William Baczek Fine Arts

  This project started with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Middle Eastern wing, where I encountered an artifact made of stone, found in Iraq and dated to circa 300 BC.  The label to this object stated, “Use Unknown”.  It also stated, “possibly a weight”, which I did not see the first time around but which my instinct at the time told me that was exactly what that was.  I returned to the studio and started carving the weights you see here, and hanging them as I presumed weights would be used. My medium is inherently heavy and I have a long and intimate relationship with weight. The thought of weights, of weight, began to take over my mind and my studio.

This past summer I worked briefly at a small CSA farm in Charlemont, the Wilder Brook Farm.  I was helping harvest and clean vegetables.  It was a magical time for me, a bucolic setting amongst good people, doing the good work of providing nourishment for others.

One harvest was carrots, and that was my introduction to nature’s, and the carrot’s, way around obstacles at the farm. When a carrot encounters a rock it changes course, sends out a new root, keeps on growing.  The carrots assume some bizarre shapes and are dubbed the “Mutant Carrots”, they become anthropomorphized, with entangled limbs and impassioned embraces.

I started carving carrots and hanging them in the studio too.

And then I thought of the biblical “fruits of our labor”, and Billie Holliday singing her famous song, “Strange Fruit”, and that is how I titled the work “The Fruit of Our Labors”, which to me is about our collective journey through life and the legacies we leave behind, material, emotional and spiritual.  The work is in part an autobiographical narrative, which I think also touches on our collective memories, so the work is about our legacies and our memories, our experiences through life, and the mystery that that is.

December 10, 2010