ALL THINGS FALL APART

“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 is a collaboration with artist, woodturner, sculptor Beth Ireland. Beth was invited to participate in the Turning It All Around: Turners in a Collaborative Conversation exhibition at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship’s Messler Gallery. She was asked to work with a collaborator from a different medium to explore: What you have turned around since the pandemic. 

We spent months talking over ideas by phone and then gathered for a week at Beth’s studio in St. Petersburg, FL, to create 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. 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.