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Nora Naranjo Morse: A nice wind will just low these away.
Pete McElhinney: Yeah.
Can you do something like to hold them in place, then? The one's that are there?
Nora: That look's good. I don't know how much, you know, I really don't know how
much we should try to keep them. You know what I mean?
Pete: Yeah. Nora: If they don't want to. It's their
time to come off. I'm surprised this lasted this long.
Pete: Pretty good yeah. Nora: I like your idea about taking that down.
Female voice: Is that all hide or is there another string? Nora: It's all, there's just, it's hide. All right.
Nora: Now what's gonna happen is, these are really
loose. We'll have to paint them first, let it dry and then put the rawhide because .... it's
scarily loose. [Yeah] And that will keep it together. Because I think what's gonna happen
is eventually these will come down. That will be a big year for us. Kelly: That's a big
year. Nora: When they get pulled down and we have to talk about what will happen to
these posts. You know because that will be a big thing for me. Kelly: Yeah. The reuse
of them. Nora: The reuse, that's huge right now. Well we talked about that right, in my
work, all of the recycled stuff, and what are we doing this material. Nora: Careful.
Pete: Would you like them to stay here Nora in like terms of their reuse? Is it something
you want, are you thinking this is something that stays in DC or? Nora: Well they're
from DC so I think they should stay in DC. But I don't, that's just something we
need to talk about. [Yeah] as a group, what we're going to do with them. They could
be used for wood. Pete: It'd be nice to turn them into a bench, so people could just
sit down and enjoy. Nora: Yeah, something wonderful like that would be great.
Nora: So what I'm doing is I'm allowing the cracks to tell me where to start and to stop in taking this off.
And then from there I'm going to sand it, after I take off a lot of
the areas that are going to come off anyway, like that, and from there I'll make it easier
for the balls that are hidden underneath here to start showing themselves.
Nora: A lot of designing this, pieces originally came from this an intuitive place, so that,
ah, some of it, most of it was planned but some of the detail design were serendipitous.
And so I'm following that same idea. Where the lines and the curves allow themselves
to shine. And I'm just the person who helps them come out. And I think that way of creating
for me is, really comes from the culture I come from, where it's more intuit than pre-designed.
I like this line. In New Mexico, you see all of these homes that are old, 100, 200 hundred
years old and they have the most beautiful weathering process happening to them because
they're adobe. And you can see the lines coming out after hundreds of years being left
out to weatherize, and I'm sort of following that same inspiration here. The artist or
the person working with the piece then becomes part of the process of creating with the environment,
and for me that's very, very cool.
When you look at some of the houses it's, they're simple and they're very organic
but they are just so incredibly beautiful and well made. Um, and a lot of them like,
in some of the pueblos, a lot of the older parts of the villages have sort of been left
just to crumble back into the ground because some of the pottery that they used to make
long time ago when the pottery was used for utilitarian purposes and if cracked or something
happened to it. Then they would just put them outside and they were just allowed to fall
back into the earth. And the homes are the same way. But in that process, I think I'm
really inspired by how that happens, why that happens, how long does it take, and what shapes
and forms come out of that. I think in that way, I'm using cultural information and
knowledge and creating with that, in a contemporary setting.
Nora: You know, to be perfectly honest, I can't wait for that other bamboo to fall off because
then we get to paint it, the poles, then it will have a different meaning completely.
Now we're looking at the last remnants of a time, a period of time. Gail: But it's
still so sharp and [Yeah], like it's telling us it wants another season [yeah].
Nora: This moon pattern correlates to that moon pattern on the sidewalk. When I initially
came to do a site visit for this project, I noticed that almost immediately and so I
remembered that and so these are clay balls that are made from micaceous and Santa Clara
clay from New Mexico. And so I brought them here. A lot of little details have been brought
from New Mexico. There's a viga that was cut by my Dad like 65 years ago, that's
planted in one of the pieces and so that it really does become about family. And that's
why I'm thinking today and telling all the conservators, if they're remembering their
family or if they're wanting to honor their family, that circle would be a good time to
paint for somebody they know or that has gone on.
You can start to see how the water drips from the tree where it hits the top of Beyoncé
or this piece and flows down, the pattern that it takes. And you can start to see how
this piece will start to erode and reconfigure after a while. And that gives me indication
every single time about what I have to think about for the next time.
If you have anybody that you don't have here anymore or you want to remember somebody
um, your family, somebody, somewhere, please do that today with your circle. I think this
is why people do ceremony. You know because this is like a ceremony right now. I mean,
the world is passing by, we might get nuked by North Korea but there's still this sense
of ceremony happening on this little plot. [Exactly]. And I love that. The lines are
real randomly chosen but they're all fitting together so perfectly.
If there's more than one person go for it.
I really like it from this angle. This one pole just full of these rings of people.
Nora: I'm, it's, I'm so proud of us.
I noticed it from across the street and I was very impressed.