Week Five
The only aim is to fathom out the everything of this nothingness.―Iris EichenbergConveying v. Inviting
Week Five of the Reliquary Engine has been about series mode, conceptual work across a range of pieces in relationship with one another.
The Collision
Week Five InquiryCan the various ways in which memory fails us be conveyed across a series of brooches?
And, how can I convey meaning while still inviting interpretation on the part of the wearer and viewer?
I spent my career as a designer working hard to communicate clearly — to motivate a call to action, educate, or evoke a response. This week has revealed to me just how much I need to learn about communicating as an artist. That's the issue underlying my work over the course of these past five days. Broadly, this series is in contribution to my twelve-week study as to whether objects can perform as prosthetics in service of memory. But more specifically, Week Five has been about exploring the ways in which memory fails, and whether I can create a series of objects that express this range of failures.
In some ways, this problem—the creation of a series—is very much in my wheelhouse as a systems designer. I think a lot about taxonomies and visual communication and the different ways in which design elements can be used and varied to express ideas. I’m a huge fan of Edward Tufte’s notion of small multiples and have always been attracted to visual series which vary along a particular axis. This type of information design is so fascinating to me.
The challenge I’ve set out to pursue this week involves the seven sins of memory, as defined by Daniel Schacter in his book of this same name. These are hard ideas to render visually. They're harder still to make felt.
I asked AI to help me contemplate this landscape of ideas as an educational advisor. Among the questions I asked it over the course of the week, some were embarrassingly rudimentary, but the exchanges were genuinely helpful.
We also had a good check-in about creative boundaries, where they lie, and protecting my authorship of the work.
On the structure of series work:
- Is it the intentionality behind the inquiry that makes something a series?
- If we limit variance to one parameter, what exactly stays static and what's allowed to move?
On translating concept into making:
- Is there a logic in starting each piece from the same skeletal frame and varying only surface?
- How do I navigate concept and aesthetics at the same time? With so little time?
On communicating without over-telling:
- How is the balance struck between conveying ideas and inviting them?
- What does Eichenberg actually mean by... ?
Through sketching I began exploring how to abstract bark into metal — how to make something that feels like a surface that has been worn and time-traveled, without casting or etching, which my studio setup doesn't support on this timeline. I landed on a geometric, layered approach: fabricated forms that read as bark fragments through structure and patina rather than direct representation. That vocabulary unlocked the rest.
The Unreliable Narrator
The series takes five of Schacter's sins as its specimens: absent-mindedness, transience, misattribution, suggestibility, and bias. Each brooch begins from the same fundamental form — a bark fragment — and varies in exactly one register: what has happened to it. The absent-minded piece is only partial in detail. The transience piece loses itself through subtraction of detail. The suggestibility piece has something additional fused to it. The misattribution piece will include a small, scientific-standard label with a wrong name. The bias piece will be gilded or encrusted with gems. The founding material for the series is a piece of evergreen bark I pulled from a tree at the Japanese Botanic Garden in Chicago years ago, kept for years, and retold so many times I can no longer be sure what I remember, have forgotten, or invented. That distinction is the whole point.
The Framing Device
The series will be presented as specimens in a case — a natural history logic applied to memory failures. I'm currently partway through three of the five pieces, and I've decided to extend the work into a sixth week to fully execute them. The labeling, wall text, and case structure are as much a part of the vocabulary as the brooches themselves.
To Be Continued
The thing I've struggled most with this week is finding the balance between relaying a story and opening the work to a viewer's own interpretation. What I'm learning, slowly, through Eichenberg and through making, is that the difference isn't about how much you communicate. It's about what kind of communicating you do. Somatic specificity — the weight, texture and wrongness of a thing — invites. Verbal specificity explains. This week I've been learning to reach for the first and resist the second. It does not come naturally.