On September 5th, after two years of working on her 1,000,000
Ellipsoids project, Mary Temple will make the last mark, the last ellipse,
on the last work in this remarkable series of drawings. She recently talked with
Mixed Greens about how the project has changed her, the ways in which painting
and sculpture are interchangeable in her work, and what it will be like to wake
up one morning in the near future and realize, really realize, that she
doesn’t have to sit down and draw a few thousand ellipses in pigmented ink on
Denril vellum that day.
MG: You’ve said that the 1,000,000 Ellipsoids project is “an
investigation of the concept of continuity and cohesion brought about by
reoccurrence.” But is there also room, within that continuity, for the
surprising, or the accidental? In other words, is there room for
discontinuity?
MT: Yes and no, and that’s part of what I find
humorous about the project. I mean, if you really want order and continuity, you
don’t hand draw something with pen and ink, do you? So if I have some idea of a
system in place, and a notion of what to expect, I can establish a mechanism for
reacting to what actually happens. I can anticipate the unanticipated. I think
that’s what makes the accidental or the surprising a pleasure, and not an utter
disaster.
MG: If you could create one of the Ellipsoid pieces
in any public space, on any scale, where would that be? On the other hand, would
you even want to?
MT: I can see a different version of this project
taking place in a public setting, in which each day another installment of some
larger picture was posted in a public space. But I really like the
Ellipsoid project’s personal, private scale.
