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kitchen_kinkIt lurks in Fallopian splendor on the kitchen floor, stuck into the Styrofoam of a packing box for a lamp. What started as macaroni art has evolved, or devolved, into pipe-cleaner art. It’s hard to say which is the higher form, but making a model of the internal capsule of the brain just wasn’t happening with spaghetti.
The steel armature looks like a butterfly skeleton, or the frame for a pair of fairy wings suitable for a small dog. We started with lengths of pasta, soaked in hot water just until pliable. The theory was, we’d lay it along the frame in long strands, looking for all the world like brain matter, then use uncooked bits for the fanning-out parts at the top. Pasta hardens when it cools and sticks to itself, right?
Uh.
We soldier on, making a kind of pasta-frame over the wire frame: wrapping each arm of the structure as a base to stick the longer, vertical strands onto. It looks great for a while, but then it begins to resemble the Flying Spaghetti Monster – especially with that wing-like shape – and as tiredness overtakes us and coffee fails, we start looking for plan B.
I think cheap yarn would probably work better than spaghetti, perhaps with some Elmer’s glue or spray mount. His wife suggests pipe cleaners, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it. I strip the strange coat-hanger of its starchy coating and leave it sticking like a broken TV antenna on the kitchen floor.
About eight hours of sleep, 50 pipe cleaners and three sticks of hot glue later, it starts to look like something.
Not entirely sure what, but something.
The most amusing part of this is that before I began, I had no idea what the internal capsule was. Beautiful branching flowers, deep inside the brain. Delicate and spreading like anemones. I have no idea what it does. He does the neuroanatomy; I am, as we established, an artsy craftsy type. When I need to be, anyway. My tools are usually words, or notes, or bodies. Now and then I play with paper and cloth and paint and string. Today I can help his grade with it.
Still, I think it odd to do macaroni art for graduate work.
In the end it’s a weird object, fuzzy with chenille and stiff with wire and hot glue, but made mainly of love.
The steel armature looks like a butterfly skeleton, or the frame for a pair of fairy wings suitable for a small dog. We started with lengths of pasta, soaked in hot water just until pliable. The theory was, we’d lay it along the frame in long strands, looking for all the world like brain matter, then use uncooked bits for the fanning-out parts at the top. Pasta hardens when it cools and sticks to itself, right?
Uh.
We soldier on, making a kind of pasta-frame over the wire frame: wrapping each arm of the structure as a base to stick the longer, vertical strands onto. It looks great for a while, but then it begins to resemble the Flying Spaghetti Monster – especially with that wing-like shape – and as tiredness overtakes us and coffee fails, we start looking for plan B.
I think cheap yarn would probably work better than spaghetti, perhaps with some Elmer’s glue or spray mount. His wife suggests pipe cleaners, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it. I strip the strange coat-hanger of its starchy coating and leave it sticking like a broken TV antenna on the kitchen floor.
About eight hours of sleep, 50 pipe cleaners and three sticks of hot glue later, it starts to look like something.
Not entirely sure what, but something.
The most amusing part of this is that before I began, I had no idea what the internal capsule was. Beautiful branching flowers, deep inside the brain. Delicate and spreading like anemones. I have no idea what it does. He does the neuroanatomy; I am, as we established, an artsy craftsy type. When I need to be, anyway. My tools are usually words, or notes, or bodies. Now and then I play with paper and cloth and paint and string. Today I can help his grade with it.
Still, I think it odd to do macaroni art for graduate work.
In the end it’s a weird object, fuzzy with chenille and stiff with wire and hot glue, but made mainly of love.
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Date: 2008-04-08 12:01 pm (UTC)Um, this immediately made me think "miscarriage". You don't mean "Fallopian" really, do you? Cause this is the brain not the ovaries, or were you drawing some comparison?
I really do.
Date: 2008-04-08 09:23 pm (UTC)