One thing Hilary notices is the pitiful broken shade on my favorite tabletop lamp. I love this thing, although it is cheap and flimsy, because it sheds just the right amount of light and is small enough to fit into my house. The lampshade is old, dirty and brittle and I put my thumb through it the other day.
Now Hilary and I have collaborated on numerous art projects throughout our 50 year friendship, so it is no surprise when she proposes that we make a new lampshade for this little lamp. I say, "well... okay..."
At the moment, I'm going back and forth between completely distracted by pain or completely narked out by my extreme meds. Not at all confident in my ability to tackle even a tiny bit of art. But with Hilary by my side... maybe it can happen.
We look around the house for supplies, and find everything we need - that's the nice thing about living with 40 years accumulation of art supplies - good looking heavy paper (from when we worked together at print shop in the 80s) glue stick, exacto knives, ice picks, various sewing tools, bright-colored tissue paper.
Hilary takes a scrap of paper and cuts some beautiful floral designs in it with an exacto knife, bending each cut out a little to give it contour telling me about someone she saw doing this and painting each little cut some pretty color and how cool it looked and would I like to do that? Well yeah. But something's wrong...
Usually I can catch Hilary's ideas. I can elaborate on them, make them a little bit mine, then pass the idea back for her to mess with; that's how it works with us, that's how we make things... but I can't get her idea past my fog and pain today. "Umm..." I say, turning her pretty scrap around in my hands, "Sure... you want me to... I mean... what?" "Or you could just do some holes, and texture with these tools." Me? No. I can't do anything. How am I going to explain this? "I think you should do it. I'll do something else."
She gets it. She does it. She's the best!
And somehow she knows without me telling her that she's going to have to help me through this project, and that she's going to have to be the boss, pretty much, for today.
The shade is now glued up the side seam with a glue stick, making sure that it fits against the top ring pretty closely;
and against the bottom ring pretty closely. I think she used a clothespin for a clamp to hold the seam until the glue dried.
Next: contemplating how to attach the paper to the metal rings. The original has some lightweight paper tape holding it all together: something we can't seem to recreate. So Hilary has to innovate for us again, and comes up with a good idea.
She cuts strips of colored tissue paper, then I cut those into random short lengths:
Hilary puts glue on the tissue pieces, then hands them to me
and I place them strategically and aesthetically where needed to hold the whole thing together. In my state of confusion this small, repetitive task feels like a major accomplishment.
We stand back and contemplate the final results. Final judgement: it's pretty good! It's not art, not even craft really - just a project, and useful. Mainly, it was fun, especially since we did it together.
Which brings me to my main point, I guess: Art as a group activity.
Too often, we undervalue the community-building aspect of projects that are created by a group of artists or artisans. Consider, like this lampshade, other collective creative endeavors:
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