Beauty Project
Ideas about, and meanings of beauty have multiple resonances. Aphorisms abound—”It’s in the eye of the beholder.” and “It’s only skin deep.” Asserting that objects, persons, places, ideas, and experiences are beautiful can be understood as an objective as well as a subjective response, embedded in our lives. Capturing what we believe and experience, and expressing our values is a culturally and cognitively mediated activity. Who defines beauty and to what ends? Who benefits? Is beauty still a relevant idea and if so, why?
During Fall 2021, I was on sabbatical, and going to a studio in Chicago for an intensive period of work. I invited friends to play with me and share their definitions of beauty. Teasing out words from their writings made for a spontaneous poetry, and were incorporated in Braille on ceramic forms inspired by artwork in public collections. The process was cerebral, fulfilling, and fun. Using Braille allows me to talk about political, cultural and social blindness, for surely, we are often blind to what is beautiful in our lives.
It is a challenge to articulate beauty or what is beautiful! I can say for certain that it is not fixed or absolute. When I experience beauty, it is a synthesis of visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile sensations, creating deep pleasure in the recognition; “Hey, that’s beautiful!” My bias is toward knowledge about how an object or system functions; engagement, and ways seemingly disparate pieces of life come together and produce meaning identified as beautiful. When I re-visit the experience that something is beautiful – in a memory, looking again, or re-listening, I often find the meaning shifts subtly. Part of the pleasure of coming to understand beauty is the unfixed nature of the term and this shifting ground.
Musing on the ways art, and by extension perhaps beauty, is parsed in our multi-valent culture, I came across Hilton Als’ review (The New Yorker, October 31, 2022, “Making Do” p. 75) where he said:
…in the current curatorial climate, where there is altogether too much talk about “the object” as an isolated creation, separate from its creator. Viewing art in this way undermines its power to teach us about empathy, about who we are or are not, in relation to an artist or to the world at large”.
I resonated to his wide-open embrace of all that we are about, and took from this that art, which can be beautiful, comes from a place, person, time and attitude that connects us deeply. My hope is the conversations we have around this topic leads us to a place of greater compassion and awareness of our collective humanity, and possibly, other ways to know beauty.
June, 2023
These pieces were created as part of an Iowa State University Faculty Professional. Development Assignment, and were fired in various kilns. Thanks to Theaster Gates Studio, Chicago (Theaster Gates, Nick Weddell, Jesse Bercaw, Jason Taylor) and Zach Wollert, Kirkwood College, for firing assistance.