Design As Poetry
Tenaya J. Fogelman
See it On Campus: Level 2
Visitor InfoRennie Hall
What If There Was No Border Between Poem And Artifact?
Design As Poetry is an iterative investigation, guided by the question “What happens when practices of writing and making merge?” Themes, patterns, and prose are explored through a collection of lighting artifacts. This project sits on the spectrum between art and design and rejects the disciplinary boundary between them.
With themes of poetics and gesture
With patterns of line, pleat, and text
Emerging through/at obscurity, intersection,
Translucency, and translation
The artifacts are composed
Of clay, cloth, paper, and metal
Through machine and hand
Slowly
Allowing for
An embrace
Of material agency
This project serves as an invitation
To imagine poetry and design as
Synonymous acts,
Synonymous beings,
And symbiotic practices.
Poiesis
“to make” “to create”
“Poiesis is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek
term ποιεῖν, which means “to make”. The word Poetry is
derived from the Greek term poiesis.”
-Wikipedia
Of
Clay, Cloth, Metal, Paper, and Text.
With
Line, Pleat, Light, Shadow, Texture, Agency of material.
Through
Pattern, Repetition, Rhythm, Gesture, Boundaries, Disciplines, Translucency, Obscurity, Code, Language, Intersection, Hands, Machines, Needles, Extruder, Poetry.
The ceramic work was created with extruder dies I designed and had cut on the CNC, then extruded and assembled in the studio. Fabric was fed through a felt loom to texture, transform, and pleat, then handstitched to impose structural and pattern. Metal appears as spot welded steel or sculpted armature and chicken wire. Lamps were made through/being poetry, while meeting hands, machines, words, and materials.
“Prick”
Mesh muslin, Cotton thread, Steel frame
“Questions.”
Extruded Porcelain
“Sunflower”
Extruded M370
“Design As Poetry Sleeve”
Extruded M370
“Clay Has A Memory”
Extruded M370, Hand carved text
“Borders”
Extruded M370, Hand Carved Text
“Line 1”
Felted + Pleated muslin
“Line 2”
Felted + Pleated muslin
“Clay has a memory”
Will it remember all the times I
said fuck and almost cried?
“Clay has a memory”
Will it spin stories about how I
can’t throw shit on the wheel?
“Clay has a memory”
As it burns at 2,000 degrees
“Clay has a memory”
And imprints of my eager, strangling hands
“Clay has a memory”
But can it speak to tattle?
“Clay has a memory”
What happens to tears at 2000
degrees?
“Clay has a memory”
But will it apologize?
“Clay has a memory”
Is a punk fucking threat
Clay is a memory,
Till death do us part.
Borders are fiction much like fairy tales
Borders are enforced
Borders are human-made
Borders make boundaries where connections were
founded
Borders draw lines
Borders create cracks in unity
Borders were founded
Borders were drawn atop, not made within
So I ask you,
What is a border?
What do we make of these borders?
If we’re left with these borders
Can we change them?
Re-contextualize them?
What if
A border was a meeting place
A decipherable line
Where disciplines kiss?
A border then, is not a boundary,
That separates bodies,
But a point of ambiguity
And a place that connects them.
There is no border between poem and artifact.
Layered cotton on a light box
Feeding fabric through a mouth of needles
Incessant humming, bright white bulb
I felt this cloth till its layers fuse
Felting cloth
Felting cloth
Felting cloth
Still
Felting cloth
Tracing and reinforcing its form
Pricking the needle through
Picking the single thread
to weave between
Hyper-focus hypnotic state
Moving the thread for hours
Drawing cloths form
Gestures as guides
Gliding the needle along delicate folds
Pulling the thread
Faint feel of friction
Numbing my thumb
Pricking its body
To lift and to shift into place
Controlling thread with thread
By needle in my hand
To allow cloth to rest
I’m watching the wheel spin.
I’m hallucinating versions of myself
To the rhythmic thumping of wheel thrown clay
I feel the collision of grit
Against my palms
As I press my tongue to
My teeth
I feel like it’s going to snag
And be jolted aside.
I feel the spinning like a
Humming in my body
I keep thinking about clay
I keep thinking about choices
Who I could’ve made of this body
Bags of clay
Bodies tuning sand into stone
Thinking on a future
Thinking through making
Making through movement
Moving through meditation
Making something,
Of this 60 dollar bag of clay
Of this body
With this body
Bodies of clay
Turning bodies of clay
Bodies of clay
Turning
A sincere thank you to all who have helped shape
my work and made this project possible by being
interminably supportive: guiding faculty Louise,
Hélène, and Sophie; special thanks to Brendan, Sara,
and Heather, and all of the ceramic technicians.
Thank you to my friends: Eden, Connor, and Michelle,
and my loving partner Matthew. And of course, all of
my peers.
