I want to be somewhere between a red, milwaukee angle grinder and a japanese hand saw laying atop a pile of walnut dust. Instead, I am dirty fingers on a laptop keyboard.
This is a jig I made for welding caster wheels centered onto the end of a 1" square tube: It's not so pretty to look at, but it got the job done. Each wheel ended up square and mostly centered without having to do a bunch of tack welds. When I was a kid and making things in my Dad’s shop I never got why he wanted to make jigs for making repeated pieces. I was under the impression that to measure each thing was a far superior method to creating than to put into the world the visual turbulence of a jig that I then became coconspirator with, like small robots building up to become a larger robot.
It is now with joy that I make a jig; push a few things together and weld or screw or staple like Michael Jordon taking free throws: eyes closed and tongue out. Absurd confidence.
But maybe the creation of jigs at all times is a bit like camouflage: it makes me disappear in the flow of my work; the texture of my hands starts to become the texture of the material and my heart beats at the rotation of a flywheel. There’s this give and take between to jig and not to jig; to be consumed or to stop the flow of the river and float above the mangrove.
For two years I’ve wanted to write a book How to Become a Failed Artist in Five Years. And for two years I’ve almost started. At first I didn’t start because I was scared I would ruin it. Now I’m scared to start because I don’t think I remember the details and point to what I was trying to write about. And I’ve been wondering about this tension in me about forgetting, but also wanting to honor the original scope of what 2-year-ago-Mark was thinking. Maybe I built a jig in my mind and then never used it and now looking back at it is a bit like this jig in the photo with no context: haphazard cuts and some charred wood.
This whole process feels a bit like snakes eating themselves, where the jig then becomes something to talk about and observe. Like that guy who wrote reviews of Pitchfork reviews. Maybe making jigs isn’t only about process but scale. Jigs at a certain scale are not just a tool, but also an idea themselves: a dedication to seeing a process have a concrete step.
Like most things we do, though, steps flatten or steepen. Stairs turn to slides turn to elevators.
I used to go to this zoo in the winter on days I wasn't in the studio. No one went in the winter and the animals all forgot about people and the feeling was a bit like being in a sequel of Jurassic Park (not the one with the first occurance of the Pterodactyl... I didn't like that one) where the buildings felt abandoned and utilitarian: minimal set design.
In college, I once had an anole that I placed in a cage with a hamster I also had. They seemed to get along. Then one morning I woke up and the anole was dismembered and the hamster was pacing like that leopard, packing down the wood shavings to a density such that a newspaper could have been printed on it.
There was a camel that was losing its hair due to stress or illness, that laid on the ground in a mirrored position of its lips: limp and forming to that which it was placed upon. Skin on teeth and rocks. Next to it was an aquarium-like cage that contained a leopard that was also stressed but paced endlessly in front of the glass, packing the dirt into a trench.
In college, I once had an anole that I placed in a cage with a hamster I also had. They seemed to get along. Then one morning I woke up and the anole was dismembered and the hamster was pacing like that leopard, packing down the wood shavings to a density such that a newspaper could have been printed on it.
The leopard did once stop pacing when I came to visit when it was snowing once. It stopped and then seemed to point it's paw in a direction that said "over there". At this point it, too, was starting to lose hair.
