Have we reached peak New York Times?

[mme_hardy]

Reprinted in full, minus image.

The Chicest Sticks

Long before the forager-artist Katie Ridley Murphy began sculpting sticks from porcelain, she sketched them from her own Atlanta backyard — and sold the resultant works as original drawings and prints. And each piece, regardless of the medium, was modeled after a real stick she found in nature.

Her mesmerizingly delicate work is inspired by, appropriately, her twin children — when they were 2, Murphy began enlisting their help to pick up the little sticks, which she would study and draw at home as the children swirled around her, playing. It was her calm in the midst of their beautiful storm. Her move from printmaking to the pottery studio took place about a year ago. And most of the sticks she seeks out these days, now that her children are 6, are white ones from nearby Arabia Mountain — where they sit atop the large granite rock face, and are naturally bleached by the sun.

At home, Murphy painstakingly recreates the shape and heft — as well as every nook and cranny — of each specimen, forming the pieces by hand, and adding about 20 percent to their size since they tend to shrink when fired in the kiln. The finer details come next, courtesy of a steady hand and an X-Acto knife — and Murphy’s grandmother’s old sewing needles. Each piece takes anywhere from eight to 28 hours to create; in the above slideshow, she shares her process.

Katie Ridley Murphy’s sculptures, $500-$2,500, are available at tenthousandthingsnyc.com.

Comments

[ankaret]

That much for a stick you can't even put your hair up with?

[legionseagle]

I'm beginning to wonder what happens when someone buys one of these and finds that their Bichon Frise loves it nearly as much as they do...

[caulkhead]

I don't have children myself, much less two-year old twins, but I would love to hear the response of those who do to the phrase "Her calm in the middle of their beautiful storm".

[recessional]

Depends on the parent. I know quite a lot - especially in arts and music circles - who would have composed that sentence themselves. (And in fact thinking of it in that sense is part of their personal strategy for not drowning their children in the nearby swamp.)

[thistleingrey]

Yep--bubble space is another name for it, which I was interested to find my kid's preschool teachers actually teaching to the kids. (Good job, teachers.)

[recessional]

For me the calm-in-middle-of-beautiful-storm PERSONALLY it is excessively twee and would interfere with my attempts to maintain the actual mindstate (I would have to find a different metaphor), but I grew up among musicians, bless them (and me, as I am kind of them) and I know about twelve people who'd use that wording sincerely and benefit greatly from it.

So, you know. Whatever works and makes you love and bond with your kids, and not drown them in the swamp.

[thistleingrey]

Absolutely. (Weather storms can be beautiful. The other kind, for me, not so much.)

[legionseagle]

It's two days after the anniversary of the Penlee lifeboat disaster and less than two weeks after most of the landmarks of my childhood were either submerged or swept away by Storm Desmond, so while I can appreciate -- from a suitable distance and under cover -- the sheer aesthetic impressiveness of extreme weather, it's not a metaphor that's doing a lot for me at the moment on any level.

[thistleingrey]

Completely understandable.

[legionseagle]

"George. Don't do that."

[sophia_helix]

Sitting next to my 2 year old as he sprinkled cracker crumbs on the floor and shrieked "Mama, yook!", I laughed. Once I took 15 minutes to draw and color a World Series bracket and he spent the whole time clinging to my leg crying for me. It was not particularly beautiful.

[legionseagle]

Nor are storms beautiful, when one is out in the open sea and fear one is about to lose vessel and crew alike, lose those who trusted to you to bring them safe to port and there is nothing you can do. A facile, oblivious, comfortable, callous metaphor.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

One of the things I found with toddler twins was that they would at least occasionally keep each other amused and out of my hair. Of course they can also get into more trouble (e.g., one twin opening door as other twin puts hand in hinge -- fortunately this never happened to mine, but I had nightmares that it was going to, and I think it almost did once or twice). So they were AT TIMES a bit less trouble than a clingy singleton would be, but it wasn't anything one could count on.

[recessional]

Having gone to look at them, I suppose I get to be the mockable one in considering them actually quite beautiful.

[mme_hardy]

I don't find it mockable to find them beautiful. It's the article I find mockable.

[ironed_orchid]

Well, it does appear to be mostly advertorial.

Also "Chicest" is a terrible word. If one is going to be both pretentious and use the word "chic" then one can modify it in much better ways. "The most chic sticks" even rhymes.

[mme_hardy]

"Chic" is one of the words I still pronounce semi-French (I go back and forth on liqueur), so "chic" and "stick" don't rhyme in my idiolect.

[ironed_orchid]

I go back and forth on pronouncing chic, which is why "chicest" struck me as off, because it is profoundly un-French. Tres chic, plus chic, which got me to "most chic".

[legionseagle]

It strikes me as being one of those portmanteau words like "Holmescest" or "Wincest" to describe a sub-genre of erotic fanfiction featuring intense sibling relationships within a fandom where the principal characters were called something like Chico or Chicane or Chicago. I can even see the sort of thing it might be, too; something about twin sisters from a dark and mysterious background who are working as a circus knife-throwing act travelling through the early 20th century mid-West, fighting vaguely supernatural crime. One of them might be a shape-shifter.

[ironed_orchid]

I like her website: http://katieridleymurphy.weebly.com/about.html

[mme_hardy]

Huh. I like her non-stick ceramics very much. (It's a personal thing, I'm not claiming universal taste or anything.)

[recessional]

The sticks appeal to me because she has so clearly spent so much time bit by bit replicating all the scratches and bark-dints of nature. It's like they're not . . .art-for-displaying, they're art-for-doing, and there's a meticulous patience to it that really appeals to me.

[kore]

tenthousandthingsnyc.com.

If that's a Buddhist reference, it's really terribly tasteless in this context.

[ironed_orchid]

Looking at the curios page, it seems entirely full of little expensive objects to make your surroundings more "zen" - so I think you are onto something.

[kore]

//CRIES

[legionseagle]

For me, the things which tipped this article over into pretentious crap were two-fold: first, the term "forager artist" and secondly "Murphy’s grandmother’s old sewing needles". Picking up twigs outside is not sodding foraging! She may be doing interesting things with twigs but the absolute staples of the arts and craft scene are found objects, and they have been for most of my life - driftwood, dead leaves, pebbles picked up off the beach, sea-glass, pine cones etc just goes with the territory. Secondly, assuming Murphy's in her mid to late 30s, which goes with the children's ages and her level of professional success, her grandmother would probably have been doing most of her sewing in the sixties and seventies, and there isn't likely to be much different in the sewing needles available then as in the ones I can buy from the supermarket now.