Kiko Denzer

The Work of Art

kikodenzer — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:15:51 +0000

It has always seemed to me that the central activity of humankind is art, that our common job consists of fitting each and every one of our unique and individual selves into a whole life and landscape, into our communities, into our common stories. http://www.theworkofart.org (Irish pun intended) features some essays about that work — the day-to-day making and fitting together of whatever parts and pieces that come to hand, to make beauty.

Like so much of industrial and post-industrial life, art suffers from fragmentation, isolation, separation between self and community. And artists have had little choice but to accept the terms they've been given — to "be an artist" you have to make it pay. So artists either have to work for wealth and power, or they have to work for advertisers, entertainers, and various purveyors of lies or inanity.

But real art — from washing the dishes to hoeing the beans — as well as the painting and drawing and sculpting — requires celebration and sharing of common beauties. Success comes not in the form of money, or fame, or status, but in the continued life of all those various beauties that we no longer know, and that we can't, perhaps, understand: the beauty of life itself; the miracles of sun, moon, and earth; night and day; stars and seasons, and the utter uniqueness of our small blue and green planet.

Such beauty only makes sense when shared. That, to me, is the primary and ultimate motive for art. Wealth, power, markets, or even ballots make lots of money, noise, and mayhem, but only art makes beauty.

Essays will be posted in order, as formatting gets figured out and as time allows. It's a work-in-progress, so comments are welcome, here or there!

Spoons

kikodenzer — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:36:10 +0000

As part of our yurt-building adventure with Bill Coperthwaite, we spent two days carving: one day for spoons, another for bowls. There's no more beautiful—nor useful shape than the full, swelling hollow of a well-designed and well-made spoon.

Note the lovely detail where handle meets bowl on the small serving spoon that Bill left with us—his contribution to spoon design.

For bowl carving, Bill invented this simple jig that sits on a bench to hold your bowl-blank, and greatly eases the job of hand-carving a bowl. He has also adapted the traditional Swedish pulling harness for the crooked knife, reducing it to a cord and a toggle handle with which to pull the knife.

Just before X-mas, a friend gave me a book on Shaker hand-craft: Hands to Work and Hearts to God. I saw this one-piece, wooden grain shovel, and wanted to make one just like it—except that we don't grow enough grain to warrant making—much less storing it.

On the next page was a dustpan. The two images clicked against each other, amidst chips and excitement from a couple of bowls and spoons I'd made in the aftermath of the yurt. So I decided to make this maple dustpan as an X-mas present for Hannah. A side-benefit was getting rid of the butt-ugly plastic pan we endured every time we swept. A neighbor provided a piece of green maple firewood, which had some lovely bird's-eyes in it. Now I wish I had copied the high, rounded, form of the Shaker shovel, but it's lovely and light, a pleasure to use, and durable.

I roughed it out with a chainsaw and this adze (from Kestrel tool on Lopez Island, in WA), and finished it with crooked knives, one from kestrel, the other from Pinewood forge in MN — there are interesting design differences between the two knives, but both are just wonderfully beautiful tools (both visible at left in the spoons photo that follows).

Knives and adze are the best hand tools I've got (except, maybe, for my favorite spoon and my Austrian scythe blades). The knives work better than any gouge, and require no mallet, no workbench. The adze is so sharp, light, and so accurate that a "roughed out" piece can be very close to finished.

Since then, I've been carving spoons, bowls, and sticks of various kinds, inspired not only by Bill, but also by aeons of sculpture by all my ancestors who lived by and for beauty, and for whom work was merely a way of participating in what was, and is, both universal and useful—divinely useless, and essential. Particular inspiration this winter came in the form of two books: Patterns that Connect, by Schuster and Carpenter, and Baule: African Art, Western Eyes, by Susan Vogel. The pattern book is just that: a thousand drawings of patterns and patterned objects all representing, according to the authors, a universal human story about who we are and were we come from. It makes far more sense than most "art" books I've ever read (it is also a summary of a previous work that runs to 7,000 illustrations in 12 volumes). Both titles provide abundant evidence of and inspiration for the obvious argument that "art" should not mean things for sale, but a way to live in creative harmony with a universe that spawns endless beauty.

Beauty as gift makes better sense than beauty as commodity, but also makes it hard to hold onto a spoon long enough to photograph it…

Here's a collection of works-in-progress.

and a poem written during my visit to Bill's home, Dickinson's Reach, in northern Maine.

Everything turns,

the sun rises.

I fill a wooden bowl with oats and fruit

And with a wooden spoon,

empty it again,

Every day.

Which master makes us

lay down spoon and bowl

for pen and sword?

Two-tier yurt with Bill Coperthwaite

kikodenzer — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:16:28 +0000

Here's the lovely, two-tier yurt that Bill Coperthwaite helped us build last October. It's on the grounds of the Ancient Arts Center near Alsea, just a long leap over a couple of ridges, into the next drainage south of us (the Alsea River). We'll finish the woven willow and mud walls this May. If you want to come help, we'll be having two workshops, 1st and last weekends in May. (see http://www.ancientartscenter.com for more info)

It took us ten days to get this far. Nearly all the cross cuts we did with hand saws (most were compound angles). The first time I met Bill, he was putting a new post under his own yurt, in Maine. I got to help, and while we cut various things, he said he was still learning how to use a saw, after nearly 70 years! With his help, I learned how to make a straight cut through a 4×4 (finally!) I had always assumed that with two lines, one vertical and the other horizontal, I ought to be get a straight cut. When I didn't, I assumed the fault was due to my lack of skill or some technical magic. Well, technical magic it was: you need a third line! Every cut since has been (almost) perfectly straight. Slow motion gets you there faster. Amazing, now, to notice how few people use all the teeth in the blade when they cut with a handsaw. If you only use the middle third of the blade, you can push and pull very fast, and feel like a machine, and make big mistakes quick. When you use all the teeth, you go slow, so the blade stays securely in the cut. Meanwhile, the saw rakes the wood with two or three times as many teeth, cuts much faster, and you can put your attention where it belongs, on the line you're cutting to…

It shouldn't have been such a surprise to me that we built it from the top down, but I didn't think about it until after Bill asked for materials I'd planned to get later. We discussed raising the top tier onto it's support pole by hand, and some were surprised when Bill suggested a machine, since he's the "do-it-by-hand" guy. After he reminded us that he'd arrived by jet plane, we rented a telescoping forklift. We happened to have a rigger named Skelk on the crew, who arranged the ropes, and a neighbor, Russ, who had moved a lot of big, heavy things and had also just gotten a crane operator's license. As soon as the rest of us got out of the way, Russ and son set it down on the locust center pole just as pretty as you please. After the whole thing was up, Bill mused that "you could probably cut that post out completely, since the roof and cable are holding everything in place anyway…" As he also pointed out, however, "do you really want to see exactly how many rivets you can take out of the airplane?"

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the building is the interior surface of the upper roof, which consists of two layers of 3/8" fir boards. We carefully tied the first layer of sticks into the requisite curve, making a series of lovely bows, which we secured top and middle by tying them to steel rings. We nailed them around the eave. The tension in the boards would have twisted the whole thing, so after we cut the strings, we screwed the second layer down to the first, which fixed it all firm. Each shingle was hand cut to fit. That was a lovely day's work for a team of about 4, with Bill leading from top center.

After the top was done, the rest happened pretty quick. Bill's gift is to organize a large crew (17, in our case) so that everyone always has something worthwhile to do, and so that all the pieces are cut to size and ready to go when needed—similar, I imagine, to the leader's role in an old-fashioned Amish barn-raising. He also knows the design well, and dreams in numbers—even when there were surprises, he spotted and fixed them quickly. He didn't relax until we were all done. The highpoints, for me, were postscripts: sitting around our table—me, Hannah, two boys, and Bill, shelling corn into a big bowl. Also a long ride in the car, during which Bill talked about Emily Dickinson and other authors who have kept him company over the years. And finally, the ride to the airport, and complex thinking about little things, details of life which escape our notice—unless they're absent—and then we lose the whole kingdom for want of a nail, or a shoe, or a spoon. If more of us spent more time and attention on making good nails and shoes and spoons, we'd have less want, less violence, less war. It's an easy message, but a demanding discipline.

Don't be an artist

kikodenzer — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:09:10 +0000

DON’T BE AN ARTIST

[Art] must have begun as nature — not as an imitation of nature, not as a formalized representation of it, but as the relationship between humans and the natural world, from which we can’t be separated despite our attempts to set up a technological superstructure to destroy it.

— Lucy R. Lippard, in Art in America, 11/81

I grew up in a home that my artist mother filled with beautiful and useful things: hooked tapestries that told stories and covered naked walls or floors; finely jointed boxes full of shells and carvings in flowing black and white beach sands that shifted like miniature dunes; knotted necklaces, clothes, bread, furniture, and tools. I drew a lot, and started carving stone at 10, working with a penknife on bits of soft soapstone. In high school, I found a piece of marble at a demolition site, learned to forge and temper old files into chisels, and carved an oversize portrait of my own fist. One summer, I picked up a piece of granite off the beach and pecked it into a recognizable figure. My New Yorker mother took me to major museums and little galleries. I loved Michelangelo and Brancusi, but found much modern art confusing and unrelated to the world. Art seemed both expensive and common. At a gallery in our town, I saw and fell in love with a small soapstone sculpture made by an unknown Inuit. The forty dollar price tag was huge for a ten- year- old, but I saved my money and bought it. (I still have it – my first and only gallery purchase.)

That year I also learned to use a potter’s wheel, and started to shape wet clay into bowls, cups, and a horn I could play. A year or two later, I learned to take and develop photographs, and started to use the camera to share with others the beauties I saw in shadows, shapes, and pattern. I drew. With negligible training and my mother’s example and encouragement, I became proficient at all this before I was fifteen.

I learned to look for beauty in clay and light and line, volume and texture – I measured my results by comparison to what I saw and felt around me. Of those years, I best recall the shapes and colors I tried to copy: the feathers and form of a dead gull I found on the beach; the patterns of light and shadow in sand dunes and grasses that I photographed; the swelling forms of bowls and cups I made of clay; the shape and colors of fish that I caught and drew, or sculpted. It seemed important to see and to celebrate.

Outside home and a few galleries and museums, however, I saw little celebration. My mother didn’t sell much of her art, and complained that the only way an artist could make a living was by teaching. And while teaching was good, the beauty it added to the world seemed small and private. I wanted beauty large, useful, and public. I wanted to work in a world where anyone and everyone could see and celebrate any number of beauties. I looked at Michelangelo’s stone figures and Sistine murals and loved that kings and popes had commissioned him to fill public squares and churches with beautiful figures from great stories – and I loved that Italians seemed to love Michelangelo as much as I and my hockey buddies loved Gordie Howe or Wayne Gretzky (How many sports heroes names live on after 5 centuries?)

By contrast, at the rink and at school, I learned to measure myself on standardized scales: goals made, grades or wages earned, all “scored” on a simple numerical scale. None of my teachers taught beauty as a subject, nor suggested it as a goal or a measure. Even my art teachers evaluated us according to technical standards reducible to some graduated numerical scale. “Beauty” was a simple thing, a matter of personal preference rather than a source of common wealth or a unifying force greater than our small, human structures, our theories, or our knowledge.

My teachers had all apparently accepted without question the judgmental and reductive demands of a world view in which every human was a whole unto itself rather than a whole participant partially responsible for the maintenance of a much larger design. Rather than looking for the ways in which each student might express and celebrate a common beauty, they divided and sorted us like merchandise, with the “A” students on top, worthy of high esteem, high price, and high wages, and the “B,” “C,” “D,” and “F” students all below, ready sorted to uphold neither the beauty nor goodness of all, but rather the status of the few. Those pre-destined or mysteriously successful ones were deemed “to be better and brighter.” The rest were actually and symbolically discounted and devalued.

I neither saw nor understood, but I could feel that the requirement to strive against everyone else also required denying the beauty that held us all – and that I held most dear and most worthy. How could I pursue (much less know) this beauty if the pursuit required me to deny it to others? How could I be worthy if someone else was not? While I did well enough at school to fit into a comfortable layer of existence, the whole thing didn’t make much sense. When people asked me “what do you want to be?” I chose “artist” but I didn’t see a clear path, a way of beauty that would make me whole in a beautiful world.

When I got out of college, I did whatever seemed to work at the time, and managed to escape categorization. My peers chose careers according to their aptitudes, went to graduate school according to their grades, got jobs and wages according to their evaluations, married or made progress, and set about either teaching or raising more professionals. I chose not to be – not to be an artist, nor, really, anything else. I wandered down a seemingly random path, from art to community organizing to carpentry to bureaucracy to writing and publishing to teaching. It was a bit confusing, to others and myself. When my mother asked when I intended to return to “my art,” I got angry.

Now, fifty years later, my life revolves around various arts, but if I tell people “I’m an artist,” the next question is almost invariably, “And you make a living at it?” Then I know it will be a long time before we can talk about art. Often I take an oblique tack, and tell them what I’ve actually been doing – making stuff, working in the office, digging in the garden, or just hanging out – but this often makes normal professionals uncomfortable. They’d rather have a recognized career category and swap credentials. The alternative of actually talking about what they do might force them to admit that their job bores them, or makes them feel small; or maybe the daily details of what they love doing are too intimate or complex. Some who love their work are humble and don’t want to claim the status of their title. (One state senator I met at a party just said “I’m a public servant.”) Maybe we’re all afraid of being misunderstood. I suspect it’s a combination of all this and more. Labels are so easy.

But to be an artist – or anything else – requires you to claim a status beyond that of neighbor or relative, to make yourself an anonymous player in a game where some are rich and others poor, some win and others lose. Your status depends on how much you can sell yourself for – and who wants to be reduced to merchandise? Imagine, on the other hand, actually knowing each other by our daily work, not just our titles. If you doctor me, I call you Doctor John. If you shoe my horse or make my bread, I might call you John the Smith or Jack the Baker. But we don’t do that because we’re strangers to each other. Career and profession convince us to abandon family and tribal roots, often every few years. We lose the opportunity to observe and know each other by what we actually do. So I rarely claim any title, much less that of “artist.”

When I worked as a bureaucrat for the City of Boston, they called me a contract administrator in the Department of Employment and Training, but what I actually did was talk, type, and sit as a desk. I never trained or employed anyone. Later, I worked in construction, but I learned to swing a hammer by swinging a hammer. I rarely called myself a “carpenter” because I’d never spent long enough with one good carpenter to get what seemed like real training or discipline, much less mastery. I spent about ten years working with community groups on projects ranging from selling food, to building houses for poor and working people, to running a community newspaper. In professional circles, this kind of work has become a “field,” so when I moved to Oregon, I got a job where they called me a “community developer.” My duties included things like “facilitation” and “coordination” -— terms which, if they meant anything to the people I worked with, meant that the government was coming to tell them what to do, or that I had money and power and might share it if they would cooperate with me.

The job was for a drug and alcohol abuse prevention project with a 3-year federal grant to reduce drug and alcohol problems by engaging communities in positive and healthy activities. These ranged from “just say no” parades in schools, to building community centers or organizing other neighborhood projects. But while the rest of the staff worked on blatantly anti-drug activities, I ignored the “just say no” parades to work on saving a local campground from the budgetary axe, and starting a small community center. It put me in conflict with my boss, and made me the odd man out, which I remained, even after the first boss left.

In the midst of my troubling oddity, a lovely and open-hearted colleague named Jill asked what motivated me. It stopped me cold. Jill had lived in the area for years, got on well with all the staff, and didn’t take sides. She also seemed to have a deep and sincere commitment to service that went beyond self-serving career notions like “personal goals” and her “5-year plan.” And while her title of “administrative assistant” conferred little status (and commensurate pay), she contributed hugely to whatever success we had because she didn’t merely take care of correspondence, accounts, and office supplies, she truly cared for the needs and concerns that kept us all at work. (Why do we assume that “administrators” just take care of things, while “ministers” take care of people?) In any case, her question shook me up.

“I just want to be a person,” I blurted.

What I wanted wasn’t status or rewards but recognition – I needed to fit into a life bigger than I was, where others could see and know me as a person rather than just some government functionary. Some years later, a book by Martin Prechtel put my desire into a deeper context. When he was in his 20s, he found his way to Guatemala and into a traditional Mayan society where the phrase for “person” translates roughly as “a full twenty” — i.e., someone with ten toes and ten fingers, all the parts required for participating in a wholly hand-made and humanly measured life. While most of us come into the world so equipped, it takes time to learn to use the tools we’re given, it takes time to discover our own particular gifts, and it takes time to fit ourselves into the community and the world.

To fit himself into his new place, Prechtel first had to learn the language. Like a child, he started with home, food, bodily comforts – the language of mothers and (mostly) women. When he took home language out into the village, he had to learn new words and structures for a different kind of work and shared life. Finally, in order to grow up from a raw child into a fully cooked adult person, he went out with the youth for an initiatory test against life and death – the final authorities that give meaning to all speech and all activity and that ultimately confer the title of “person,” or “full twenty.”

The life of a Mayan villager included much suffering: the brutality of a military government that abused and eventually destroyed them; the hardships of a wild land that provided nothing without toil and which exacted severe consequences for mistakes. Despite the lack of a safety net or an organized system to motivate and reward them, however, people typically recognized and celebrated their life, gratefully and skillfully accepting the invitation to participate, whether at home or in the fields. As Prechtel puts it, they “used the gifts they’d been given…to make beauty.”

He explains their personhood partly as the result of the absence of the verb “to be” from their language. Instead of “being in the world,” they “belonged to the world.” Instead of arguing creation versus evolution, they devoted themselves to maintaining the world that carried them, and gave them life. Rather than authors, they saw themselves as caretakers. Prechtel explains:

One cannot say, ‘She is a mother,’ for instance. In Tzutujil, you can only call someone a mother by saying whose mother she is, whom she belongs to. Likewise, one cannot say, ‘He is a shaman.’ One says instead, ‘The way of tracking belongs to him.’

Prechtel’s adopted people understood each other by what they actually did, not by what they were. Real activity related them to a shared existence where every individual saw and understood themselves in living connection not only to each other, but the land under their feet: Prechtel explains that “Where an American settler says ‘this is my land, this land is mine, a Mayan would have to put it…as ‘this soil carries my people, we belong to this land.”

To know and be known this way requires an intimacy and engagement with life that most Americans, I think, don’t experience. Yet we do have and sometimes even share real experiences that can bring us together. That fitting together of people and life is the literal definition of art. The indo-European root, ar, means, simply, “to fit together,” a meaning that crops up in many interesting places, and has much more to do with how we care for the world we live in than it has to do with our status as makers, painters, or performers. Each one of us, simply in order to live, fits ourselves into life in some way. When it works, we reap rewards that go beyond money: worthiness, goodness, strength – all forms of beauty that gain value as we share them.

Language shifts experience, and giving up the verb “to be” forces us recognize the context we do share. Try it and see what happens. Every time you catch yourself writing am, are, is were, was, or will be, re-formulate the thought with another verb: instead of saying “the grass is green,” say “the rain gives green to grass,” or even just, “green grows the grass.”

Is it not true that “the grass that is green” is, literally, an object; something small that we own, interpret, or manipulate as opposed to the common ground that carries us all?

Language can isolate us, or bring us together. People, by the kind of traditional definition Prechtel offers, always belong to and participate in something larger than themselves. I think we all know, at some level, that the life we all face is not a problem requiring a solution. Rather, we come into the world helpless and weak, born into something too big for solutions, that we can only hope to know by living through it. But how will we do it? Each of us must choose a way to follow from the ways that we find open to us. So imagine answering the question “what do you do?” by declaring what way you have chosen:

“I follow the way of health” (doctor)

“I follow the way of justice” (judge/lawyer)

“I follow the way of caring” (minister)

“I follow the way of water” (plumber)

“I follow the way of design” (artist)

Imagine! The plumber would earn the respect due him for working with the source of all life. Rather than winners and losers, rich and poor, professionals and peons, all of us could receive honor and rewards for service to noble ends – and all of us could share a common humility, with common beginnings and endings in the soil from which we all grow – and which, when we die, we must all ultimately return to and feed. Prechtel calls it “feeding the holy,” and says it’s something that requires the participation of every member of the community. I call it art, because beauty invites each of us to participate, not as separate individuals graded and sorted according to profession and status, but as whole persons, all related and equally responsible for helping to maintain what sustains us all.

(more essays at http://www.theworkofart.org)

Quotes from Martín Prechtel come from his books, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, and from an interview with Derrick Jensen, in The Sun, April, 2001.

ovens and efficiency

kikodenzer — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:50:57 +0000

Dear Oven builders, mud teachers, bakers, and eaters:

I would like to talk to you about some of the claims being published about the efficiency of earthen ovens.

I think we need to be clear that any masonry oven, whether it's made of unfired earth or fired brick, is not, by definition, a "fuel efficient appliance" – especially if it isn't insulated.

There are more and less efficient ways to work with an oven, and some of them make quite good use of the wood burnt in them, but in my experience, those ways don't apply to people who just want to cook a few pizzas, or a few loaves of bread, or perhaps a holiday turkey. That kind of use requires the burning of many pounds of fuel to cook just a few pounds of bread or meat. I don't think we can call that "fuel efficient."

There are different kinds of efficiency besides fuel efficiency, and those are, I think, equally important. "Efficiency" itself means "what comes of our making," and goes far beyond pounds of food cooked for pounds of fuel burnt. There is also the work of making family and community, which can benefit greatly from the kind of communal hearth provided by an oven. There is the work of building relationships with each other and the earth, which can benefit greatly from working together with strangers to build something beautiful and useful. Ovens can be wonderful even when they go unfired: simple and magical to build, lovely to look at, and beautiful for how they bring people together. But like every thing human — like every thing living — life comes at the cost of life — and in order to actually cook in your oven, the cost is the life of trees that we cut and burn as firewood.

I suspect that most of the ovens built in the US don't get used more than a few times a year, and if they bring people together for a day or even just a few hours, then perhaps the exchange of life for life is fair. If they are well insulated and fired with small dry sticks, the exchange is even better (good insulation under the hearth and over the dome can increase retention of useful baking temps from just a few hours to 12 or more).

But when we teach people to build ovens, or if we build ovens for clients, I think it's very important to be very clear that the simple /fuel efficiency/ of an oven can be anything from terrible (a few pizzas) to OK (pizzas, flatbread, loaf bread, meat, casseroles, lasagna, soup, pies, stew, cookies, warmed milk for yogurt, dried food, and dry wood for the next firing). In America, we are rich enough in fuel that we don't pay that close attention to how many trees we cut to cook our food — but that is not so in many other countries. So a claim of "efficiency" in America or on the web may carry the wrong message to a country where trees are scarce, and fuel is in short supply.

If you're interested, I'm happy for a chance to continue this discussion, either here on the blog site, through the comment option, or directly (contact me at handprintpress.com, or by snail mail at POB 576, Blodgett OR 97326).

stix 'n mud can make a hug

kikodenzer — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:12:59 +0000

A new charter school in Corvallis commissioned this mud project as the initial step in creating an "outdoor classroom." All 60 kids, K-5, participated in 2 days of playdough brainstorming and design, and six days of mud. Parents and neighbors contributed random prunings of willow, fruitwood, and forsythia that we wove into a rough hut; the mud came up out of a hole in the ground, and we ended up making a lovely cob bench and this "hug hut."

The hut is intended to be temporary. It will probably "last" for at least one winter, but my hope is that teachers and parents will replace or augment academically defined "art curriculae" with a culture of creativity, where every year, individual students not only get to "express themselves" and "make things," but where all the citizens of the school will share in re-making the school into a warm, inviting place to be and to learn—rather than the cold, factory-like institutions that we've inherited from industrialized systems thinking. It seems to me that the underlying foundation of culture is not the things we make—why burden future generations with mandatory maintenance and obedience to a single vision?—rather, let's pass on the skills and stories by which our children can live and celebrate their own lives in joyous relation to the lives and stories of those who went before them.

The hug arrived completely unplanned and uninvited—perhaps it was a response to the uninviting "no trespassing" sign that marks the boundary between the playground and the adjoining property (just visible in the upper right corner of the photo above).

The source of our inspiration was this fuzzy, lumpy, perforated pile of mud that pretty much followed whatever shape the underlying sticks gave us. The finished hug was a bit of a surprise, but once we saw it, it was clear what we needed to do: Spike defined the regal roman nose on the yellow figure, and all we had to do to bring the red figure to life was outline the head, and clarify the eyes, nose and mouth. The arms were there—they just needed hands…

We started with homemade playdough, and as many ideas as we had kids.

The idea of a small, enclosed space was popular with at least half the kids, each of whom applied their own embellishments, sculptural shapes, and stories.

We looked at all the work and considered our options, given a short time frame and limited materials…

The first four sticks seemed impossibly mobile and indefinite, but every additional stick lent strength and shape to the growing form…

leaves on the sticks helped define the shape and fill in the gaps…

but the bigger gaps made for nice windows, both large and small…

There were a few kids who really didn't take to the mud, but we had other jobs, like stripping the bark off trees that were donated for a "challenge walk"—balance beams that will be set on blocks to mark out the edges of the playground, provide for shady seating on hot days, and a path from here to there…

Most got dirty, and when they did, they got happier, too!

The bench takes shape under expert hands. I'll be curious to learn how many kids make mud at home this summer…

The hut takes shape…

The principal: not sure she wants that kind of hug…

In addition to books and desks for every student, this school also provides shovels, wheelbarrows, and other real tools suitable for doing real work.

Parents and other community volunteers make such projects possible; there are always more details and more work than one person can manage alone.

Many hands…

Light work…

applying color: both red and yellow are local soils mixed with water and just a bit of cooked flour paste for binder.

The finished bench, with concrete cap.

Cutting rebar for setting the beams of the challenge walk… The kids devised the clever system for clamping the metal while cutting.

The nature of childhood, it seems to me, is to seek shelter and observe the rest of the world. Such observation is the basis for all other learning.

And shouldn't shelter feel like a hug?

The earth embraces us, in a mud hut, on an earthen bench, or in a circle of stumps.

Jumping bricks, or: inside out oven building

kikodenzer — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:53:29 +0000

I built this oven for a local CSA farmstand restaurant (gathering together farm). We held a public workshop; folks came to make mud and learn and we built the basic oven in a weekend. BUT! (and this was my fault for not watching more closely), the dome came out a little flat. Usually, when it's not quite right, I tell folks, "OK, time to tear down and rebuild." This is a great way to conquer the fear of doing it wrong—

and it's the only way to prove to folks the truth of my favorite oven-building adage: "the second time is easier and faster." But I let myself be convinced that the dome was adequately curved. It wasn't. A year later, it was bulging downward, at the rate of about one eighth of an inch per month. Collapse was inevitable.

"Well," you must be thinking, "didn't you say the second time is easier and faster!"

Yes, well, OK, but…even had I been able to halve the time for building the oven and the large, sculpted shell containing the loose perlite insulation, I would have needed at least a week, not including the time required to dry out the damp oven itself. The restaurant uses the oven 5 days a week, and I didn't want to be responsible for two weeks of down time—

nor did I want to put in that much (unpaid) time myself.

So the need for speed provided a perfect opportunity to try something I'd been wanting to try: making a brick dome using thin mud bricks laid on an angled bed of mortar, with successive courses in a series of shrinking circles to close in the dome—

without formwork! It's traditional for ovens and vaulted or domed ceilings. I'd seen ceilings done this way in Mexico and wondered, "how did they do that!?" as well as photos of German mud-brick ovens made the same way.

Now I can say from experience that it works! And it makes me appreciate bricks. They are pre-dried, pre-shrunk, easy to work with, and quick. Since they are relatively small, they shrink without cracking, which means you can use mud with a high percentage of clay. Clay holds up better to the thermal demands of an oven than a typically sandy cob mix, which relies on lots of sand to limit shrink. And if you're working in a situation where time = money—that is, if you're building an oven for someone else—you can make bricks at your leisure, and store them for when you need them. Mud has higher value when it's made into a brick, so you can charge a unit price for each nicely squared blob of mud, but since bricks make for a quick build, you don't have to spend so much time on the site building, drying out the oven, etc. (Here starts the slippery slope of professionalism, which is, as Collette said of writing, much like sex: first you do it for love; then you do it as a favor just for friends; then you do it for money. And then you set up guilds and unions, a licensing board with bonding and contract requirements with related insurance and legal industries, then lobbyists and trade agreements and complete control—

which spawns renegade activities like how-to books for home-bakers and oven builders, backyard mud ovens, internet groups, and here we are!)

note the cracking bulge at the top center of the oven ceiling. I cut a story stick that just fit under the bulge without scraping, to keep track of movement. After about a month, I could no longer slide the stick through without scraping. I figured the bulge had dropped another 1/8-3/16 of an inch. Fortunately, our raw clay-sand bricks had dried by then.

Lisa, one of the cooks, helps make bricks—

here she wets the brick form (1.5" deep: scrap 2×2 — thin bricks are best for domework, as they make better curves, and their lighter weight means less risk of slippage when you're setting them).

Next, she sprinkles sawdust (we didn't have any sand), so the brick will slip off the board.

Throw two handfuls of mud into the form; if you throw it right, the corners come out clean and sharp.

smooth the top surface…

we learned a lot from watching Caramelo, from Oaxaca, an expert adobe-maker… I didn't get his picture, unfortunately…

pull the form: the brick is ready to slide off onto a flat surface for drying.

here's our stack of about 220 bricks, with form.

in mexico, they say you can tell the top of the adobe by the dog prints…

The outer surface of the over is a thin shell containing perlite insulation. I cut a hole in the bottom side to drain out the perlite. I used a piece of old roofing tin to make a chute to direct the flow of perlite. It poured out like water. Nasty dust. A good mask is well worth the money.

here you can see the layers, from outside to inside: colored final clay-sand plaster, insulating sawdust-clay mix, and gypsum-impregnated burlap

a Sawzall came in very handy to cut a hole in the top, and eventually, to cut out a large, wedge-shaped piece of the entire shell. There was virtually no cracking as a result of any cutting. The shell was super-strong and rigid. Note the bamboo armature underneath.

perlite inside the shell, avalanching down to the drain hole…

Lisa peering into the emptied out shell…

good insulation! The bamboo, which was just temporary formwork for the fireproof plaster shell while it dried, is still completely intact: not even charred!

The bamboo supports a layer of burlap impregnated with clay slip and gypsum plaster for a quick-setting, stiff, and fireproof surface that could be plastered immediately.

even the jute twine that I'd used to tie the bamboo hadn't charred—

indeed, it was barely toasted! I would guess that the temperature at that level barely got over 200 degrees F.

In cross-section, you can see the layers of the fire-proof shell that holds the insulation. From top to bottom: white is gypsum and clay impregnated burlap with some sandy-clay plaster, then a layer of insulating and sculptable plaster made of clay and sawdust, then a layer of fine clay-sand finish plaster.

The surface at the bottom of the photo is the top of the oven dome, made of pure sand and clay. Above that, looking like the edge of a cliff, is a layer of sawdust mixed with clay slip. This close to the heat, the sawdust gets hot enough to completely burn out, leaving an insulative clay foam. It works well, but crumbles at a touch. The white above is perlite, which was pretty well contaminated with the crumbs of crumbled clay-foam, so we had to buy new when we refilled the insulation cavity.

The thermal layer comes down. Note thickness of shell.

The dense thermal layer was not hugely massive because the oven is used primarily for pizza and just a bit of bread. However, with 6-10 inches of perlite all around, it held heat extremely well, and performed beautifully.

Thickness ranged from a bit more than three inches to almost five inches.

Thermal layer completely cleaned out. Note the bottles in perlite exposed around the edges of the floor bricks. The bricks on edge around the perimeter are a "bumper course" to protect the softer mud dome from peels and firewood.

Front arch

the hole in the shell was just big enough for me to step into the oven and sit on the floor. I'm very glad I didn't have to wiggle through the door in order to work!

first courses of bricks, showing the mortar wedge that sets the angle of the dome

a wedge of bricks at the corner nearest the door helps define the line from the (low) front end of the oven to the higher rear end…

story stick shows the 16" target height for the rear of the dome: I angled the bricks to meet the top of the story stick about 6-8" off the back of the oven…

the mortar is just clay and sand, like the bricks. Building an oven with bricks this way means that you can use more clay in the mix; because the bricks are relatively thin and small, they shrink without cracking. The clay is generally more durable under constant use than a typical "cob" mix, which uses a higher percentage of sand to limit cracking.

at work: I was very glad when I realized I could just cut out a big doorway right through the shell. Originally I'd thought I would have to wiggle through the door and work lying down!

the walls start to close in; each course describes a slightly smaller circle and tilts at a steeper angle

I'd only ever seen pictures of this, so was both pleased and amazed at how well the mortar held the bricks against the force of gravity

getting tighter!

I had to clean the bottoms of the mortar joints by feel because I couldn't get low enough to see 'em!

I tried to work as symmetrically as possible, but it's definitely very different than laying up a straight wall.

toward the end, I had to enlarge the opening of the shell just to be able to maneuver.

I used the spray bottle to wet out dry surfaces to take the mortar better.

the dome closing in to the final keystone courses…

these last bricks were almost vertical, but were also held in place by being wedge-shaped. Since the bricks were raw (unfired) they were easy to cut with an old Sawzall blade.

final courses close the dome.

note the angled courses shaping the "throat" leading to the door opening

hard to clean the insides of the final mortar joints; I made a long handled tool that reached through the doorway to scrape the joints clean.

patching the shell was a matter of splitting some new bamboo and wedging it into place

not much structure is needed to support the burlap and gypsum plaster, which is self-supporting once it sets. However, I did "tie" the main bamboo struts with "straps" of gypsum-soaked burlap that wrapped around the bamboo and over the outside of the shell. These got trimmed after the gypsum set.

from burlap to finish plaster was a matter of an hour or so…

I started a drying fire immediately (using the old bits of bamboo for kindling—

nice and dry!)

almost ready for pizza!

We The People vs The Western Diet

kikodenzer — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:24:46 +0000

I just finished reading In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan. Part of my pleasure in reading it was remembering my grandmother, Evelyn Sayre Norton, and meals at her table — the eggs she fried in bacon grease, the lamb fat she savored, and the produce she brought back from local farmers for whom she saved and recycled her shopping bags — long before anyone would give you a nickel credit for such things. Eating this way, she lived into her 90s.

I also appreciated the methodical way in which Pollan justified choices I have made because, well, probably because I am happier eating with the memory of my grandmother — and her local farmer friends — than I am eating at the industrial cafeteria. And because it’s always been cheaper to make (and now grow) it myself.

In any case, the question that occurred to me after reading the book is this:

Is anyone considering (or better, organizing) a class action suit against the purveyors of the western diet (government/agribiz/commercial research)? It seemed to me that the book pretty well laid out the whole case. Did the tobacco suit have any better evidence than what Pollan just published? If current, “near epidemic levels” of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc. are all linked so directly to the western diet (and nutritionism), would it really be such a wacky idea? Might it help re-frame the current ag debates?

If this question has already been addressed, I'd love to know (I don’t even try to keep up with all the news, most of which strikes me as even less healthy than trans-fats). In any case, I am keeping a hopeful and curious ear out on this one…

Thanks again to Michael Pollan for his good work.