Airborne in a week

Priscilla was the set designer hired to hang and arrange all of the artwork I had shipped from D.C. to NYC for this CNN shoot. We had one morning in the studio in Bushwick to unpack, hang, and shoot before I had to get back to work.

The crew was trying to figure out if I could sit on a pedestal as well, so you see Patrick sitting on the shortest one. When I finally got placed, we found that the noise from planes, trucks, forklifts, etc. was so bad that we couldn't capture the interview/audio at this location so we just did a lot of visuals of me holding art and making cords and dunking hanji in water.

The next morning we shot in Fort Greene Park. My phone went into the bowels of the rig once I got my violin out so there are no more pictures from that day. I played violin for hours that morning, even a little after a park official came and said we weren't supposed to film without a permit. After that, there was a lot of walking up and down streets before we wrapped and headed into horrible traffic to the closest downtown Brooklyn FedEx.

The producer helped me fill out a bunch of shipping labels but I was kind of mortified by the packing job. Fingers still crossed that everything makes it back safely. I gave all kinds of written and in-person instructions on how everything had to be packed, which were almost all ignored. Let's hope there's no additional billing for damage once everything arrives.

Our final (early) day was in the paper studio. I had spent the week prepping kozo (soaking in lime, cooking in soda ash, rinsing, beating, and even bringing out a different type of fiber plus all of the raw materials—which we never even needed!). We had hoped it would be more quiet, but then all the noise started to kick in: loading dock, freight elevator, rolling dollies above, and the vibration of some powerful tool upstairs. The crew was so frustrated that they went from our floor (6) to look for the source and found a table saw on 10 being used to renovate the entire floor. They begged to turn it off for a bit so we had 30 minutes to wrap up the whole interview before it started up again.

The shoot for papermaking was really less work than I expected, and I made a dozen little sheets that dried by the time the day was over. The lime and soda ash combo really killed the crispness of the fiber but at the same time it was much more even and cleaner than prior batches of Thai kozo.

After the shoot, I had a few hours to finish up my work for Dieu Donné. This was the last package that I accepted and unpacked for them. Somehow I managed to get all my stuff packed, on my back, and to the street to get a car home to start the massive pack. In the end, I probably could have flown home with everything, but left a few things with my family to ship later because I got a strange wrist injury halfway through the month that makes it hard for me to do certain things (like heavy lifting).

I flew back Saturday and already saw three dear friends, including these happy kozo plants at Oberlin. I went yesterday for a couple of errands and my car was grateful for the highway miles. My suitcase is emptied and ready for the next journey: Western Australia via California!