind the Balloon Factory project. We asked Caroline Linder, Lisa Smith, Michael Savona, and Steven Haulenbeek for the skinny on their savory new creation, which we invite you to visit this weekend at the Noho Design District.
Whatever Fabien Cappello's studies at ECAL may have taught him about luxury, his subsequent grad degree at the RCA may have un-taught him: The London-based designer has made stools carved from trashed Christmas trees, Venetian glass vessels melted onto lowly bricks, and benches constructed from shipping pallets or punctuated with cheap street-vendors' umbrellas. That's not to say, of course, that Cappello's work isn't high end — it's been shown at the likes of Libby Sellers Gallery and has won him an Elle Decoration New Designers Award — just that the materials and ideas he sees value in wouldn't exactly be considered the norm. If he's come a long way since setting up his own studio in 2009, it's because his focus on local and overlooked resources has captured the curiosity of the design world, not just its eyes or its wallets. That said, with the world headed where it's headed, his style of economical chic may become the new luxury before long, so we figured he was worth checking in with. He gave Sight Unseen a quick glimpse into his practice below.
Before the show Alley-Oop opens at L.A.'s Poketo store this coming Saturday, you should take a moment to thoroughly examine the portfolios of its two Portland-based collaborators, illustrator Will Bryant and furniture designer Eric Trine. Because think about it: How easy is it to picture the results of a collaboration spanning the two disciplines? Especially when Bryant's work is so crazy vibrant — full of squiggles and anthropomorphized hot dogs wearing neon sunglasses — and Trine's is so very understated, albeit with a lot of cool geometries in the mix. Alley-Oop is like one of those software programs that lets you crudely merge the faces of two people to find out what their child might look like at age 5, though perhaps a better metaphor would be that it's like what would happen if you pumped two designers full of methamphetamine and locked them in a room together for 48 hours with nothing but some spray paint and a welding gun. Actually, that's not too far off from how Bryant and Trine describe it themselves. See our interview with the pair after the jump, along with the first preview images of their collaborative work — which hopefully won't be the last.
