Adventures in Lighting

Construction no.2 is fitted with a tiny spotlight that shines on a set of beans made important in the essay “Beans and Me” by Jeremy Jackson from Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone (ed. Ferrari-Adler 2008).  In the essay’s story, the author imagines an interaction among anthropomorphized pinto, lentil, black bean, and black-eyed pea—the latter bean is left out of the limelight in an imagined scene.

Constructing the scene required the coordination of box size and intensity of light for the spotlight.  There is, I discovered, a relationship between object and light that relates to the “inverse square law,” that is, that light falls off, inversely, with the square of the distance.  This “law” came to my attention after an adventure into Radio Shack for the electrical materials to create a spotlight for a very tiny space.  Radio Shack and electronics go together and I assumed that the local mall retailer and its staff would guide my adventure.  Not so.  After showing my box and quest to light it to who seemed to be the “manager,” she directed me toward a confusion of drawers with all sorts of wires, lights and other paraphernalia.  As she stepped away from me, she smugly said she had no idea how any of those elements worked together.  Well, how about the other teen aged employees?  The young man shyly smiled with an absent look on his face, and the young woman was “very busy” at the moment, but she dropped the hint that the tiny lights with their mysterious wires need to be connected to a battery source.  Of course I ought to know about the wonderful world of electronics, but at the moment any schooling on the subject was dim.  I messed around those drawers for more than a half hour with excursions to the battery section of the store attempting to match up lamps with battery holders with battery voltages.  I settled on a 6 volts mini lamp (a tiny light bulb with wiring) and a cool little plastic box with on/off switch that holds 4 “AA” batteries, each 1.5 volts to equal a corresponding 6 volts for the lamp.  I took the pile of items to the busy young woman and she offered a “this should work” assessment.  I didn’t spend much money but the self-education was priceless.  I’ve always been fond of Jean Piaget’s premise that “to understand is to invent,” and here I had the chance to “invent” a connection of materials that would potentially create a spotlight for my box construction.  Although my efforts of invention compare to a very elementary understanding of electronics, I experienced a sense of fulfillment as I left the store, clutching my Radio Shack parcel.  But the lack of staff help made me wonder about the health of this retailer.  A New York Times web search came up with the news that Radio Shack is in turmoil; last fall its chief executive stepped down following a 21 million dollar loss despite the retailer’s shift toward the smartphone market.  The Internet is surely a wicked competitor, but I bemoaned the fact that others will be denied the chance to mess around a drawer of paraphernalia in a brick and mortar “store” as I did and “invent” an electronic connection.  A tutorial on electric circuits like this one from Red River College offers post invention reflection:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3XS4lAxvrc

There was elementary thrill in connecting wires and seeing the little light blink on.  I drilled a hole in back of the box to thread the wires through, glued the beans in place, and added call outs for the beans printed on vellum.  But, oh my, here is where the inverse square law came into play.  The tiny light was diffused across the bottom of the box and hardly spotlighted the trio of beans.  I contemplated, “spotlight, spotlight,” then google imaged the term.  Right, they have a lens tube that directs the light, limiting diffusion.  I sawed off the end of a common pen top to create a black tube, fitted it with electrical tape and, well, see the spotlight effect?

Adventures in Lighting

Construction no.2 is fitted with a tiny spotlight that shines on a set of beans made important in the essay “Beans and Me” by Jeremy Jackson from Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone (ed. Ferrari-Adler 2008).  In the essay’s story, the author imagines an interaction among anthropomorphized pinto, lentil, black bean, and black-eyed pea—the latter bean is left out of the limelight in an imagined scene.

Constructing the scene required the coordination of box size and intensity of light for the spotlight.  There is, I discovered, a relationship between object and light that relates to the “inverse square law,” that is, that light falls off, inversely, with the square of the distance.  This “law” came to my attention after an adventure into Radio Shack for the electrical materials to create a spotlight for a very tiny space.  Radio Shack and electronics go together and I assumed that the local mall retailer and its staff would guide my adventure.  Not so.  After showing my box and quest to light it to who seemed to be the “manager,” she directed me toward a confusion of drawers with all sorts of wires, lights and other paraphernalia.  As she stepped away from me, she smugly said she had no idea how any of those elements worked together.  Well, how about the other teen aged employees?  The young man shyly smiled with an absent look on his face, and the young woman was “very busy” at the moment, but she dropped the hint that the tiny lights with their mysterious wires need to be connected to a battery source.  Of course I ought to know about the wonderful world of electronics, but at the moment any schooling on the subject was dim.  I messed around those drawers for more than a half hour with excursions to the battery section of the store attempting to match up lamps with battery holders with battery voltages.  I settled on a 6 volts mini lamp (a tiny light bulb with wiring) and a cool little plastic box with on/off switch that holds 4 “AA” batteries, each 1.5 volts to equal a corresponding 6 volts for the lamp.  I took the pile of items to the busy young woman and she offered a “this should work” assessment.  I didn’t spend much money but the self-education was priceless.  I’ve always been fond of Jean Piaget’s premise that “to understand is to invent,” and here I had the chance to “invent” a connection of materials that would potentially create a spotlight for my box construction.  Although my efforts of invention compare to a very elementary understanding of electronics, I experienced a sense of fulfillment as I left the store, clutching my Radio Shack parcel.  But the lack of staff help made me wonder about the health of this retailer.  A New York Times web search came up with the news that Radio Shack is in turmoil; last fall its chief executive stepped down following a 21 million dollar loss despite the retailer’s shift toward the smartphone market.  The Internet is surely a wicked competitor, but I bemoaned the fact that others will be denied the chance to mess around a drawer of paraphernalia in a brick and mortar “store” as I did and “invent” an electronic connection.  A tutorial on electric circuits like this one from Red River College offers post invention reflection:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3XS4lAxvrc

There was elementary thrill in connecting wires and seeing the little light blink on.  I drilled a hole in back of the box to thread the wires through, glued the beans in place, and added call outs for the beans printed on vellum.  But, oh my, here is where the inverse square law came into play.  The tiny light was diffused across the bottom of the box and hardly spotlighted the trio of beans.  I contemplated, “spotlight, spotlight,” then google imaged the term.  Right, they have a lens tube that directs the light, limiting diffusion.  I sawed off the end of a common pen top to create a black tube, fitted it with electrical tape and, well, see the spotlight effect?

Adventures in Lighting

Construction no.2 is fitted with a tiny spotlight that shines on a set of beans made important in the essay “Beans and Me” by Jeremy Jackson from Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone (ed. Ferrari-Adler 2008).  In the essay’s story, the author imagines an interaction among anthropomorphized pinto, lentil, black bean, and black-eyed pea—the latter bean is left out of the limelight in an imagined scene.

Constructing the scene required the coordination of box size and intensity of light for the spotlight.  There is, I discovered, a relationship between object and light that relates to the “inverse square law,” that is, that light falls off, inversely, with the square of the distance.  This “law” came to my attention after an adventure into Radio Shack for the electrical materials to create a spotlight for a very tiny space.  Radio Shack and electronics go together and I assumed that the local mall retailer and its staff would guide my adventure.  Not so.  After showing my box and quest to light it to who seemed to be the “manager,” she directed me toward a confusion of drawers with all sorts of wires, lights and other paraphernalia.  As she stepped away from me, she smugly said she had no idea how any of those elements worked together.  Well, how about the other teen aged employees?  The young man shyly smiled with an absent look on his face, and the young woman was “very busy” at the moment, but she dropped the hint that the tiny lights with their mysterious wires need to be connected to a battery source.  Of course I ought to know about the wonderful world of electronics, but at the moment any schooling on the subject was dim.  I messed around those drawers for more than a half hour with excursions to the battery section of the store attempting to match up lamps with battery holders with battery voltages.  I settled on a 6 volts mini lamp (a tiny light bulb with wiring) and a cool little plastic box with on/off switch that holds 4 “AA” batteries, each 1.5 volts to equal a corresponding 6 volts for the lamp.  I took the pile of items to the busy young woman and she offered a “this should work” assessment.  I didn’t spend much money but the self-education was priceless.  I’ve always been fond of Jean Piaget’s premise that “to understand is to invent,” and here I had the chance to “invent” a connection of materials that would potentially create a spotlight for my box construction.  Although my efforts of invention compare to a very elementary understanding of electronics, I experienced a sense of fulfillment as I left the store, clutching my Radio Shack parcel.  But the lack of staff help made me wonder about the health of this retailer.  A New York Times web search came up with the news that Radio Shack is in turmoil; last fall its chief executive stepped down following a 21 million dollar loss despite the retailer’s shift toward the smartphone market.  The Internet is surely a wicked competitor, but I bemoaned the fact that others will be denied the chance to mess around a drawer of paraphernalia in a brick and mortar “store” as I did and “invent” an electronic connection.  A tutorial on electric circuits like this one from Red River College offers post invention reflection:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3XS4lAxvrc

There was elementary thrill in connecting wires and seeing the little light blink on.  I drilled a hole in back of the box to thread the wires through, glued the beans in place, and added call outs for the beans printed on vellum.  But, oh my, here is where the inverse square law came into play.  The tiny light was diffused across the bottom of the box and hardly spotlighted the trio of beans.  I contemplated, “spotlight, spotlight,” then google imaged the term.  Right, they have a lens tube that directs the light, limiting diffusion.  I sawed off the end of a common pen top to create a black tube, fitted it with electrical tape and, well, see the spotlight effect?

Adventures in Lighting

Construction no.2 is fitted with a tiny spotlight that shines on a set of beans made important in the essay “Beans and Me” by Jeremy Jackson from Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone (ed. Ferrari-Adler 2008).  In the essay’s story, the author imagines an interaction among anthropomorphized pinto, lentil, black bean, and black-eyed pea—the latter bean is left out of the limelight in an imagined scene.

Constructing the scene required the coordination of box size and intensity of light for the spotlight.  There is, I discovered, a relationship between object and light that relates to the “inverse square law,” that is, that light falls off, inversely, with the square of the distance.  This “law” came to my attention after an adventure into Radio Shack for the electrical materials to create a spotlight for a very tiny space.  Radio Shack and electronics go together and I assumed that the local mall retailer and its staff would guide my adventure.  Not so.  After showing my box and quest to light it to who seemed to be the “manager,” she directed me toward a confusion of drawers with all sorts of wires, lights and other paraphernalia.  As she stepped away from me, she smugly said she had no idea how any of those elements worked together.  Well, how about the other teen aged employees?  The young man shyly smiled with an absent look on his face, and the young woman was “very busy” at the moment, but she dropped the hint that the tiny lights with their mysterious wires need to be connected to a battery source.  Of course I ought to know about the wonderful world of electronics, but at the moment any schooling on the subject was dim.  I messed around those drawers for more than a half hour with excursions to the battery section of the store attempting to match up lamps with battery holders with battery voltages.  I settled on a 6 volts mini lamp (a tiny light bulb with wiring) and a cool little plastic box with on/off switch that holds 4 “AA” batteries, each 1.5 volts to equal a corresponding 6 volts for the lamp.  I took the pile of items to the busy young woman and she offered a “this should work” assessment.  I didn’t spend much money but the self-education was priceless.  I’ve always been fond of Jean Piaget’s premise that “to understand is to invent,” and here I had the chance to “invent” a connection of materials that would potentially create a spotlight for my box construction.  Although my efforts of invention compare to a very elementary understanding of electronics, I experienced a sense of fulfillment as I left the store, clutching my Radio Shack parcel.  But the lack of staff help made me wonder about the health of this retailer.  A New York Times web search came up with the news that Radio Shack is in turmoil; last fall its chief executive stepped down following a 21 million dollar loss despite the retailer’s shift toward the smartphone market.  The Internet is surely a wicked competitor, but I bemoaned the fact that others will be denied the chance to mess around a drawer of paraphernalia in a brick and mortar “store” as I did and “invent” an electronic connection.  A tutorial on electric circuits like this one from Red River College offers post invention reflection:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3XS4lAxvrc

There was elementary thrill in connecting wires and seeing the little light blink on.  I drilled a hole in back of the box to thread the wires through, glued the beans in place, and added call outs for the beans printed on vellum.  But, oh my, here is where the inverse square law came into play.  The tiny light was diffused across the bottom of the box and hardly spotlighted the trio of beans.  I contemplated, “spotlight, spotlight,” then google imaged the term.  Right, they have a lens tube that directs the light, limiting diffusion.  I sawed off the end of a common pen top to create a black tube, fitted it with electrical tape and, well, see the spotlight effect?

Adventures in Lighting

Construction no.2 is fitted with a tiny spotlight that shines on a set of beans made important in the essay “Beans and Me” by Jeremy Jackson from Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone (ed. Ferrari-Adler 2008).  In the essay’s story, the author imagines an interaction among anthropomorphized pinto, lentil, black bean, and black-eyed pea—the latter bean is left out of the limelight in an imagined scene.

Constructing the scene required the coordination of box size and intensity of light for the spotlight.  There is, I discovered, a relationship between object and light that relates to the “inverse square law,” that is, that light falls off, inversely, with the square of the distance.  This “law” came to my attention after an adventure into Radio Shack for the electrical materials to create a spotlight for a very tiny space.  Radio Shack and electronics go together and I assumed that the local mall retailer and its staff would guide my adventure.  Not so.  After showing my box and quest to light it to who seemed to be the “manager,” she directed me toward a confusion of drawers with all sorts of wires, lights and other paraphernalia.  As she stepped away from me, she smugly said she had no idea how any of those elements worked together.  Well, how about the other teen aged employees?  The young man shyly smiled with an absent look on his face, and the young woman was “very busy” at the moment, but she dropped the hint that the tiny lights with their mysterious wires need to be connected to a battery source.  Of course I ought to know about the wonderful world of electronics, but at the moment any schooling on the subject was dim.  I messed around those drawers for more than a half hour with excursions to the battery section of the store attempting to match up lamps with battery holders with battery voltages.  I settled on a 6 volts mini lamp (a tiny light bulb with wiring) and a cool little plastic box with on/off switch that holds 4 “AA” batteries, each 1.5 volts to equal a corresponding 6 volts for the lamp.  I took the pile of items to the busy young woman and she offered a “this should work” assessment.  I didn’t spend much money but the self-education was priceless.  I’ve always been fond of Jean Piaget’s premise that “to understand is to invent,” and here I had the chance to “invent” a connection of materials that would potentially create a spotlight for my box construction.  Although my efforts of invention compare to a very elementary understanding of electronics, I experienced a sense of fulfillment as I left the store, clutching my Radio Shack parcel.  But the lack of staff help made me wonder about the health of this retailer.  A New York Times web search came up with the news that Radio Shack is in turmoil; last fall its chief executive stepped down following a 21 million dollar loss despite the retailer’s shift toward the smartphone market.  The Internet is surely a wicked competitor, but I bemoaned the fact that others will be denied the chance to mess around a drawer of paraphernalia in a brick and mortar “store” as I did and “invent” an electronic connection.  A tutorial on electric circuits like this one from Red River College offers post invention reflection:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3XS4lAxvrc

There was elementary thrill in connecting wires and seeing the little light blink on.  I drilled a hole in back of the box to thread the wires through, glued the beans in place, and added call outs for the beans printed on vellum.  But, oh my, here is where the inverse square law came into play.  The tiny light was diffused across the bottom of the box and hardly spotlighted the trio of beans.  I contemplated, “spotlight, spotlight,” then google imaged the term.  Right, they have a lens tube that directs the light, limiting diffusion.  I sawed off the end of a common pen top to create a black tube, fitted it with electrical tape and, well, see the spotlight effect?

Adventures in Lighting

Construction no.2 is fitted with a tiny spotlight that shines on a set of beans made important in the essay “Beans and Me” by Jeremy Jackson from Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone (ed. Ferrari-Adler 2008).  In the essay’s story, the author imagines an interaction among anthropomorphized pinto, lentil, black bean, and black-eyed pea—the latter bean is left out of the limelight in an imagined scene.

Constructing the scene required the coordination of box size and intensity of light for the spotlight.  There is, I discovered, a relationship between object and light that relates to the “inverse square law,” that is, that light falls off, inversely, with the square of the distance.  This “law” came to my attention after an adventure into Radio Shack for the electrical materials to create a spotlight for a very tiny space.  Radio Shack and electronics go together and I assumed that the local mall retailer and its staff would guide my adventure.  Not so.  After showing my box and quest to light it to who seemed to be the “manager,” she directed me toward a confusion of drawers with all sorts of wires, lights and other paraphernalia.  As she stepped away from me, she smugly said she had no idea how any of those elements worked together.  Well, how about the other teen aged employees?  The young man shyly smiled with an absent look on his face, and the young woman was “very busy” at the moment, but she dropped the hint that the tiny lights with their mysterious wires need to be connected to a battery source.  Of course I ought to know about the wonderful world of electronics, but at the moment any schooling on the subject was dim.  I messed around those drawers for more than a half hour with excursions to the battery section of the store attempting to match up lamps with battery holders with battery voltages.  I settled on a 6 volts mini lamp (a tiny light bulb with wiring) and a cool little plastic box with on/off switch that holds 4 “AA” batteries, each 1.5 volts to equal a corresponding 6 volts for the lamp.  I took the pile of items to the busy young woman and she offered a “this should work” assessment.  I didn’t spend much money but the self-education was priceless.  I’ve always been fond of Jean Piaget’s premise that “to understand is to invent,” and here I had the chance to “invent” a connection of materials that would potentially create a spotlight for my box construction.  Although my efforts of invention compare to a very elementary understanding of electronics, I experienced a sense of fulfillment as I left the store, clutching my Radio Shack parcel.  But the lack of staff help made me wonder about the health of this retailer.  A New York Times web search came up with the news that Radio Shack is in turmoil; last fall its chief executive stepped down following a 21 million dollar loss despite the retailer’s shift toward the smartphone market.  The Internet is surely a wicked competitor, but I bemoaned the fact that others will be denied the chance to mess around a drawer of paraphernalia in a brick and mortar “store” as I did and “invent” an electronic connection.  A tutorial on electric circuits like this one from Red River College offers post invention reflection:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3XS4lAxvrc

There was elementary thrill in connecting wires and seeing the little light blink on.  I drilled a hole in back of the box to thread the wires through, glued the beans in place, and added call outs for the beans printed on vellum.  But, oh my, here is where the inverse square law came into play.  The tiny light was diffused across the bottom of the box and hardly spotlighted the trio of beans.  I contemplated, “spotlight, spotlight,” then google imaged the term.  Right, they have a lens tube that directs the light, limiting diffusion.  I sawed off the end of a common pen top to create a black tube, fitted it with electrical tape and, well, see the spotlight effect?

Yoshimoto’s Kitchen

The words that inspired this project’s first model construction to represent text are from Banana Yoshimoto’s book, Kitchen (1988):

The place I like best in the world is the kitchen. No  matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me.  Ideally it should be well broken in.  Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate.  White tile catching the light (ting! ting!) (3).

The most captivating aspect in pre-production was the anticipation of sewing up tiny tea towels.  I went to Canvas Works in downtown Olympia (http://canvasworks.net/) to find pure linen.  The owner led me to the bolts of linen; I sheepishly disclosed that I was making an art project that required tiny linen towels (I presupposed from Yoshimoto’s text that the fabric of the tea towels was linen, and in fact, when I visualized the text saw the word “linen” associated with towels even though that precise word does not appear).  The owner was surprisingly interested and became fully involved in helping me select the exact linen weight and color.  Sewing the tea towels was the last step in the production of the piece.  The first step involved inventorying the wooden boxes that I own.  A cedar box made its way into my hands and I suddenly pictured how it could be re-fashioned to resemble a kitchen counter space and backsplash.  In between those first and last steps I made my way to ReStore (http://www.spshabitat.org/restore/) to pick out white tile—as in “White tile catching the light…”  Their inventory of tile was not as great as I remembered it to be, but I found a small box of assorted white tiles and chose two styles—my bag of about 40 tiles came to $1.60. 

Next, I assembled all the parts, not making the mistake of gluing at that point.  I cut the bottom of the cedar box in two with a Dremel jigsaw to form a “counter,” then sized things up to figure out where the text might go.  I spent a good deal of time with an alphabet rolling stamp (http://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/6261595/il_570xN.269250752.jpg), but this proved to be too inaccurate and annoying, so I switched to computer generated printing.  Selecting the paper also proved to be time consuming, trying out different kinds of paper and fonts.  An image from a Japanese calendar coordinated with the white tiles best and gave a nod to Yoshimoto’s heritage. 

Glue the tiles—wait—grout the tiles (which proved to be very tedious and messy)—wait—glue the image with text—wait—glue the shelf—wait, tape the little pile of towels onto the counter—done.  

Yoshimoto’s Kitchen

The words that inspired this project’s first model construction to represent text are from Banana Yoshimoto’s book, Kitchen (1988):

The place I like best in the world is the kitchen. No  matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me.  Ideally it should be well broken in.  Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate.  White tile catching the light (ting! ting!) (3).

The most captivating aspect in pre-production was the anticipation of sewing up tiny tea towels.  I went to Canvas Works in downtown Olympia (http://canvasworks.net/) to find pure linen.  The owner led me to the bolts of linen; I sheepishly disclosed that I was making an art project that required tiny linen towels (I presupposed from Yoshimoto’s text that the fabric of the tea towels was linen, and in fact, when I visualized the text saw the word “linen” associated with towels even though that precise word does not appear).  The owner was surprisingly interested and became fully involved in helping me select the exact linen weight and color.  Sewing the tea towels was the last step in the production of the piece.  The first step involved inventorying the wooden boxes that I own.  A cedar box made its way into my hands and I suddenly pictured how it could be re-fashioned to resemble a kitchen counter space and backsplash.  In between those first and last steps I made my way to ReStore (http://www.spshabitat.org/restore/) to pick out white tile—as in “White tile catching the light…”  Their inventory of tile was not as great as I remembered it to be, but I found a small box of assorted white tiles and chose two styles—my bag of about 40 tiles came to $1.60. 

Next, I assembled all the parts, not making the mistake of gluing at that point.  I cut the bottom of the cedar box in two with a Dremel jigsaw to form a “counter,” then sized things up to figure out where the text might go.  I spent a good deal of time with an alphabet rolling stamp (http://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/6261595/il_570xN.269250752.jpg), but this proved to be too inaccurate and annoying, so I switched to computer generated printing.  Selecting the paper also proved to be time consuming, trying out different kinds of paper and fonts.  An image from a Japanese calendar coordinated with the white tiles best and gave a nod to Yoshimoto’s heritage. 

Glue the tiles—wait—grout the tiles (which proved to be very tedious and messy)—wait—glue the image with text—wait—glue the shelf—wait, tape the little pile of towels onto the counter—done.  

Yoshimoto’s Kitchen

The words that inspired this project’s first model construction to represent text are from Banana Yoshimoto’s book, Kitchen (1988):

The place I like best in the world is the kitchen. No  matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me.  Ideally it should be well broken in.  Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate.  White tile catching the light (ting! ting!) (3).

The most captivating aspect in pre-production was the anticipation of sewing up tiny tea towels.  I went to Canvas Works in downtown Olympia (http://canvasworks.net/) to find pure linen.  The owner led me to the bolts of linen; I sheepishly disclosed that I was making an art project that required tiny linen towels (I presupposed from Yoshimoto’s text that the fabric of the tea towels was linen, and in fact, when I visualized the text saw the word “linen” associated with towels even though that precise word does not appear).  The owner was surprisingly interested and became fully involved in helping me select the exact linen weight and color.  Sewing the tea towels was the last step in the production of the piece.  The first step involved inventorying the wooden boxes that I own.  A cedar box made its way into my hands and I suddenly pictured how it could be re-fashioned to resemble a kitchen counter space and backsplash.  In between those first and last steps I made my way to ReStore (http://www.spshabitat.org/restore/) to pick out white tile—as in “White tile catching the light…”  Their inventory of tile was not as great as I remembered it to be, but I found a small box of assorted white tiles and chose two styles—my bag of about 40 tiles came to $1.60. 

Next, I assembled all the parts, not making the mistake of gluing at that point.  I cut the bottom of the cedar box in two with a Dremel jigsaw to form a “counter,” then sized things up to figure out where the text might go.  I spent a good deal of time with an alphabet rolling stamp (http://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/6261595/il_570xN.269250752.jpg), but this proved to be too inaccurate and annoying, so I switched to computer generated printing.  Selecting the paper also proved to be time consuming, trying out different kinds of paper and fonts.  An image from a Japanese calendar coordinated with the white tiles best and gave a nod to Yoshimoto’s heritage. 

Glue the tiles—wait—grout the tiles (which proved to be very tedious and messy)—wait—glue the image with text—wait—glue the shelf—wait, tape the little pile of towels onto the counter—done.  

Yoshimoto’s Kitchen

The words that inspired this project’s first model construction to represent text are from Banana Yoshimoto’s book, Kitchen (1988):

The place I like best in the world is the kitchen. No  matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me.  Ideally it should be well broken in.  Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate.  White tile catching the light (ting! ting!) (3).

The most captivating aspect in pre-production was the anticipation of sewing up tiny tea towels.  I went to Canvas Works in downtown Olympia (http://canvasworks.net/) to find pure linen.  The owner led me to the bolts of linen; I sheepishly disclosed that I was making an art project that required tiny linen towels (I presupposed from Yoshimoto’s text that the fabric of the tea towels was linen, and in fact, when I visualized the text saw the word “linen” associated with towels even though that precise word does not appear).  The owner was surprisingly interested and became fully involved in helping me select the exact linen weight and color.  Sewing the tea towels was the last step in the production of the piece.  The first step involved inventorying the wooden boxes that I own.  A cedar box made its way into my hands and I suddenly pictured how it could be re-fashioned to resemble a kitchen counter space and backsplash.  In between those first and last steps I made my way to ReStore (http://www.spshabitat.org/restore/) to pick out white tile—as in “White tile catching the light…”  Their inventory of tile was not as great as I remembered it to be, but I found a small box of assorted white tiles and chose two styles—my bag of about 40 tiles came to $1.60. 

Next, I assembled all the parts, not making the mistake of gluing at that point.  I cut the bottom of the cedar box in two with a Dremel jigsaw to form a “counter,” then sized things up to figure out where the text might go.  I spent a good deal of time with an alphabet rolling stamp (http://img0.etsystatic.com/000/0/6261595/il_570xN.269250752.jpg), but this proved to be too inaccurate and annoying, so I switched to computer generated printing.  Selecting the paper also proved to be time consuming, trying out different kinds of paper and fonts.  An image from a Japanese calendar coordinated with the white tiles best and gave a nod to Yoshimoto’s heritage. 

Glue the tiles—wait—grout the tiles (which proved to be very tedious and messy)—wait—glue the image with text—wait—glue the shelf—wait, tape the little pile of towels onto the counter—done.