Monotype

Additive

Subtractive

Trace Drawing

Display and Surrender pt.II

I have made the argument before that sometimes the visual of an action holds more value than its monetary worth. Here is yet another example...

In 1989, Kenyan President Moi acquired some 12 tons of illegally poached elephant tusks from his predecessors. Of course wanting to end the trade, he was advised to sell off the ivory and make $3 million to fight poaching. Nope. He had all of it stacked in a huge mound and burned. News media covered it and people paid attention. It set off a barrage of other nations to light their own elephant pyres and set a ban on the trade of ivory in Kenya. Had he sold it all and spent the money to buy new equipment and staff, there wouldn't have been the loud resolve that the burning had. The resolve was worth more than the money.

For extra info, go to RadioLab's podcast "The Rhino Hunter"

Matter Matters/Work is Hard

This past June I began working with Treehouse Design Company here in Memphis. I came in as an intern, helping out in the construction and design of the current build, a three-story metal clad treehouse. I have definitely learned some things about the nature of work and the importance of the physical presence of things.

The work is hard. No matter how hard or efficiently or thoughtfully I try to install a window frame, the process always turns out being twice as long as you thought and the frame winds up slightly crooked. There's a deep, almost blatant struggle between me and the materials. Much of the time, we leave the worksite not because we accomplished everything we set out to do, but because we are too tired to continue.

Yet some days I would come down from the scaffolding and displace myself from my labor to notice a looming, beautifully shining structure perched there in the woods. There is a contrast of Galvalume against hackberry, uninterrupted against fractured, geometric against organic to produce tension that every human who saw it needed to deal with. We had created a physical, lasting object of beauty.

I would put forward that in no other place of work are the cultural mandate of Genesis 2 and the fact that work is now cursed from the fall more equally apparent than in the act of physical creation. We were made to work, the Bible says, perfectly and without sin, to build, grow, and progress culture for human flourishing. Building beautiful things excellently does this. Yet the fall in Genesis cursed that endeavor. The work becomes hard and sometimes fruitless. The tension is hard to grapple with.

Yet when I look at the mandate and then back at my work there is a great truth.. We are told to hold dominion over the earth, to subdue it, to bring order. I find that as a gardener prunes weeds to allow fruit to grow, so I build beautiful things with material that, without my intervention, would not exist. We bring order to chaos. As God did when he created everything, so we also collectively arrange disorder into something that is good and glorifying.

SIDE NOTE:

Heres some extra neat things we've been working on.

T-Shirt design

SketchUp rendering of Pod-2. The Treehouse Guys of DIY network are coming to help us build it. YAY CABLE TV.

Rendering of St.Jude Byrd House in Bristol, Tn. Yes that is a real NASCAR coming out the side of that wall.