Rust, Trust, and Taking the First Step
On transformation
“But how do you know it’ll be better?” asked bird.
“I don’t know,” replied bear, “but I have hope, and that’s all I need to believe.”
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📷: Risenshine x 3, spinning soon at the new LA Babyletto retail experience
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What will you begin today?
My first mobiles were made from a handful of rusty bedsprings and a spool of fishing line found in a dirty blue dumpster.
Long before I made my living creating art, you could find me, stick in hand, digging in a sun-baked dirt lot behind my apartment in Phoenix, AZ … the excitement of what I might discover driving my daily treks into the unknown.
Many years before I worked up the courage to ask my friend Lisa Congdon if she’d carry my mobiles in her San Francisco Rare Device I would return again and again to that lot, in search of long-buried “treasures” sunken between tumbleweed and Sonoran sand.
Before Milwaukee Art Museum, Kemper Museum of Modern Art, and University of Michigan Museum of Art took a liking to my mobiles, you might catch a glimpse of me silhouetted against Papago Rocks, hacksaw dulled as I cut those warped bedsprings from the earth - memories of endless hours spent as a kid digging in the hillside behind my house, always with the hope of finding something, anything.
Before RIXO, Le Centerpiece, Merchant Modern, or küdd:krig HOME, I’d sit there in the sand trying to figure out what I was going to do with these rust-flaked springs, clouds overhead lighting a fuse.
Before hitting the screen in Apple TV’s Severance, HBO’s Pennyworth, or on the pages of The World of Interiors, I strung those springs in the air outside my apartment, metal swirls dancing as thunderstorms approached – mesmerized by the movement, unpredictable and alive.
To get somewhere, you must begin somewhere.
And to begin somewhere, you have to believe that beginning alone is worth it, is enough.
Because, while we can’t know what *might* be when, we can hope based on how we feel now. And act.
The rest will take care of itself.
What will you begin today?