s t a t e m e n t
m. s. t r i p p t u t t l e i i i
I codify. I seek to break down my world into the bare, to make it as simple as black and
white. There the problem arises. I can’t put life into my own classifications. There is no
positive and negative. There is not a good and an evil. There is no truth and there is no
false. But, in me, there exists a need to place into a comparative relationship these
oppositions.
My latest work has been a trial to order these things around me: The relationship of the
organic and inorganic, plastic and wood. What can the physicality of substances tell me
about their own proliferation in our lives?
Within each substance, there exists a myriad of sub-comparisons:
raw wood versus
newsprint. We see wood as strength, a builder, supporting our habitat. Newsprint is
fragile; it yellows in a short few weeks, brittles and withers. Science categorizes these
materials in the same group…they are both chemically the same. Yet, we do not ever
acknowledge that the morning paper could have just as easily been the timber framing the
house we sit in reading the morning paper.
Desire and repulsion are at the core of my exploration. The line we draw between these
seemingly binary oppositions is movable, arbitrarily. What repulses us can so often be the
one thing we desire the most. Chocolate dipped cigarettes: the chocolate coating the end
prevents the ignition. The tobacco and paper center precludes the idea of ingestion. The
two materials are paired in our culture. The flavors mix in our palates and our culture:
chocolate = fat
cigarettes = bad
fat = bad
I continue to work despite knowing the futility of my explorations. I seek to explore the
very oppositions I know are false, for nothing more than to understand them: To delve into
the aspects of these dichotomies allows me to attempt a comprehension of why we, as a
society, construct them. And why, I as a human, in the same society, fall into the same
traps of contradiction.
A separate, but related vein of my recent explorations have been in the realm of human /
space interaction.
Similar to the ignorance of the connection between the mundane
materials of our daily lives, we as humans fail so often to acknowledge our connection to
the built environment. I am interested, not only in the way we move about in a particular
location, but mostly in the textures of that environment. Texture, or touch, in a way, is the
most overlooked of the senses. In a fine art context the idea of touch is forbidden, both
culturally, and physically. The act of framing work or placing it behind glass or past a rope,
seeks to distance us, and separate it from us. I have explored and will continue to recreate
the textures of my past, and map them to their location, as a way to indelibly record my
memory and to pay homage to forgotten experiences.
I feel the next evolution in my work is to transition to a larger scale, to deal with the same
issues of both veins of my work in learning to design a built environment. I seek to study
and explore the ability of self-expression through architecture, not as a change of direction
but an expansion.