contemporary modern living room furniture design mentor
>> i was thinking a lot aboutjust growing up on the border and having thisdual personality. >> changing her country each dayis definitely part of the work. >> with this idea they had ofeast and west meeting, opening up cross-cultural references,how everybody gains when we're open to the other. >> it just connects us, and it just brings out our humanity. >> my work intersects old
technology and new technologies. >> which allow her to make a kind of art the world hasnever seen. >> ♪ 'tis a gift to be simple,'tis a gift to be free, 'tis a gift to come downwhere you ought to be, and when you find yourselfin the place just right, 'twill be in the valleyof love and delight ♪ >> major funding for "craft inamerica" was provided by cynthia lovelace sears & frank buxton...
[women vocalizing] >> l.l. brownrigg... lillian and jon lovelace... the national endowmentfor the arts, windgate charitable foundation,stolaroff foundation. additional support was providedby the following. [music playing] >> so i do sculptures,furniture, site-specific installationsfor museums, and then i pay
my bills by making jewelryand accessories. yeah, just lots of stuff, lotsand lots of stuff. it all grows in and out of playing aroundwith disciplines and materials, but--but not abandoning, i thinkwhere i started. so now we're getting closer andcloser and closer to the border, and that little, like, hazyhorizon is tijuana already. you know, my parents both livethere. my sisters and i all grew
up in tijuana. it's--it's a safeplace for me and for my family. and my grandmother had 9 kids. she had 7 girls and 2 boys, and my dad is one of the 2 boys. >> my mom, she was--she was a u.s. citizen born, uh,in azusa, california. >> one of the reasons why we'reliving here in mexico instead of living in the states, becausei didn't wanted my kids to be
unattached to their country,so they will--their roots will be pulling them and feelingthat they're mexican. >> as a kid in tijuana, i grewup in a very, very tiny, tiny house. the block that we livedin was not the best block, as far as looks go, but it was--everybody knew everybody. um, i was always a really, reallyoutgoing kid, so if a new person moved in to one of the houses,i'd go knock on the door and
say, "do you have any children,and how many children, and what are their ages and theirgender?" you know, and they would tell me, "oh, there's athis girl, this boy, this girl," and i'd request the one that wasclosest to my age and was a girl, and i'd say, "well, isthat one available, and can she come and play?" my dad and i would cross the border every day, and i wouldget dropped off at my grandma's
house and then go to schoolclose to my grandma's house. and it wasn't because my parentswanted me to go to school in the u.s. it was because they didn'thave a baby sitter, and so my grandmother lived on the u.s.side, and so then they just-- by default, i just ended upbeing dropped off in the u.s. it was pretty tough, though. it was really, really tough, because, well, we'd have toleave the house, like, 3:30, 4:00 in the morning for us to beable to cross the border and get
to the u.s. side in time formy dad to go to work. so i would get dropped off at my grandma'shouse sometimes around 5:30 in the morning and then justwait for people to wake up. yeah, and a lot of theseblankets are the types of blankets that are usedin the weavings, that has all the crazy colors in it. i definitely feel the freedomto work with whatever material i want to.
i guess it's a littlebit like improvising with the material and just kind ofletting the material dictate where the composition is going. so it's a little bit like painting with material. my exploration into color andtexture comes from the mexican side of me, and the cleanerlines and more minimal aesthetic come from the u.s. side of me. >> i'm just really drawn to the
spirit of her work. tanya putsall of herself into the littlest detail of what she does. thetexture and feel of her pieces, i think, completely relates toher own sense of self in her own environment, and her pieces havethis surface texture that's sort of reaching out toeverything around it. everywhere you place one of her pieces,it suddenly feels at home.
>> with tanya, it's about theconcept, and it's about creating something that she hasn't donebefore, and it's about the process. it's all aboutthe process that i respect about the artist and that i cannot,as a--you know, i don't understand. >> well, i was at the rhode island school of design workingon my thesis for grad school. i was thinking a lot about justgrowing up on the border and
having this kind of dualpersonality where sometimes i was one thing on one side of theborder, and then on the other side, you know, i'd have tobecome something else to fit in, and so i was thinking of a lotof stuff that had to do with dualities. because i wasstudying how to make furniture, i started thinking about ifthere was a chair that i could work with and transform intothe opposite of what it was, but still letting it retain mostof its personality.
and, um, so that's kind of how the feltchair idea came out, was just taking something that was supercold and uninviting and transforming it into somethingsoft. it comes as raw wool, and then through the process ofhand rubbing it for 20 hours-- [laughs] it becomes felt. so it's like making a gigantic dreadlock, but just arounda chair, which is what karla's
currently doing. >> it's her work. i respect it. i want it to be perfect, as ifshe was doing it. tanya has been like--you know, she's my bestfriend. she's my mentor. she's my boss. she got meintroduced to art, because when
i was a kid, she kind of noticedthat i really liked drawing, so she would buy me art suppliesand take me to, like, art classes. >> she always tried to push us to do whatever we enjoyed doing,whether it was karla drawing or even when i was really intowriting, she would always kind of make us, you know--push us tokeep doing that. yeah. see, this is like...
>> heh. >> show me your tricks. >> tanya has been felting for, like--about, like, 7 or 8 yearsnow, so a lot of the felting now comes to me because she's just,like, really sick of it. and it used to be, like, this--thisprocess that was really friendly and really amazing, but then itjust takes so long that you just kind of, like, hate it at somepoint. 'cause it's like,
"doo, doo, doo," you know? >> getting into felting didn't have to do with a love of felt. it had to do with wanting to learn a technique that i couldtake to small places that didn't have electricity, running water,or anything like that, and teach people a skill that could helpthem earn some income. >> early on, with tanya, shefelt a responsibility to support where she came from and supportthe underdog.
>> this is the communityof maclovio rojas in what was the outskirts of tijuana,but now seems to be more and more connected to the rest oftijuana. i started coming here in, i believe, 1997. and wheni started coming here, it was with the border art workshop. and so this community is really special.
gracias. this place was settled mainlyby women, and when i got here in '97, there was already over8,000 families. this entire place is scrapped together, andso the motto here was pound to fit, paint to match, and so itwas just whatever we could get our hands on, we would make useof. we had a lot of different projects going on throughoutthe community.
one of 'em was to build this community center thatwas to--to stand as a, as a beacon,as a ship of kind of freedom and education. the art that wascreated out of this community center was a really, reallyimportant part of what was happening, because it was a wayfor them and us to help them tell the story of thiscommunity. when we would talk
to the women about how it wasthat they settled this land, they would talk about that theywould lay down and they would cover themselves and then, um,rattlesnakes would go in-- underneath the covers and sleepwith them at night to keep warm. and then the women would wake upin the morning, chop off their heads, and eat them forbreakfast, and so it was just always a really beautiful wayfor us to think about how strong the women of this communitywere--are. and just how amazing, you know, the circumstancesin which they founded this--
this area. my experiencein maclovio rojas inspired me to become an artist. it also just really taught me to trust and love working withother people. ok, so then we have--these arethe doubles. >> ok. those are singles? >> the singles.
and then there's mediums that are inside thereas well. they're just, like, kind of off-white. >> we have such a--special sammy. >> he's so cute. >> we're like, "sammy, come sitwith us." >> jewelry is what allows forall the other things to happen,
because there's a larger market,and especially with the internet. people from all over the world can have these productsavailable, so a lot of the time, we get really big orders, andbecause everything is made by hand, we can't really catch up. >> let's move this over closer to you. >> we don't outsource anything,
like, so they have tounderstand that we do it all by hand, so yep. >> there's, um--if we need doubles in chartreuse... >> she's a teacher at otis college of art and design, so atthe end of my junior year, she's like, "oh, would you like to beone of my interns?" and i was like, "ok, sure."
so that'swhere it started. >> right. that's the other one. >> it was kind of like a little experiment each class where shewould, like, show us a new thing. she would, like, bringher burners to class and, like, show us how to, like, boilleather and weave and dye things.
>> with this exhibit andthe title of it, i was thinking about lines and what do linesmean. you know, one of the first things that i thought about wasthe line is the border, and the line is artificial boundaries. so the space is really laid outwith all these artificial boundaries, because if youreally wanted to get through it, you know, it's just string. you could just, you know,
go through stuff. but then alsoi was thinking about how my work crosses in between functionaland nonfunctional, fine art and craft, um, traditional andmodern. it just makes sense for me to be able to play withwhatever i want to play with and not really stay within a certaindefinition of what people call me. i think it's a very frontiersensibility about making work
and about, yeah, just how you'redefined as a person. no matter what bernarddid, he always wore a jacket and tie, and you see him herethrowing in the studio with a white shirt and a tie on. >> people sometimes ask me, "how do you know when it's in themiddle of the wheel?" and one's almost stumped to answer,because the answer lies so very much in the doing.
as soonas it's steady and unmoving-- silent, as i called it--it's obviously centered. >> "a potter's book" by bernardleach, it had just been published in america. and so weall tried to get a copy of this book, and we read it, and it waslike, "boy, this is exciting." >> "the potter's book" was mybible, and i fell in love with the pots that leach made,his philosophy. >> it was a big part of whatmade better standards
in american pottery. >> and we tried to throw a pot on the potter's wheel. of course, we made a mess. we-- we had wasted clay. we had clayall over the place, and we almost got thrown out of school. but, uh, it did get us started.
one day, my first wife alex andi contacted leach and asked him if we could come and talk aboutapprenticing with him. we went to england and spent 2 1/2 yearsthere at the pottery. >> this amateur film about theleach pottery was taken in 1952 by my 2 american students,warren and alex mackenzie. the idea was to make a visualrecording of the normal sequence of work at our pottery atst. ives for the sake largely of
students and other potters whoeither had not the opportunity to visit us or who want to seehow we have attempted to assimilate oriental traditionand technique to suit our english needs. >> we were not making our own pots. we were making, uh, leachpottery pots. and those--what we called standard ware pots wereillustrated in a catalogue.
>> i became an apprentice--thiswas 1968. bernard leach was 82 at the time. he worked every dayin the studio. he had a private space upstairs, and we were toldto not disturb him. it was his time to work. and we'd see himat teatime.
they started me out on a fairly simple--what ithought was a simple shape, and it was a humbling experience. i cut my teeth on this lidded soup bowl. i made thesefor 2 months before they reached a certain standard wherethey could be sold. >> we were on a 3-week firingschedule, so we made pots for 2 weeks.
then we stopped and hadglaze chores and firing duties. and then we started all overagain. lovely rhythm. very supportive rhythm. but we alsohad the freedom to stay after work and to go up on weekendsand make our own pots, and bernard would critique them. >> and the cutting of the foot
is something that we have learntand are still learning from our eastern masters. >> leach was in japan studying. he met hamada. they became friends, and they became part ofthis mingei movement together. "mingei" is a made-up word. i think they said that, uh, this group made the word up.
it hasto do with being people's art, folk art. and they had thisanonymous quality of the fact that the potters were simplydoing a job. they were doing a job like we would talk about anauto mechanic repairing our car. he doesn't do it with any greatpanache or anything, but we want it to be right, you know? andthat's the way they--they wanted their work to be.
it just hadto be right. and when leach was invitedto return to england and start a pottery, hamada said, "i willgo with you," and so he went to england with leach, and theybuilt the pottery together. they went out and found claysthat would work. they found a supply of wood to burn in thekilns. and in fact, hamada lived in the main building of thepottery.
that was his bedroom, and he had a--a handmade bedthat he--he made, that was still there when we--we were there. >> hamada leach meshed perfectly, because--out of thisidea they had of east and west meeting and coming to some newkind of, uh, sense of what the human race could evolve into,to those ideas of opening up cross-cultural references, uh,how everybody gains when we're >> mm.
now, how--how do i put it? i think hamada was a muchbetter potter than leach, but the reason for that is leach wasa much better draftsman than he was a potter. bernard broughtpots to life in his sketches, and then when he made the pot,he was simply copying the drawing, but doing it with clay. hamada made his pots
on the wheel, and that's wherethey were created. >> shoji hamadawas a genius, you know, so in spite of my continuingto want to define this whole thing as craft as opposed toart, some people surpass it. the lusciousness, the robustness,the--the materials, everything about it was just wonderful,so sumptuous and wonderful. certainly part of--of, uh,asian pottery is that wonderful business of capitalizing onthe accidental, the fortuitous
accident. i think it'scharacteristic that all leach-trained potters and alltheir offspring want to explore. the whole point is kind ofsetting up a situation where the fortuitous accident can happenand learning how to coax it into being on a more and morefrequent basis. >> leach was going to go backto japan with hamada, but they decided instead of returning viathe mediterranean and the suez canal and so on past india tojapan, they would continue west
and cross the atlantic, crossamerica, and then go to japan from california. my wife saidto them, "well, look, if you people are going to go crossingamerica, would you be willing to do some workshops in america?" hamada thought for a while, and he said, "if you'll arrangethem, we will do them." >> they swept through the unitedstates at a time when people were hungry for what they hadto offer.
>> up until that time,the functional pots were not recognized as an art form. hamada and leach did bring with them the pottery aesthetic,but also a philosophy of how you lived your life, and with that,then, a group of us from the sixties moved out intothe country i remember coming back fromengland, and not having a role model how to run a pottery, imodeled after the leach pottery. i tried to do standard ware andthen individual pots, and the
standard ware just failed. no--the shops wouldn't buy them. one shop bought--bought somestandard ware. they never sent a check. so it just flopped. that was to be a blessing in disguise, because it broughtme to--to making the pots that i really wanted to makein my heart.
>> the altered form is to me howhamada leach might have diverged in america away fromthe way it took form in england. and i would say in america,starting in the 70s, uh, potters started looking at the form asit is on the wheel and altering it both on the wheel and offthe wheel into a new form. strictly american. i don't thinkit's ever hit amongst the potters of britain at all,the way it is a common thing in america.
>> i grew in love with alteringabout 25 years ago, when i went from gas firing to wood firing. and i realized after all the labor of cutting the wood,of cleaning the shelves up, of wadding, stacking, and then thebrutality of firing for hours and hours and hours, that iwanted to invest more time in each piece. and i developedaltering techniques. it's not about production pots.
i've been there, done that. it's about each pot being different,but cousins. by the end of the day, i'm wiped out because ofall the thinking i'm doing and what goes into the piece. i wanteach one to be unique. ...when i was teaching a summerclass at alfred in 1985, and i challenged the students to comeup with a new spout idea,
and i also took the assignment. i thought of the pump in mygrandfather's cabin in rural minnesota. as a kid, i lovedto pump water from that. it was magic. so i took that exact sameshape, i put it on a pitcher. it did not pour. then what cani do?
so i had to modify it and modify it and come up witha spout that would pour. again, function was--was important. and it evolved into one of my signature pieces,the beaked pitcher. >> the pots i make today wouldnever have been accepted by the leach pottery in 1952, becausethey--they wouldn't come up to their standard.
but for me,they're the pots i have to make. a potter has an attitude aboutthe way he or she approaches clay, and it inevitablycomes out. when--when we came home from theleach pottery, having spent 2 years,2 1/2 years making someone else's pots without a desire forexpression in them, you know, uh, it took us about 3 yearsto get over that, uh, quality in our work. >> since i was at st.
ives,my throwing technique hasn't changed. adding the decorationin it is something new to me. the sgraffito work that i'mdoing is completely new to me, and i don't know that i havetechnique. i just--i do it as well as i can. what i hope i'm doing--and can'talways achieve it--is playing. i'm out to amuse myself andamuse others without it going
cute. it may go cute from timeto time, but i want to evoke not a dated cuteness. [laughs]but cuteness of yore, if you would have it. then the face thing just exploded and has just--it's been through millions of ramifications for me. you've always got that 2 eyes,nose, mouth pattern, and it just
divides up space in an endlessvariety of ways, and then you get the extra bonus of any humanface being expressive. but it's--it's not art witha capital "a." it's decoration on top of utilitarian pots,and i've always been most comfortable in that arena. >> she has this strongcommitment to her local clientele. one time, clarycalled me up and said, "gail, please don't send collectorsto my studio or my showroom."
[laughs]>> that's clary, the strong principles of the leachprinciples, of the pots being for local consumption andthe pots be very reasonably priced and affordable to all,and she has stuck with those principles for decades. >> i would imagine that in talking with those of us who areleach-trained potters, you've been hearing a--quite a bitabout the past, and i almost wish we could abolish that word,because i think what we're about
is the continuum. >> oh, good. it's gonna be large enough, don't you think? >> mm-hmm. >> what we'll do is--right. set it on there. when i think of--of the joyin my life as a potter, it's not the awards, the accolades.
it's teaching charlie. it's the passing it on. >> let's try one more time. perfect. >> first learned about warren when i was an undergrad atbemidji state, and, um, we had warren's pots in our collectionthere, and learning about warren and--and the leach tradition waspart of our--our curriculum. a lot of the lines and stuffcome from a lot of the work--
your jars that you... he's had these students that have gone on to become pottersand teachers, and then they have had students. warren laid downsuch a--a rock-solid foundation and built a--a culture aroundthe functional pot. >> yeah, there--there'ssomething that affects you. you know, they're part of your lifeif you let them b-be.
>> in just thesetroubled times now, that these crafts and what we live with areeven more important to us. it just connects us, and it justbrings out our humanity. >> ...and the direction in whichboth as craftsmen and ordinary members of community we areattempting to find a way in which the function of art canfind its modern expression in closer contact with life. >> we are very visually orientedin our culture. we're not
oriented toward the other sensesas strongly, and i think that the whole tactile, physicalresponse is as important, i think, as the visual. i've come to it through weaving. the reason that i chose weavingis that i felt there was a huge area of unexplored territorythat hadn't been explored in terms of contemporary art. >> lia cook's work is important,because she's been making work since the 1970s and really knownas a pioneer in the modern fiber
arts movement. >> my background, it goes from being an--wanting to bean actress to political science, but i always took art. i alwaysdid drawing and painting and almost every other art formother than textiles. i think i was, like, 26 when i learned toweave. spent a year in sweden,
and my purpose there was tolearn to weave. i went to a very traditional hand-weaving school,and it was great. uh, i wanted to work 8 hours a day, and ilearned all kinds of complex, interesting things about weavingthat i never would have gotten from, uh, the san francisco bayarea at the time. i showed my work really firstinternationally in the biennale. that biennale that occurred inlausanne, switzerland, was very
unique in that you had majorpeople in the field exhibiting alongside somebody who'd neverexhibited before, because it-- you could apply. you couldpropose something. that's essentially what i did,and then, when it was accepted, i did it, and it was a largeinteresting work that got a lot of attention. i think my work has changed alot over time, although i think i see the threads that gothrough it.
i'm always exploring new ideas, experimenting forwhat the next step might be. >> what is particularlyinteresting about cook's work is that early on in her career,she went to the history of art and to the history of paintingin particular, and she magnified details that you would find inpainted reproductions of cloth, so the folds, the laces,the draping. >> i wanted to foregroundtextiles, make it the subject matter.
>> magnifying those details was quite brilliant, becausepainted cloth, uh, cannot represent itself the way thewoven cloth can, because you're using a one-to-one mediumof cloth to represent cloth. lia cook represents a previousgeneration that found skill to be incredibly exciting, and shehas continued to acquire skill, and her new skill set isnew technologies. >> all right. ok.
you know, i have to have some technical experimentationas well as, you know, developing a larger context for my ideas. once i bring it into this program, i have to assign weavesto each color, and i have a file of weaves, and this is what itlooks like. so all weaving is binary. it's just the thread iseither up or down.
black means up, white means down, so--butthese are the weaves that i want to put into the image. when iassign each of them to a color and put them in, you beginto see how it's going to weave. so after i finish with thatcomputer, i bring it over here to the computer and the programthat runs the loom, and from this point, i just, um, start. right now, i'm in the middle
of weaving, so i'm on--i'm gonnastart on thread 773, so-- and there's 2,859 weft threadsin here, and weft threads are the threads that go horizontal. this loom is a loom in whicheach thread is operated separately, so there are 2,640of these micro air cylinders, so every thread can be operatedseparately, and that's why you can create a full image of anykind of structure you want. took quite a while before thatcomputer hand loom actually developed.
i think industry, power looms were probably developed earlier,but the--the loom that actually was a hand loom, that i coulduse for my work came much later. it's not automatic. you have tomake decisions as you go or put in a system of color as you go. ok, so this one goes here. by changing the way i weave it,the translation, i actually change the emotional expressionof what i'm weaving, the face.
over here, we have good examplesof that. these are woven very, very differently, this oneto this one to this one. totally different weave structures,and they're the same image, but they have a different feelabout them. well, i think my work intersectswith photography. my mother was a pretty good photographer, so ido have this huge collection
of family photographs. like,i've tried to go out and use other anonymous photographs, andsomehow it doesn't have the same feeling for me. it's notimportant people know that they're my family photographs. it's just important to me, because i--i like, um, exploringit. i'm looking at these photos
in detail. i'm looking atexpressions and thinking about the different personalities andhow we connected. i do feel it impacts the work, but i'm nottrying to tell a story to somebody about them. when peoplelook at the work, they make a connection with it. it bringsup all kinds of stories and
histories that the personexperiencing the work has. >> i was really excitedto install her exhibition in the large gallery space. giving thepieces room to breathe was incredibly important. you wouldthink of how you would install mark rothko's paintings. itwould be much in the same way, so i wanted to give them theirspace for contemplation.
>> i think it's really kind ofa--a good-- >> it draws you in. >> yeah. and also the way you hung the other ones. i wanted them to sort of be looking at each other. i'm interested in this continualmotion in relationship to the work and how it changesas you move around.
it's not a static experience with it. it's experience in motion. >> the viewers have reacted to the weavings really positively. i think there's a certain amountof awe when they come into the space, um, and the realizationthat what they're looking at is a textile versus a photographis a great aha moment for visitors.
>> what the weaving does to photography or the photo is itadds this tactile dimension that you maybe don't have with sortof a flat print. for one thing, i have always been interestedin the brain and how--so it's an interest--i guess an interestin what you would call neuroaesthetics, uh, how thebrain works, i guess. and i had this idea about my work for--fora while about this emotionality
of the--of the tactile qualityand how that, you know, relates to our emotional experience. andthen as it goes to the brain, well, what is the relationshipto what's going on in the brain? and i'm very interested in thetouch part of the brain, too, so when people are respondingto my work, are they somehow connecting into this--our senseof touch and our memories of touch? so i went to search for somebody
that could do it with me. so basically i found greg siegle in my search. >> i run a depression lab, and we're mostly focusedon understanding who gets better from depression, how to treatpeople better, and brain mechanisms of recovery. um, oncea year, we shut the lab down and invite an artist to the labfor 4 days, and the artist gets
to use all of the toolsof neuroscience to answer some questions about art. >> good? >> yep. >> oh. all right. >> and remember--ok, look, look,look, look. >> see? we're already
just about in. >> oh, great. >> the artist in residenceprogram is done for a few reasons. the big one for us isthat we study emotional disorders, we study emotion. and yet as psychologists and psychiatrists, we're given verylittle training in how to generate emotion.
artists havethat training, so we bring them in, and they teach us about whatit means to create something that generates emotion. what wegive back is we help artists to understand something about theirown creation process or how people perceive their art. so, lia, check this out. this is dynamic indication of your brainactivity right there.
>> so you wanna see your alpha? so, um, if you were to, say,close your eyes for a second, i can see it happen. >> there. i just did. and, see? it got red. >> and now it's come back. >> just from closing my eyes.
>> yeah, closing your eyescreates a lot of alpha. just go to sleep. >> so shall we weave? >> why don't we weave? >> beating. now you're throwing a shuttle. good. >> beating down. today it was very exciting.
we were actuallyable to observe what was going on for lia cookin her brain as she was weaving. technology that has allowed usto do that is a new generation of machines that measurebrain waves. these are electroencephalography or eegrigs, and it solves a lot of the problems that would haveprevented us from measuring people as they do craftin the past. beating.
uhp. made a mistake. >> so now you can... >> correct the mistake. keep going. >> no, no. i can't keep going. i have to stop. >> i mean correct the mistake.
>> correct mistake, yes. uh,let's make sure i have the right--wait a minute. i haveto check again. >> checking correct. she got frustrated, and a lot of the front part of her brainseemed to shut down, and this is what happens in people when theyget clinically depressed. they
sit tonically with that frontpart of their brain shut down. and then lia got past it... >> and she was back to weaving. so perhaps if we find this in a number of artists, we canstart to generalize about how art therapy might actually behelping people. >> we set up this experiment inwhich we try to read the blood flow of the brain while peoplewalk around the museum and experience different emotionlooking at lia cook's, uh, art.
...for me. i will secure itwith a... we try to, you know, catch thosevariations with the optical device that we have right here. the fact that they're hand-woven rather than machine-made-wovenscreates a very interesting challenge, because a personwould be attracted by the, um, instinct of touching to see howit was created, and that is gonna probably cause a verystrong brain response due
to the fact that the person isnaturally craving for touching the art, but they cannot do it. >> ok, here. this is pictures of my brain. these show thecross-sections. so you can see where these fibers connectin the brain. it's a whole
technology that was being usedfor other purposes, for surgeons. they were looking at,you know, fibers in the brain and what you wouldn't wantto cut while you were doing surgery. when i first saw examples from this program, i was just blownaway by the way it looked like a weaving. and that just took me some
totally other place. i justthought, you know, this is very interesting in terms of art andwhat i could do with that. >> i think it's particularlyinteresting that she's gone to the hard sciences, a place wherethe humanities doesn't stray into very often, and trying to--not think like a scientist, but rather get scientists to thinklike artists. >> what i've been impressed withis the similarities between art and science.
both are creativeefforts where the artist goes in to answer a question using onemedium. the scientist goes in to answer a question using adifferent toolbox. the processes unfold similarly. you plan. you analyze or, in this case, create.
you step back, look atwhat you've done, modify, and go do it again until you're happythat what you've uncovered is some essence of truth. >> i'm almost as interested in how the scientist respondsto my work as i am about how the artist or the art critic does. >> when we measured someone in the brain scanner perceivingweavings, we got a lot of activity in brain areas thatare associated with, um,
touch and feeling. and what we saw was more activity for the weaving inan area of the brain called the amygdala. it's a deep, buriedbrain structure that processes emotion at a low level. so thething where you see a snake and you jump back 'cause you'rescared, that's the amygdala network.
low-level emotions andthe sort of introception, body awareness feeling were both moreactive for the weaving than the picture. so that was what i was looking for. >> so that's pretty much what you were looking for and whatyou expected. >> so now i want to doa real study. >> no, there was-->> well--
so this was oneperson. we gotta do more. >> the science part of it,i think i was, uh, of the idea that itwasn't something that i was interested in. i didn't see itas a creative thing, but that's what's fascinating at this pointin my life, to have this whole new avenue open up, and that wasvery exciting for me. >> and we'll just put this onein, and then we'll be ready
for you. >> major funding for "craft in america" was provided by cynthialovelace sears & frank buxton... [women vocalizing]>> l.l. brownrigg... the national endowmentfor the arts... watch additional video online,including more interviews and artists at work. plus visita virtual exhibition of objects from america's leading artists.
visit "craft in america" at pbs.org. >> [women vocalizing] >> any tradition is importantto carry on. >> my daddy had brothers olderthan he was, and that's the way he learned to make pottery,working with his brothers. >> clay, glass, wood, metal,fiber. human hands transform humble materials into worksof function and beauty.
>> making and experiencingbeauty is really a basic human need. >> i have a commitment to carry on this tradition. i have a realstrong feeling about doing this. >> to work with one's hands andcraft something that generations will see is probably oneof the greatest gifts that anyone can give. >> discover what drives artists
to create on "craft in america."