Methodologies and Materials

The day before flight, a 75" high × 48" wide × 52" deep Vinyl “creativity chamber” was tethered to the interior of the jet. The purpose of the chamber was to contain the paints I would be using while allowing for free-floating body movement within the working space. Although I wanted the paints to float along with my body, I placed a canvas within the creativity chamber to catch the paint as it fell out of the air (Fig. 5). In this way the canvas served as a research document, rather than as a painting, tracing the position of my body and paint particles in space. It would have been ideal to execute such work in a larger unconfined space; however, I found the size of this chamber to be completely adequate. We used Velcro strips to hold the chamber to the floor and bungee cords attached the top of the chamber to the fuselage. The chamber was constructed with a Velcro door for access (Fig. 6).

On the morning of my flight, I prepared 10", 14" and 18" pastry bags, filling them with acrylic gel medium having the viscosity of toothpaste, using all the colors of the rainbow (Fig. 7). In a fanny-pack tied down near the creativity chamber, I placed containers of paints having the viscosity of table cream.

“Other artists, concerned with a more ecological approach, have used gravity, chance, stones, water, and even walking as materials from which to make art, often choosing remote sites for their work in order to circumvent the artificial environment of the art world.”
—Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? [24]

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