I have been very negligent in my blog duties, so I have a lot of catching up to do. The first project I will tackle is "Memento" from early October. Our assignment was to create a small item representative of a certain memory using only three materials. As I thought about what to do, memories of all shapes and sizes came flooding back to me: reading dinosaur books on the plush beanbags of the tiny library's children's section; listening to "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears on the long car trip to Washington D.C.; tornado sirens at Grandma and Grandpa's house during the summer; the sweet, sick, wavy feeling of breaking my arm on the wood floor at dance; making houses in the backyard out of cardboard leftover from the packaging of large appliances. One after another, they surfaced and vanished like carbonation in a freshly-poured glass of pop. After much consideration, I finally latched on to one specific memory: spending time at Howell Airport with my dad.
Aviation has always been a huge part of my life. My dad is a freight pilot and a flight instructor. He was also an aerobatic champion, competing for a spot on the world team, until my sister and I were born. An advocate of "do what you love, love what you do," my dad always says he would fly for free, that "getting paid is just a bonus." I remember wearing his captain's hat and regulation UPS tie as he pulled me around the living room on his flight bag before leaving for another week of work. Because he is gone for about half of the year, our relationship sometimes seems slightly out of touch. Nevertheless, my dad has tried very hard to make sure our father/daughter bond remains strong. One such way he has accomplished this has been through (what else?) airplanes.
My dad holds me in the Decathlon while Uncle Karl poses in his aviators
Howell Airport was a small place in New Lenox, southwest of Chicago. My dad used to spend a lot of time there, and he would often take me (and my sister, when she was old enough) with him, especially during the late spring and summer. I distinctly recall the smell of aviation fuel, purple and white cloves that grew on the grass medians between the taxiways, and the mustiness of the hangars. But more than anything, I remember the little office where Cathy, the receptionist, would greet me and take me into Bill Howell's den with the huge, cushy "boss" chair. I would be given a stack of copy paper and the Christmas cookies tin of crayons, left alone to color while my dad talked airplanes and flew with other adults. I loved flying with my dad, but even back then I understood that some parts of his life were his - that it was okay if some things went over my head. And so, I drew pictures of people with hoop earring-adorned cat ears and sucked happily on Runts from the 25-cent candy machine in the lobby.
Process Pictures
I started out by building a structure of balsa wood reminiscent of my dad's aerobatic trophies.
I knew crayons has to be a central component of my memento. I decided to tear the paper off crayons and rip them into small bits.
I glued the crayon paper to the wooden structure with wood glue.
I then added distorted paperclips to the sculpture by piercing the wood and securing them with glue.
Final Memento
"Like Father, Like Daughter"
My final solution consisted of a sculpture made of balsa wood, crayon paper, and paperclips. (Glue was also used in its creation, however because it is not visible, it does not count as a material.) I decided to use wood because it reminded me of the unfinished, exposed ceilings of the hangars and the smell of busy buzz saws in Curly's busy workshop. Its vertical orientation alluded to the memory not only being bigger than me, but also it being about the sky, and airplanes, and looking at the world from a distance. The office/art supplies ground the memento, however, and describe the duality I felt between isolation/participation while at the airport. Though I often sat in Mr. Howell's office and colored, my dad also took time to introduce me to the amazing world of aviation. We would go up in the Decathlon, or my uncle's Luscombe, and sometimes he would pretend to fall asleep at the stick and make me fly the plane for a while as I frantically yelled, "Dad! DAD! WAKE UP!" The bent paperclips represent the pathways we carved through the sky, and visually break up the rhythm of the wooden posts. As I mentioned before, the structure resembles my dad's aerobatic trophies, which he now keeps in his office - the "Captain's Den" - next to model airplanes and his retired captain's hats. In this way, my memento is a monument commemorating things lost: my dad gave up competitive aerobatics when he saw one of his friends crash at a competition, leaving behind a wife and two little girls. Howell Airport has also been shut down, demolished, the site now waiting to be developed into a shopping center.
We are different, my dad and I, but tied together by so many small moments. Wearing his hat and tie, riding on his flight bag, putting the fruit-patterned cushion in the backseat of the Decathlon so my sister and I could see out the window, eating grilled cheese sandwiches at DeLand and watching the skydivers come in, going to Saturday morning Gaggle Flight breakfasts, camping out at Oshkosh, and, most importantly, taking off down the runway at Howell, watching as the buildings and cornfields got smaller and smaller and smaller. And the place where it all began became but a speck below us as we burst through the clouds.
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