Promise on County D was an installation I designed for the 2014 Design MMoCA at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. I was thrilled to be invited once again to exhibit at this event, which presents of my favorite challenges ever: to choose a piece from the museum’s permanent collection and to respond to it with an original work of design, aided along the way with the museum’s smart and helpful staff. This time around, I chose J. Corson-Rickert’s wire sculpture of a structure titled Cathedral for Hudson Park. Images of the banners and key appear below.

Here’s the description I wrote for the exhibition catalog:

Shelter is essential in more ways than one. As a child, I enjoyed constructing models of buildings — always houses — dreaming of love and life within while finding warmth and shelter from imagined threats outside.  Because they were three-dimensional, these house-models offered multiple entries and perspectives to stimulate the imagination. Cathedral for Hudson Park works this way too: it demands that you view it from different angles as you use your imagination to climb inside. What’s more, its mesh-like transparent walls literally open up to present an ever-shifting series of shapes and planes to comprehend.

When I first encountered Corson-Rickert’s piece, I was tangled in the emotional and financial limbo of trying to sell one home while buying another. It was a bumpy, drawn-out affair, but we were ultimately successful, and have moved into a home situated on fifteen park-like acres. During this process, I reminisced about moving to the rural house I still consider to be my childhood home. It was 1981 — the year of this Cathedral — and I was six years old. My daughter, now six, just moved into what I hope will be fondly remembered as her childhood home. And I hope that her parents, too, will live there long after she goes off to find her own place in the world.

I grew up to be a graphic designer, rooted firmly in the two-dimensional world of typography and layout. I am now more concerned with how we communicate using characters and symbols. Shapes make symbols, symbols convey meaning. For this interpretation, I am using shapes borrowed from Corson-Rickert’s sculpture to form a new set of symbols — a rough typeface — to document hopes and desires for my Wisconsin family’s new domestic cathedral.