Celebrating

What am I going to do with all this beauty?
—Juliette Bellocq

That’s the question that popped into Bellocq’s mind upon first encountering Sister Kent’s work. And her answer seems to be: relentlessly work, create, and facilitate others’ creativity.

Today she works to organize exhibitions that aren’t just to be looked at, but ask visitors to create works of their own. And then revel in the fierce pride and joy others take in their new creations. To paraphrase Juliette’s reference to Kent’s book Learning by Heart, the joy of making something transforms the way you see the mundane, and that brings a form of religious experience into your life.

Making by hand

Working with her hands seems to define just about everything Juliette does. Examples abounded throughout her talk, but a remarkable instance was her outlining of the creative process behind an eyewear company’s website.

With this as with many other projects, Juliette looks for work that allow her to hone and develop skills she’s passionate about while meeting the clients’ needs. For this web project, Juliette and her partner at Handbuilt started by making things with their hands: dresses, as a matter of fact. Odd to think of a web project springing from handmade objects, but in this the physical products Juliette and her partner created drove the final look of the site.

Creating scenarios

Again, scenario creation runs through a great deal of Juliette’s work, from the aforementioned silkscreening exhibition/workshop to the Corita-inspired procession at Otis. But the project that most struck me as an act of scenario creation was the illustrative film project Juliette contributed to for LAX, See Change.

Apparently the animating element of the project was too intensive to allow the artists to directly participate in, so the artists collaborated to write a recipe for the film, writing up an outline of the film with reference to sample images they’d created. This left the actual execution of the film up to the animator, but provided him with a script, a linguistic framework to build the final graphic project upon.

Eating good food

Bellocq closed her talk with an overview of her work with local organizations and the community to improve distribution of healthy food in the Watts district of Los Angeles, which she described as a “food desert through which all the city’s food passes.”

Today, Watts faces a challenge: that of a short supply of fresh, healthy food options. That shortage, combined with the limited transportation means available to many of the district’s residents, has led to a variety of food-related health issues.

Bellocq has tackled the problem in myriad ways, from creating a map of local fresh food sources with her students to aiding the effort to grow a farm within Watts. (Which project is ready to go, awaiting only funding.) Check out the Los Angeles Food Policy Council site for more info.

Overall, Bellocq’s presentation teemed with inspirations—both creative and social—making it clear that she and her studio, Handbuilt, are creators to watch closely.

posted by John Moore Williams