When I first started, what was very very important to me
Was dealing with the nature of process.
So, what I had done was I had written a verb list--
To roll, to fold, to cut,
To dangle, to twist--or whatever.
And I really just worked out pieces in relation to the verb list
Physically in a space.
Now, what happens when you do that is
You don't become involved with the psychology of what you're making,
Nor do you become involved with the after image of what it's going to look like.
So, basically, it gives you a way of proceeding,
With material in relation to body movement,
In relation to making,
That divorces you from any notion of metaphor,
Any notion of easy imagery.
I think what artists do is
They invent strategies that allow themselves to see
In a way that they haven't seen before
To extend their vision.
Various artists do it in different ways:
Cézanne did it in his way,
Obviously, Pollock did it his way
By dripping downward in a horizontal plane.
But I think what's interesting about artists is
They constantly come up with ways of informing themselves
By inventing tools or techniques or processes
That allow them to see into a material manifestation
In the way that you would not if you dealt with standardized
Or academic ways of thinking.
These ellipses only came about because
We'd invented a wheel to make these things
In order for us to understand what we were doing.
And albeit it's a small invention
And on another sense, it has never come up
In the history of form making before.
We're not drawing the outside of the piece
Like a pear or a donut.
What we're doing is trying to figure out
What the internal volume will revolve like.
We made a wheel to figure that out,
And that wheel predicates the outside the skin.
So it's the way of working from the inside, out.
I think one constantly tries to invent ways
Of seeing into what one's doing
So you don't get into some lock-step notion
Of how to do what you do.
I have to kind of invent new strategies