ALL THINGS FALL APART

A collaboration — Beth Ireland and Gretchen Burger

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.” - Pema Chodron

All Things Fall Apart arose from an invitation to participate in the Turning It All Around: Turners in a Collaborative Conversation exhibition at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship’s Messler Gallery. Woodturners were invited to work with a collaborator from a different medium to explore: What you have turned around since the pandemic. 

Beth, who is a wood turner, sculpture and artist, and Gretchen, who is a filmmaker and artist, spent months talking over ideas by phone and then gathered for a week of making at Beth’s studio in St. Petersburg, FL, where they created All Things Fall Apart— a process, a sculpture/bench and a video.

Our initial conversations for how to approach our Turning Around project focused on the pandemic and our experiences of isolation and discomfort. Gretchen had just moved across the country with two suitcases and didn’t have any material possessions with her. Beth spent hours in her shop examining materials, furniture and sculpture parts, which she had carried with her for decades. For both of us, the isolation forced exploration of self, objects and ideas.

We talked about how we, individually and collectively, would emerge from the last two years when the rhythms of day to day life had been so profoundly broken. What do we hang on to from our lives before and what do we let go of?  Why are we so resistant to change? What do we really have control of anyway? Pema Chodron's teachings about how life is a never ending flow of things coming together and things falling apart became our guide.

We brainstormed building a claustrophobic arch playing a loop of obsessive thoughts. We drew sketches of really uncomfortable chairs. Finally, we landed on a bench - a piece of furniture and a form that invites engagement and conversation.

All Things Fall Apart is the parts of what would be a bench if fully assembled. It’s beauty of form and material. It’s quirky, absurd and endlessly interchangeable. It’s recycled from the legs of a thirty year-old desk, chairs still in construction, and a mango tree salvaged in St Petersburg, Florida, where we created this project. It’s raw, rough, turned, sanded, and animated. It’s trust in each other– our problem solving skills, our communication, our resilience, our imaginations. It’s a creative journey that is never done, in a permanent state of assembling and disassembling. It’s falling apart and coming together, over and over again.

For next iterations of the work, we want to explore how to engage viewers to create new forms and experiences, adding to the cycle of coming together and falling apart.

BETH IRELAND earned her undergraduate Fine Arts degree from the State University College at Buffalo, and an MFA in sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has been running her company, Beth Ireland Woodworking since 1983. Her business provides woodworking with a specialization in architectural and artistic woodturning. Beth has been involved in a traveling art/craft project entitled Turning Around America since 2010 and has received three Windgate fellowships. She teaches the Professional Woodturning Intensive at The Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, as well as programs at craft schools around the country. Beth lives and works in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

GRETCHEN BURGER is an artist, filmmaker, curator, educator, and cultural worker engaged in convenings, conversations, art projects and advocacy for creating a human(e) future. Gretchen has produced, directed and edited award-winning public television and feature documentaries and has taught traditional, experimental and immersive media and storytelling to students of all ages. She is a co-founder of FEARLESS CREATIVE, an agency working at the intersections of public art, public benefit R+D, old and new technologies, education, and community engagement design. Gretchen earned a MFA in film and video from Massachusetts College of Art and Design - which is where she and Beth met. She currently resides in the Hudson Valley.