[ Fall 2010 ]
Professor Taiji Miyasaka
The first semester of graduate school, We were assigned to ‘map’ this timber grain silo. The space was … amazing. Heartfelt solitude, tucked away in the Palouse Hills. Inspired, at the time, by the words of Robert Irwin, I tied to disengage with the holistic experience in order to see what already exists. The phenomenological experience was poetic and evoked a special type of silence out of me. The last thing I wanted to do was theorize about it.
So, I divided the silo space by visual textures – sky, walls, and ground. Focusing on the walls, I broke down the experience into quality of the wood, patterns of its structure, and elements within it. This enormous space, the walls of it, are comprised of only wood and nails. Some of the nails were still sticking out of the wood. From far away, you couldn’t really see them. So, I started to connect all these oddities with a string. It began to reveal the amount of nails in the space visually.
The wood walls surrounding you were massive. Visually, it was difficult to comprehend the texture of the wood because of its immense scale. So, I began to cast block of plaster along the wooden wall. The blocks, when displayed, reduced the visual scale from the whole silo down to an object. That reduction allowed the texture and quality of wood to really show.
