The Love Armor Project

Mothball the military industrial complex.

Shirley Klinghoffer and Sarah Hewitt had better keep on knitting. Knitting their brows because this last little art intervention of theirs was a real humdinger. Or maybe we should let’em relax for a while, maintain their poker faces and just admit to ourselves–the ante has been upped.

Getting knitting forms the plan, so the work broadcasts immediately deep-dish, Chicago-style feminist collaboration of the “women’s work as high art” variety that we’ve all come to love. But since it’s 2008 and since both genders knit, and everybody can be a Marine, and it’s Santa Fe, and the mistaken occupation of Iraq still sucks, Love Armor transforms the Waxman Gallery into a deconstruction site that posits itself successfully as both a theoretical and social action, a genuine act of peace, love, and understanding. You in the hinterlands, still saying art can’t be activism, all you really need (fur yerself) is a nice Humvee Cozy.

A little knitted dust cover for an appliance you rarely intend to use is such a good thing to have, especially when it’s made by someone who cares. Getting the National Guard to bring a camo-painted Humvee to cuddle and cozy (because sharing is caring) into the former tank armory at the CCA is a hilarious idea. The floating Humvee Cozy has all the classical conceptual elegance of a well-played and well-intended joke, a la Duchamp or Manzoni. In realization it provides the anti-gravity to enact the psychic deconstruction process that is grief.

The Love Armor Project posits an off-white site within a black hole, a still place to honor the 4,000-plus American lives lost in Iraq, many in or around this Humvee, our standard issue military vehicle. The cozy transforms itself into a shroud for those who never got out. The L.A.P. intercedes, nurtures, and as a laying-on-of-hands it offers healing and protection. Knitting is a meditation akin to enumerative prayer, akin to chanting, akin to mother wailing–a father’s tears, one after another.

Milan Kundera called it “the laughter of angels,” when something lifts and unburdens your heart finally, after a long time of despair. The floating cozy, after the Humvee M1026 was driven out, achieved this lifted elegiac emotion via presented absence.

My recommendation: immediately contract eight-five percent of our designers and manufacturers of weaponry to work as artists exploring their deepest imaginations.

Jon Carver
THE Magazine
November 2008

To create one’s own language as an artist takes a great deal of time and growth. Now that I have found a “language” of vessels with techniques and materials, it is time for me to clarify my concepts and constructions to best communicate.

Technique, materials and forms are the structure of an object/element. I choose to sculpt using fibers – using a variety of materials from jute twine from the hardware store to bark peeled fresh from a tree, and cloth purposed for commercial fishing. To build an object I use a variety of textile techniques – stitching, knitting, crochet, coiling, weaving – any form of joinery. My forms develop from the materials’ strengths and weakness. They border on the yonic and womb-like, referencing nests, bindings, and scarification.

But I’ve allowed the materials and the processes to heavily influence the style of my work as opposed to enforcing the concepts I want to communicate. In a manner, I have been following or deciphering myself from my work. I believe that it might have been the best way for me to learn about myself to see or hear what I had innately to say. But now it is time, with new maturity and self-realization, to sit and create from a sense of awareness.

I will most likely always work by intuition but I would like to take this time to really examine each element of my process. From the initial concept, writing and sketching to the choice of materials – raw to manufactured or re-purposed, the technique to construct the structure and the conclusion of the object and it’s successfulness in communicating the original thought. I will be analyzing my “language” and hopefully be able to narrow down my words to the essential phrasing.

I just returned from 2 weeks at Haystack. It’s become a bit of a home-away-from-home. Hisako Sekijima was teaching and I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to meet her and work in her presence. I didn’t accomplish quite as much as I hoped but I did meet wonderful people and had a chance to see some old friends.

images in ebook

Find out more about the Trickster at Duane McDiarmid .

Wednesday May 21 at 7:30 AM Kathryn and I will be guests on the morning show on Park City Television!

Went to Kamas and the National Forest yesterday. Lovely woods and the Provo River.

kamas pictures