Hello, bloggers.

I wanted to share with you an ongoing project I’m working on, which I began back in late November.

I was reorganizing and going over all the storage areas in Chicago, and all the boxes that we use for shipping.  Some of them are huge, and they were all taken apart.  I started counting them, and it came out to about 50.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, up on the farm in Wisconsin, I said to myself:  I’m just going to let that sink into my head.  And there was something sent to me during the night.

The next day, I woke up thinking about wind, fire, water, and air, all the components of the world.  I wanted to take all of them and incorporate them into a whole series of pieces.

So I broke the 50 down to three different series.  The smallest was 4’x4’; the largest would be 12’x4’.  Then I found old wood and cardboard that had been lying around.  I came up with a complex procedure, where I’m going to take all of them out to the farm in Wisconsin and clear out a huge space, where I will put them all down.  I have to talk to the concrete person and get a truckload of concrete.  I have a big bag of gold pigment, which I found.

So I’m going to spread these out in a certain manner, which I’ll figure out the day before, and have steel mesh put inside to create a matrix of little cells.  So the structural integrity will stay with it all the time.

I’m going to mix up a lot of colors.  My friend and color mixer, Jack Basso, has been scouting around for some new colors.

It’s going to be a synthesis of all the new elements, so when I put down the concrete, I’m going to embed objects into it.  Many of them will be flammable.

Then, I’m designing steel stamps so I can stamp them as I did in my piece, The Wave.  So I can put designs into it.  Concrete has a memory.  Even though it’s lying in a big pool, it still has the memory of the scars that were on it.

I’m going to wear some special shoes, so that when I’m walking on it, it will make predictable footprints in it.  Then I’ll let it sit out and cure in the open air.  Depending on the rain situation, I’ll leave it out all the time, but if it gets too rainy, I’ll cover it with tarps.

Then, the next process will probably be three months later.  I’ll go with a flammable liquid like kerosene, turpentine, or gasoline.  You know those little logs you put in fireplaces to keep the fire going?  Well, the wood and the cardboard will be encased, but it will be in a design that I’ll make, while the concrete is wet.

In three months, it will be a part of the whole.  So I’ll soak all the flammable things in a flammable material.  Then I’ll take my blowtorch and set the whole thing on fire.  It’s not going to be that big of a fire; it’ll be contained; it will burn the logs or whatever else is in the concrete.  It will also melt the colors that are in there.

So you’ll have these great, carved canyons and scars in the concrete, with the color running through it.  It will be a charcoal color, because not all of it will burn, and it will have a feeling of time, destruction, and rebirth.

At this point, it will probably rain out there for six months, so it will have all the weathering, and it will all come together just by the natural destruction and rebirth of nature working upon it.  Then I’ll put it all up and decide if I’m going to go any further.

What I’m creating is a version of the Rio Grande Gorge in Taos, New Mexico.  There are so many things up there at the farm:  thick electric wires, an old hose...  I thought:  Lamb, you can sculpt these into things, you can force the design, you can let them come together into this collage of power and majesty and metamorphosis, bringing them all together into a cohesive force that can be looked at.

It will make a big statement, as far as I’m concerned.  It has the symbolism of the phoenix rising from the ashes, the beginning of time, building bridges from one thing to another to another, and trying to find a landscape where all the elements feel comfortable.

I already have people working on it.  It’s going to take 3 months just to make the forms for them.  I think this will be a two-year project, because it’s going to have 3-month periods in between the different stages.  So stay tuned for updates! 

Matt