This morning I finally finished an art hanging that I'd begun in 2017, a book of seven copper pages with various found things attached. At the time, I'd been fiddling with elementary metalwork and wood...mainly rusted pieces, wire and scraps from the street and from generous neighbors, often with holdings of dried branches or twigs or their bark...anything with a texture that caught my eye. Ephemera, some artists call it, though that seems too airy for such solid earth-elements.
Some pieces, like the two above, are easier than others...they know how to tell me what they want to be. The copper book, though I enjoyed doing the individual pages, was a challenge because once the pages were finished the whole seemed to elude binding. Yet I knew that the pages needed to form a book...they weren't fighting me on that point. But getting materials this bulky to come into readable "text"...how to do that? Over time, I tried three binding methods in vain.
Eventually, I left the pages stacked in a leather sleeve on the bottom shelf. But they lived in a corner of my mind and would surface now and then, question mark intact.
Finally, earlier this month, I undid the package and laid it out on the floor next to my work chair. I walked around it, still confounded. I asked various experts for their ideas, and continued to frown.
Then, this morning, after a sleep frustratingly interrupted by sporadic knee pain and a forced awakening that turned out to be a mistake, I thought, well, I'm dressed and it's too early for the rest of the day's chores, and wandered into my workroom, walking over that line of copper pages.
Perhaps because of the bad night and the topsy-turviness of the day's beginning, it suddenly occurred to me that I was looking at the piece wrong way round. I'd meant it to be bound in a literal arrangement, one page after another, like a library book. Except this wasn't a book bound for the library. Its title should have been a clue, for what in life ever goes from left to right (or even right to left) in a linear track?
Just two days before, my nice neighbor Holly had given me, in a treasury of supplies she no longer used, a coil of copper wire. I picked it up. It was just the right gauge to use as hangers...not side to side as I'd always assumed, but top to bottom. My book would hang, in its own right and clearly its own preference, one page over another, vertically.
I couldn't believe, as I sat winding the wire through each set of pages, that I hadn't thought of it sooner. For one thing, a string of horizontal pages would need a very wide wall to display; a bound set of pages would need a shelf to sit on, clumsily at best, or a specially designed holder to underpin its uneven size and shape. But there were always places to hang a long, narrow piece.
Clearly the elements were now aligned to bring this book to fruition. In less than an hour, I had hanging on my wall the completed work. When the carpenter and painter arrived a few minutes later to attend to some also last-minute house projects, I could show it off.
Left or right? top to bottom? horizontal or vertical? forward or backward?
bound or free? late or soon?
Aren't those the elemental choices we are faced with in life? For some of us (me), you would think we'd remember that there isn't only one way to arrange a work, especially one entitled Life Instructions. But I guess we just go on learning that day after day.
