Something I was drawn to in Rebecca Carlton's work is her use of repetition and many small parts to create a whole image. In three of the four pieces she showed us, she had done this in some way (10,000 leaves, 5,000 porcelain eggs, 188 clay pigeons), and it was to talk about scale of the issue she was presenting us. With numbers that big, it almost stops meaning a certain number to me and just becomes "many" eggs, "many" leaves, an uncountable amount. The effect as a viewer of her work is almost lost when you don't have her explaining her whole process.
Looking at the basket of eggs for example you just see many eggs and don't totally realize that she individually hand-shaped all of them. It was helpful to see the images in her presentation of all of the eggs lined up before she fired them, then I got a sense of the time and labor it took.
The second thing that interests me about the repetitions in her work is less the final product but the artistic process. The focus and commitment and patience to repeat these processes over and over for the leaves, the eggs, and the birds is really impressive. I imagine after a while it would become meditative. It reminds me of that quote from one of the presentations at the beginning of class, maybe John Cage, saying if something is boring after you do it for one minute, try two minutes, then three, then five, then ten, and so on. I notice for example when I meditate that it starts easy, then gets really hard, and then gradually the difficulty becomes interesting and exciting and new. I would love to try her process with a piece of work sometime and see how that feels to be in it from her perspective.
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