Simone Bodmer-Turner: Take Third
WORDS: SIMONE BODMER-TURNER
PHOTOGRAPHY: ANASTASIIA DUVALLIE ON BLACK & MARCO GALLOWAY ON WHITE
My imagination—the work that I want to make—is always several steps beyond the work that I am currently making with no obvious path of how to get there. Many creative-minded people live this way, I think. There simply are not enough hours in the day to keep up with your racing mind. You wind up having an idea of where you want to be and what you want to make. It feels almost as palpable as if you were there, but the problem is you haven’t actually made the work yet.
My first solo show wasn’t supposed to be a solo show. It was supposed to be a duo exhibition with an artist. We had developed an internet friendship and exchanged emails on process and inspiration. Our work fit well together; we had been great admirers of each other’s practices for some time and shared a language in different mediums. I was responsible for getting him on board, so when he later had to drop out, I was asked to propose another artist or designer to show alongside or if I could manage it, fill the space myself. I think those were the exact words proposed to me: “Fill the space.” I’m sure the gallerist had no idea that I had been waiting for this moment for so long. Though the offer didn’t come with the ceremony and preciousness that my former self had imagined, I quickly said I would love to have the opportunity to “fill the space.”
I could have made easy work that was simple to place and appreciate. Instead, I decided to make a big deal of this moment and tackled overly ambitious designs that most would advise against given their size and unwieldy materials. These forms had lived in my head for ages.
They so mind-twistingly challenged my concept of what was possible within ceramics that I had to see them through. One of the wildest pieces I made was a five-foot-long, four-foot-tall credenza. I stacked eight ball-within-cage cubes onto and alongside one other and mortared them together like a three-dimensional mosaic. I love the crude nature of their assemblage. Unexpectedly, that initial arrangement opened up pathways in my brain to form works that I previously could not have imagined. Two standing lamps came next, made in separate parts—the sea-creature-like tripod legs and the tulip-like head—and again, mortared together to create taller-than-kiln-height pieces. Had the construction taken place all in one go, their tiny necks certainly would have snapped. A friend of mine recently said to me—while we were indulging ourselves in visions of the future —that you begin in the first place, imagining the second place and wind up in the third place. After the dust from the show settled, I started looking around the empty studio. I saw the parts that had been hewn off sculptures, saved and finished as their own simple shape or completed too soon and too simply because of over-dryness. Suddenly, instead of these parts serving only as remaining evidence of failed sculptures past, they became puzzle pieces meant to meet, intertwine, suspend off one another. I began joining parts from different years and different sculptures into new compositions using the same method I had discovered from building the credenza and the standing lamps. The credenza still hasn’t sold, and I didn’t expect that it would. It took five months and the labor of five assistants to make. It had to be priced accordingly and requires a buyer with a certain taste in hulking whimsy. But now I have this entirely new language, born out of an unlikely piece of ceramic furniture and find myself in that unexpected third place.
"You begin in the first place, imagining the second place and wind up in the third place."
