Sculpture Studio Spring 2010

Project 1: Process

Michael Bargamian, Untitled (2,500 Nails and then Some), 2012

When I began to think about this project, the one thing that continued to occur to me was that process is strongly connected to repetition; that being the repetition of a particular action and the repetition and use of certain materials. With this idea I wanted to make a work that could have only been made through spending an extended period of time with a set of guidelines and a few materials. I wanted to make a work that would on one level physically exhaust myself through its making and, on another level, establish the work as it’s own entity/object that could only exist by going through the special process of working with these materials.    

I went about achieving this goal by deciding on what would be, in my mind, as the most straightforward materials and method of creating a process-based work. I figured that hammering nails into a wooden board until the top of the board was covered would be the perfect way to develop a serious sense of process. So every time I worked on this piece I would drill a series of holes in a row along the width of the 2x2 board, after which I would then hammer in nails into all the newest holes – slowly covering the entire wooden board with these small metal surfaces. After the nerves of the first few rows past I began to fall into a rhythm of drill, drill, drill, and then hammer nail, hammer nail, hammer nail, hammer. I soon thought of the process as the verse (the drilling) and chorus (the hammering) of a bird song.

As I continued this fairly straightforward process, developments began to occur throughout the object itself and thereby changed the final state of the piece. Firstly, the two wooden boards I had screwed together to act as a base for the nails began to separate – showing the nails and wooden scraps that live between the two wooden pieces. At the same time, the rows that I had been so carful to keep straight across the board began to break form and began to create a “wave” as the rows got closer and closer to the top of the piece’s frame and in some locations the nals seem to "bunch up" ad create little mounds that are interesting to run your hands and fingers across. The forming of the wave changed the way I was able to / had to move around the object and changed the rhythm and pattern of drilling holes and hammering in the nails. However, as these changes in the physical materials (the buckling and splintering of the wood) and the interaction between the materials (the nails staying in the wood at differing heights and forming a wave across the wood) occurred, they became integrated into the ongoing process that I set out to cover the wooden board- or the process adapted to these changes. I feel that by allowing these material changes to take place, I properly adapted to the changes and surprises that arose during the creative process.

While I feel that my piece was successful in the fact that I adapted and adhered to a strict process, I feel that I had I known what would happen with the interactions of materials (the separating of the wood boards by the hammering of the nails, for example), I would have worked to incorporate these changes into my final product more. As of right now I feel that I was able to just explain these happenings as outcomes of my process, but in future pieces I think it would be interesting to explicitly study or look at these interactions of materials in a more specific manner – what would happen if I forcibly tried to separate the boards with the nails? How would I go about this process again if I knew that there would be some unexpected occurences?

Finally, I cannot help but realize that this piece, while not meaning to be, is very personal. Personal in the fact that I spent many hours alone, silently working until I had covered the wooden frame with over 2,500 nails; the work has a bond with myself that I am not sure will entirely be conveyed or felt by a viewer. They may just see the work as “a bunch of nails” and not as the outcome of a desire to push myself into a new artistic territory – the territory of repetition and process that leads to a unique understanding of howmaterials work and respond to one another. Perhaps this possible lack of connection could be alleviated by providing some form of written statement that explained my thoughts and feelings that were changing throughout the creation of the work.