I Stay With the Tools
Our first assignment for Barbara Glauber’s Visual Identities course involves the design and application of a personal monogram. I know very few people who readily label their possessions, and I’m not one of them. But, given this challenge to create a representational mark for myself, I decided that it should carry some sort of permanence in its application.
At the same time, it must be effortless and fluid, like a few quick turns of the wrist. I ended up with a loopy brush script shape derived from a handwritten abbreviation of my name. Given the range of objects I was required to label—a metrocard, a portable design object, an article of clothing, and a beverage container—I turned to our school’s laser cutter.
Tougher objects, like the glass, have to be etched twice at full power. The metrocard only required about a third of the power. Frail items, like the nylon stocking, took less than one tenth of the power before it began to melt. Marking became a reductive process and took away as much as it added to the surface of the material.
A couple of days ago I got a haircut at Hair Mates, on Third Avenue, from a talented haircutter named Mao. Mao mesmerized me. A handsome holster was slung around her hips, carrying five gleaming pairs of scissors and a long row of hair clips. As Mao worked, she would separate a lock of hair with a comb, and grasp the ends at an angle with three fingers. Then briskly even them out with a snip.
I watched her in the mirror as she concentrated on a lock, or a few strands of hair at a time. She paid careful attention to every detail, each part of a construct that I can’t understand. Of the many crafts that elude me, haircutting is one. Mao’s process is also reductive, although its result is not permanent. I admire her neat set of tools, and the challenge inherent in her occupation—setting things right through destruction and elimination. A perpetrator of destructive deeds for a constructive end.
I’m beginning to feel that creative processes don’t draw material out of thin air, but rather as having to filter and finesse existing content to discover something pure and true. Substantial and actual, not fabricated. This process is alarmingly honest.
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