First Friday: December 2023 – Reflecting on Water
Inspiration & Updates from Brian Madden Studio
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
— Margaret Atwood
Thanks to everyone who visited my open studio this month. I enjoyed all the quality time with my old friends, and to all my new friends, nice to meet you! I’m looking forward to welcoming you back to my studio for our annual holiday party on December 16th.
I’m writing to you from the oldest city in the USA, St. Augustine, Florida, and the wisdom of water is on my mind. This month I’ve been seeing a lot of parallels between my creative practice and the natural inspiration flowing around me.
Read on for creative explorations and studio updates as the year of three winters continues. In this December edition of First Friday, I’ll share:
WHAT I’M MAKING: Ecco Leather: DECOM 2 Workshop at Le Garage
WHAT I’M READING: How to Read Water
WHAT I’M SEEING: Driftwood Beach on Jekyll Island
WHAT I’M SHOWING: The de Young Open & 2023 Studio Party
WHAT I’M HEARING: The Year of Three Winters Continues
You’re receiving First Friday because you’ve supported my artwork, visited my studio, or otherwise signed up to stay in touch. Thanks for being a part of this story!
WHAT I’M SHOWING: Ecco Leather: DECOM 2 Workshop at Le Garage
Last month I attended a material innovation workshop in Portland, Oregon at Le Garage, Ecco Leather’s new maker space. Ecco built this space to foster ideas for a more sustainable future for leather. The workshop was a unique opportunity to dive into a material that I’ve never worked with, and collaborate with a small team among a group of designers and makers from companies like Nike, Adidas, Columbia, and Ecco.
My team’s mission was to explore the world of organic leather and sustainable processes, before developing a story around our experimentation to present back to the full group at the end of the 2-day workshop.
As one of the only non-footwear industry folks, I leaned into creating through the lens of my artistic practice, sharing stories about how I repurpose remnants and byproducts in my creative process, particularly in my Six Months in Dogpatch collection.
Our explorations of color, materiality, and repurposing waste led us to pursue a concept of salt, fat, acid and heat, made famous by Samin Nosrat’s cookbook. Salt represented color and texture, fat used wax to cover and block the surface of the leather, acid focused on removing and altering material, and heat kicked things up a notch by burning and searing the leather to add new texture.
We created a fictional restaurant called Patina, where the chef maintained their apron, the tablecloths, and more from each month’s cooking, and repurposed them into the menu covers, a knife roll, and even serving bowls. We brought the story to life by repurposing organic leather drop cloths we had previously laid down beneath each of the other groups’ works stations, to capture the remnants of their ‘cooking’ throughout the workshop to create one-of-a-kind, wabi-sabi objects that captured time and process.
I was so happy to get my hands dirty experimenting with new materials and techniques, while learning from diverse perspectives. I’m curious to see how this will continue to evolve my process and time-based artistic practice.
WHAT I’M READING: How to Read Water
I feel so connected to water— its calming, nourishing presence, its persistent, fluid motion and its transformative, awesome power. So I felt grateful when my mom gave me a book called How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea, by Tristan Gooley.
Gooley navigates the reader through simple ways to understand the characteristics and behavior of water, and how it’s affected by weather, location, and context.
The book touches on how to observe water and all its subtleties to understand what may lie beneath the surface, which can prove particularly useful while fly fishing in a mountain stream, surfing a break, or stepping across puddles on a commute to work.
I’ve been feeling particularly inspired by How to Read Water, because it’s emerging as a personal metaphor for exploring the world as a creative entrepreneur. Along this path there are so many subtle and often hidden signs for how to proceed and engage as an artist, a designer, and an entrepreneur in a turbulent world. Each new relationship and budding idea reveals opportunities and constraints that require patient observation, dutiful persistence, and humble curiosity to navigate.
So much of my inspiration and process also points back to water. It is both gentle and flowing when used in the natural dyeing process, and immensely powerful and abrasive when I use water jet machines to cut through solid stone.
My marble wave forms (inspired by Vija Celmins’ pencil illustrations), water-jet cut stone sculptures and process-generated remnant artwork, and even my experiments with pigmented leather at the Decom 2 workshop are all shaped by water and its many forms.
WHAT I’M SEEING: Driftwood Beach, Jekyll Island
This past week I joined my wife’s family to visit the barrier islands off the coast of Georgia. While kayaking through marshland at low tide, we learned that this part of the East Coast of the US is so far west, it’s actually due south from Ohio.
This is a beautiful area of the low country, with fantastic diversity of forests and coastal marshlands. And being this far west means that it’s the first place for tides to leave, resulting in a great tidal fluctuation, which can be amplified by full moons and hurricanes.
The most striking example of this is at Driftwood Beach on beautiful Jekyll Island. In the 1970s, dredging of the shipping lane next to the island resulted in erosion of the protective coastline around a seaside forest. A hurricane brought a surge of water that engulfed the area, and when salt water encroached on the roots, the trees died, eventually weathering into these skeletal forms we see today.
Reflecting on these compounding factors as we explored this sculptural wasteland, it felt bittersweet learning about the impact we humans can have on a landscape, while simultaneously being visually inspired by this unexpected result.
WHAT I’M SHOWING: The de Young Open & 2023 Studio Party
In two weeks we’ll be hosting our annual studio holiday party! We’ll have music & activities, drinks & snacks, and Jen McP’s legendary cookie swap. If you’d like to create something for the cookie swap, please bring a couple dozen or so, and we’ll have bags so everyone can take some home. RSVP here and bring your friends!
Dress code is casual, but it’s the holidays, so feel free to have some fun, express yourself, and if you love dressing up, go for it! And of course, tacky sweaters are always welcome 😈
It’s also the last month to see my Six Months in Dogpatch diptych at The de Young Open 2023, closing January 7. The Open is a must-see showcase for Bay Area artists. I will also be showing more originals and experiments that are available from the Six Months in Dogpatch collection at my holiday party. If you’re interested in learning more about the collection, please reach out to info@brianbmadden.com.
WHAT I’M HEARING: The Year of Three Winters Continues
Spotify wrapped season is here, and The Year of Three Winters is coming full circle now that we’ve been through the Australian winter, just in time for American winter to begin again. This month features mellow songs overheard during crisp autumn days and nights in SF, Banff Canada, Massachusetts, Georgia, and Florida.
The First Friday Playlist can only come from songs I’ve heard, received, discovered, (or rediscovered) out in the world. Songs overheard at (coffee) shops, restaurants, bars, galleries, or received from friends IRL and online. And we do take requests.
We’ll be playing tracks from across the First Friday playlists during my annual studio holiday party on December 16. Hope to see you there!
Thanks for reading,
Brian
brian@brianbmadden.com
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.”
— A. A. Milne