Midterm Show

My final project for the halfway mark of the full year Senior Art Seminar was a bar table made out of hardwood pine boards for the table top and footrest, as well as recovered barn support beams with the rough edges left on for the table legs and supports.

This project was my first major challenge as a beginning woodworker. I attempted to build the table legs and outer rim of the table with the rough edge to preserve the look of the piece before I milled the beam down. I didn't fully understand before I started how hard it would be to work critical pieces to the structure and stability of the table, as well as descending at a custom angle, without having all four edges being perfectly square. I built my own custom rig to be able to drill holes in the table legs to carve out the joinery, and worked extra carefully with many mistakes along the way to join every piece together flush to come to a sturdy end result that preserved all the design elements I saw in my original pieces of wood.

I also decided to build a more sculptural piece at the last minute before the show. Three days before we were supposed to install our pieces in the gallery, I was struggling with a midterm essay for my senior seminar course in my other major, Africana Studies. I was also struggling with the final details of sanding, gluing up, and preparing my bar table to show for the critique. I started absent mindedly looking through my phone, and began reading through all of my notes over the years. I realized everything in my notes app from my time at Oberlin told a story of struggle, creativity, lost ideas, and random thoughts I had completely forgotten. I also happened to be standing in front of a storage closet with its own history of materials and projects left behind by past students. The next day I asked my professors if I could use materials in the closet for another project. I took two old filing cabinets and coupled them with scrapped pieces of a table built by an alumn that used to sit in the Africana Heritage House's Lord Lounge until it fell apart and needed to be taken apart.

Looking at these pieces along with my notes, I knew I had to build a filing cabinet for my experience at Oberlin. I titled the piece; "an Oberlin Education," and built it in a frenzied improvisation, only putting the finishing touches on during the opening to the show itself. I wanted the shelves to feel chaotic, with my notes and memories haphazardly strewn about inside, the notes too small to be convenient to read, yet just legible enough to be understood. I printed out every single note I had written on card stock, and every voice note I had recorded jumbled together on very low volume playing from a speaker buried inside the piece.

The final piece surprised me in how fitting and cathartic it was to create. As my friends and mentors read through the notes, I knew I had encapsulated my experience at Oberlin, and showed myself how I learn best, from taking lessons and experience from mentors, and applying them by doing something before I may be fully ready, then adapting to my mistakes on the fly. It was also a true return to my artistic roots as I was seriously questioning my place in the Visual Arts program.