The pieces that make up the Khitin series represent a struggle to make a decision. The follow-up series, Elytron, comes from the same inability to move forward. The decision was not about making these shapes or not. It was whether they were best represented by a subtractive approach or by an additive method. After a considerable amount of time spent pondering, planning, drawing and reconsidering, a decision was made to pursue both. Not making a decision is often the decision.
Khitin is a corruption of the word Chitin (English). The word Chitin is derived from the word Chitine (French) which is of course derived from the word Chiton (Greek). The definition is simply “a covering”.
This idea of a covering is at the heart of what interests me. It is easy to understand what materials the world is made up of at the top level. Wood, iron, stone, concrete and even plastics are clear about their origins and use. Not everyone can build a car or make a marble statue, but everyone understands the material; how its gathered and what tools are required to work with it.
What about the things that are not made of wood or steel or stone? What kind of base material is used to form a fish scale, crustacean shell or bird’s beak? How is a beetle’s exoskeleton or a fungi cell wall made? From what material? How are the structural elements of an insect’s wing constructed? Beyond the material, what is that process? A building process sculpted, organic and free of manmade constraints.
Somewhere along the way I focused on the idea that the microscopic construction sites using this mysterious building material were worth investigating. At the same time, I found attraction to an array of shapes made by people out of wood and steel and stone. Organic shapes. Curved and undulating surfaces either highly polished or heavily textured and distressed. My early interests were driven by this attraction. The construction of boats and boards is a good example. These things are easier made with almost any material other than wood, but they never look and feel as good unless they are of wood. Musical instruments fall into this category. The concept of a hollow-form precisely designed to echo sound from a vibrating string to a sound chamber and back to an ear is complex enough. To construct it from wood of all things makes it that much more complicated. I knew I needed to make objects that attempt to mimic the forms made in nature by this strange substance. Is it organic, botanic, geometric? I knew wood was my way forward, though most shapes I pursue may be easier realized in any other material. Wood can be ill tempered.
I gathered the appropriate tools, a lot of them. I gathered the skills, a few of them and proceeded to realize I could end up a boat builder who has no need for a boat. I could become a luthier with no desire to play an instrument. It rang of inauthenticity. How do I presume to use the shapes and methods and tools of these professions and not make the expected result? I set out to make the shapes that I see around me, some having been doodled over and again in meetings and lectures when attention could have been better spent. Some more recent. The intention is to work out the shapes in either a subtractive method or an additive approach or both if the subject lends itself to it.
Kevin Currier
2020