In a show at Ramiken Crucible last April, Gavin Kenyon made a room of beautifully stacked columns.
He has perfected a technique of mold making with soft-forms.
I saw something in the Harlem River last year that I thought he would like.
I didn’t quite understand how it was made, but I thought Gavin would know,
about an unusual formation of cement pilings under a pier,
that seem to have been cast inside zippered bags.
Some of the old pilings are still visible, and it looked like a retrofit.
The zipper would allow a bag to be placed around an exsisting column.
Once the column was cast, the bag could be left to deteriorate.
“Yep, that’s what it is.” said Gavin. He pointed to the top of a column where the old piling was still visible.
He said the bag would protect the cement from washing out under water while it cured.
Here are some of the old pilings next to the retrofit ones, and you can see why they needed some help.
It was like being in a cathedral with hundreds of Gavin Kenyon sculptures,
each one gently curved, beautifully animate, and solid as rock.
“What do you think, Gavin?” I asked.
“I like it.” He said.
We traveled north along the Harlem River and looked at some of the other piers.
The city seawall is amazing here, with sewer outfalls, and sub-structure,
all covered with tiny living things.
You can really see what the city is made of,
and you can see how it will be unmade.
Structures have changed even since I was here last year,
revealing strange things about their interior.
Brittany Prater is an artist and filmmaker,
who’s beautiful video work seems to speak about the cycles of life and desire.
She is working on a documentary about radioactive waste in Ames Iowa, her hometown,
where tons of high level radioactive particles were dumped.
She uncovered the history of the town’s secret involvement with the Manhattan Project and it’s disastrous health affects on residents there.
The crew seemed quiet, absorbed in thought as the day grew hotter.
We had been to three boroughs in just three hours,
and we landed back to the salt marsh,
where the ‘Randall’s Island Park Alliance’ has done a great job of restoring this landscape to how it might have looked soon after glaciers carved the N.Y. harbor into being.
Back in Brooklyn, Gavin invited us to his studio.
Seeing the layers and accumulation, the sewing machines, and the molds themselves, I though that it wasn’t just the soft-mold process that connected his sculpture to the pier,
it was the idea of accumulating one formula after another,
and the desire to see how it all comes apart.
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