 There's lovely to look out into a crowd and see some new faces. I'm beyond excited to be here at Mechanics Hall. Thank you so much to the board of directors for bringing me on. And I look forward to more conversations like this. And I hope that you will reach out and talk to me about your dreams and visions about the future of Mechanics Hall. There's so much history in this building. There's so much story history and creativity. And I'm thrilled. I'm so excited about the future of this organization. So I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be here. And I'm thrilled to be introducing John this evening. I assume most of you are familiar with John's work. I think I became most familiar with John's work during the Portland Museum of Arts exhibit last year, which I'm sure you have a slide of somewhere in this presentation. And I am not a big fan of introducing people with bios because John's story is his story to tell, not mine to tell. But I do think it is important for you all to know that John has recently opened up a plant office space up on Monjoy Hill, which I hope that you will all visit. And he will describe the history of his work, which my understanding comes from a deep passion for nature and art and theater design. And I'm going to leave it up to him to describe all of that to you. But I'm going to remind you that Mechanics Hall is a 501C3 nonprofit organization. This is my job, is to make sure that you are aware of that. The things that happen in this building happen because of people like you. The things that happen in this building are because of members. So if you would like to become a member of Mechanics Hall, you can go to mechanicshall.org. You can sign up. There's multiple levels for you to do that. It is important for us to have people in our community to support this work. As you will see, if you look back, you'll notice that there's not complete lighting over there. That is because we are in the middle of a beautiful library renovation that's supported in part by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation. And then the next couple of months, some of those 1970s file cabinets will go away. And we're returning to the original history of this beautiful, beautiful room. The stacks will be opened up. And we invite you to come in and spend time here and read and write and be curious. And the upstairs ballroom, which has been partially renovated, will complete that renovation hopefully this summer. And it will go back to its original floor print. So there's a lot of exciting things happening. Become a member. That way you get our newsletters. You're aware of what's happening in the building. And please, I really encourage you. I am Annie at mainmechanics.org. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear the ideas that you have and the experiences that you've already had in the building. And with that, I'm going to introduce officially John Fuddling. So thank you so much for being here. Hi, and thank you for coming. I'm really excited to be here. And I'm going to start off tonight to I feel like I was asked to kind of talk about where, how I got to where I am with my business and my creative practice at this point. And so I'm going to kind of start by talking about this last month of my life. So five weeks ago today, I opened up this plant store, which is the newest part of this business that I've been building for about two and a half years, based around flowers primarily and now extending into house plants. So about this time, which was the first day of spring, the pictures are from a few days afterwards when we got some more snow, of course. I also got a text message from a former flower student that was like, SOS, my friends, wedding in Ireland. The flowers have fallen apart. What are you doing next month? And so I just returned last night from a trip to Ireland in which I had my first international wedding. So in the last five weeks, I've opened up the shop. I've been down to Norfolk, Virginia twice because a set that I had designed and built for an opera two years ago was being remounted at Virginia Opera. So I drove down with the set, set it up, flew back here, flew back there, took down the set, drove it back up here. And then went off to Ireland. Here's a video I'll show you. So Ireland was a crazy trial and I think is a great example of it kind of hits on a lot of points on the challenges of being a florist and the challenges of the work that I kind of find exciting. And so to get this together, I had to have these very quick conversations with the bride, figure out what she wanted. So this was like five weeks ago. By like week four, we're trying to build a round budget, like ballpark numbers. Like I don't know what flowers cost in Ireland. I have to figure out what kind of car do I rent? Well, how do I get flowers out to an island, a very remote island off of the west coast of Ireland? How do I get people to let me buy flowers in Ireland in the quantities I need to make this wedding a possibility? So I spent a few weeks contacting wholesalers. I must have contacted 10 to 12 different flower sources throughout the country, finding people who would agree to sell to me, who had different containers and candles I need. I spent a half a day on the Dutch flower auction website, which you've ever seen. It has changing prices and quantities. It's like a stock exchange. And so I have never used that before. I had to learn all about how to do that. And so I get to Ireland. We pick up the car, which they're smaller. It's a minivan, but it's not an American-sized minivan, which is what I was kind of expecting. So it was a smaller car than I expected. Not all the flowers fit into the car. And not only that, but we ended up having to fly the car over. They craned it up. So you can see that's all the branches. I have, like, the towel top of the car is like seven foot long branches of Curly Willow. And we got there 20 minutes late from the time they told us to, and I walked in the ferry terminal. They're like, nope, sorry. And I was like, wait, no, this is the last ferry of the week. They only run three times a week with this commercial, like this cargo ferry out to this island, which is a three and a half hour boat ride for that car out to the island. And so they're like, no. And I'm like, so I walked out. And caught my breath for a second. I walked back. And I was like, well, will you just maybe take the branches? Or can you take anything? And they're kind of like, it's a wedding. Weddings open doors for you. And you're like, OK, it's a wedding. And these flowers need to go to this wedding. They're like, oh, weddings. Weddings, OK. And so it's one of the great things about working with flowers is they actually literally open doors for you. You're holding flowers. And people will unlock a door for you. You don't do anything if you have flowers in your arm. And so this was on Thursday. So I went in Dublin Wednesday, picked up the flowers Thursday, drove all the way across to Galway, got on this boat, and then the, oops, it's going to show the video again. I don't know how do I get out of there. I want the next slide. There you go. And so now, so this was a 1,200-year-old church ruin, on a monastic site on the far side of the island. So I get to the island. It's a 20-minute drive through the little roads with all the stone fences. So this is where they brought me. This is a place that it's Inishmore on the Aron Islands. And so it's where the land meets the sea is what it translates to. It's where people thought that Europe ended, that the world ended. And so it has this really intense, beautiful, ancient quality to it. So it just, I don't know, it was a crazy week. So I made this, and I made some of this, and just was very lucky to get to bring thousands of dollars of beautiful flowers out here. But yeah, so this is what I've been up to. This is why I'm a little exhausted. And I took these pictures. The wedding was Monday. So I left off the island at 8.15 yesterday morning and got back at 10 o'clock last night. And so this kind of gives you a sense of the landscape there just because I lost my phone on the way back. So I lost all my pictures that I took, which is too bad. But I did walk out to this fort here. And so this is where I spent five days. As part of all the stress aside, I also, when I work on a lot of these projects, you'll see a lot of it's about getting to go to places, about spending time in places, about drawing out things that I think are special about the environment, but also getting to experience it in the first place. I love the journey that this job and my practice has taken me on. And so going to this last week was definitely this big peak so far in my growth. So now I'm going to go back to kind of, this is the end of college. So we're going to jump back. So you can see it's a lot less, I don't know. It's simpler maybe. But I wanted to start here because this was the first show I ever worked on. Well, I have a BFA in set design in theater from DePaul University in Chicago. And I always struggled with the program there because it was very academically rigorous. It was like everything has to be research-based and dramaturgically accurate. But I didn't find it very expressive. And I'm much more just a feelings and intuition-based designer. And so when I was working on this show, it's like, obviously, it's an old chapel. But what I did was this upper part here was actually a torn apart blueprint and had this concept of it being my unfinished set design homework. And it was the first time where I was just kind of like brought this sense of myself to any of my work. And so I thought that this was a big turning point. And throughout the show, this big mural changes a lot. They end up ripping the fresco off the wall and stuff. But by the end of the show, they've blown apart the building. And there's a lot of murder. And we actually took the set and removed some of the walls and pulled it back. And you can't quite see it in this picture. But you could see the back walls of the theater. And we went from this semi-realistic enclosed space to everything being blasted apart and had this abstract moment. And it felt really visceral. And I've learned that I like that a lot and that it doesn't have to necessarily make sense all the time if the gesture can convey the emotion that you want it to. So after the hole was blown in the wall and everybody's killed, there's the dead bodies, as the people are laying on the ground the set just dematerialized. And everybody was just like, there's just this moment of just the breath was taken out of you. And I love that moment. So after a graduated college in 2006, moved to New York City, it was a really tough environment to be working in theater. But I was getting gigs. I got a job the first morning. I woke up in New York. I had an email with a job in it. And so things were going pretty well, except that New York kind of just hoses you down. It was like too much going on and it was kind of constipating. But it did make me realize that I value collaboration a lot because it was hard to find collaboration in the professional world because everybody was just like, we've got to get this job done. We've got to get this job done. And so I bring these next shows up because this is my first major collaborative relationship with this director, Ethan Herd. So this is a production of Montverdes or Feo done at Yale in a church. And this speaks to a sensitive design where I like to work in spaces and try to make it feel like it's always been there. So the church is real. But this kind of, you can see this is for the super titles and the stage was built over the altar. But it just is supposed to look like it's always been there. So there's little young me. But with the set, and there's something about subtlety that I really like. People have said, told me that in some of the work you'll see that it's not visible enough. And I actually really like that, even though a lot of times I'd like to be very, very visible. And so that's why I bring this up. I'm bringing up a lot of these younger things just because of things that they say about how I think now. So this is another project I did with Ethan. It was one of the first times I was flown across the country for my art, which is something I love traveling for work. So this is out in Santa Fe and is also one of the first times where it was like they had a problem and the person they were working with wasn't working out anymore. Like, can you come at the last minute? Which is a role that I keep on finding myself and where people trust what I do and the relationship we have and know that if they call, if I can, I'll show up and I'll do the job that they need me to do. And so I showed up with a luggage, like a really luggage thing full of power tools in Santa Fe and just got to work. So this show, this was Iphigenia and Other Daughters, kind of a retake of retelling of some mythology here, but also played in tandem with, well, is this proof? Proof with the composition notebooks. Oh, the mind is blurry over time. And so you can see like right, this structure here is the same as this structure. So between the two nights, they would build the set, rebuild one set over the other one. And so this speaks to the problem-solving nature of theater and the transformative nature of stuff that I really like to explore, but it's also a big pain in the butt, to be honest, to like put a whole new porch system, like it's just silly and ridiculous. So yeah, so that was 2009. So 2010, we moved to Maine. I like quit the theater. I was like way over this professional theater world where you had to have like an MFA from Yale. You'd have a trust fund, so you could afford to have a studio practice that didn't require you to work another job. And, or you had to like, like people would literally be like, yeah, I designed and build this show. Here's a hundred bucks, like in New York City. Like it just wasn't possible. I had this occasion where I was outside on a fire escape spray painting a prop in the rain. And like the stage manager who was inside in the theater stopped rehearsal because there was like a little bit of spray paint smell in the theater. And it was like threatening to cancel rehearsal because of the spray paint smell. Well, I'm like outside of the rain spray painting. And I'm like, you know, this just doesn't feel like you want this to like come together. This like, it just felt like, I don't know. It just didn't feel like that collaborative relationship that I was looking for. And so I like stopped working in theater. We moved to Maine. And then, so that was 2010. 2011, I started working in flowers. So that was a crazy kind of moment for me. I walked into Minot's flowers to get a job to deliver Valentine's Day flowers because I was unemployed and needed some extra cash because I just moved to town. And they had me work in the store and said just washing buckets and answering phones. And there's just kind of something that was interesting about the environment. I really love plants. I had plants already at this time, but it was like, oh, okay. And they like brought me back after Valentine's Day. And I just kind of started to get in the groove of that. So 2011 was really like our first full year in town. I started to work with flowers. I started my professional relationship with Snell Family Farm. If any of you are familiar with them and I would barter my time for food and flowers and stuff with them. And so I started to get flowers from them that were like for me to play with and to work with. And that summer was really just the first time where I was like, what are these things? They're not like dead, but they're not alive. And they're like powerful, but like I just don't understand their power yet. So it was just kind of like, it was like a year of like new things. And by the end of the year, I was running one of the other stores in the company. And so I like really like took to the industry really quick. And then this was a big moment. So this was in at Space Gallery. This was there. It was 2012 New Year's. They hired me on to kind of come up with a concept for the party overall, which was gonna be like, like kind of very lively art and interactive art. And they also suggested I do an installation, which I'd never really thought about before. I have a set design background and like that's like how I did stuff. You know, I had a play or an opera and I'd work from that to produce a product. And they're like, oh, you have ideas, like just like make something. And this was when the annex space was just opening. So this was the first project that was in the second space at Space. And it really like helped me recontextualize myself. They gave me a big chance, both doing like art direction and coming up with the bigger concept for the night, but giving me a whole room to work in without like, with like some money and like without limits. And so this was kind of, became this like kaleidoscopic thing that would change colors. And it also, you'll find out, I tend to work a lot by myself. So I put this whole thing up by myself, which at one point ripped out of the wall and was kind of like holding onto the wall and it was, it's a lot of like fun, dangerous times on ladders in my life. Where did I, oh, maybe I never added the other thing. So yeah, this is another important moment at 2012. This is my husband, Chris, standing on something, giving a speech. And we opened a space in our house called Institute for American Art, which is presenting other people's art. It's artists and residents. It's a live performance. We've kind of done a wide variety of things and a variety of spaces, but it was an important time for me to, I was very much struggling with my like private and public identity. And opening the house up to people was really a big struggle, but also was the beginning of a time where I was like forced to deal with my public person. And so the Institute like kind of like has helped me like come out of my shell a lot. And so 2012 with the founding of this was like a big, a big moment for me being able to be like a public business person now. It's starting to deal with that. I was also at the time, yeah, I didn't add them. That's okay. Starting to make my first art installations. So this isn't it. I don't have any pictures of it up, unfortunately. I forgot to add it, but I would go out into these places around Portland with like yarn with natural materials and install these like sculptural shapes, kind of line drawings in trees and like using like what I could find there to create these larger images. But it was the first time I was like compelled to just make things for no reason. And I remember going out with the yarn the first time and like tying it into the tree and making this like whatever. They're not really that interesting in composition, but as soon as I like finished, I like stepped back and I noticed it was like swaying in the wind and as the trees would move, the like lines would grow slack and like pick up again. And then I would go back and visit these things and some of the yarn would have broken or there'd be leaves stuck in it or spider webs would be growing on it. And I started to like see these objects I was making as these like things to kind of like watch age. Like I became really fascinated by how the like the mold would grow on the yarn. And so I kept them up over a period of time. And I went back often and started to document them. Just because they became better, you know, like it was watching them age, watching things use them was more fascinating to me. And I also realized that visiting these spots time and again to take pictures to became like a special thing for me, it became kind of this like pilgrimage. And I very occasionally would find like it had snowed and I would see footprints near it. Like I could see that somebody had like come and had seen it. And I was like, oh, okay. So there's like, there's this like life that I can like bring that theater maybe like hides you inside these little boxes sometimes and audience can be like sometimes a little limited for theater. And so I was always, I was really interesting for the first time to be like who is seeing these things and how are they like more interactive to like the general public who aren't seeking this specific experience that just happened upon them. And I got really interested in the chance of all of that. So this next project, so we're on to like 2013, not too long ago. So I started working with Sean Muscha who's a really like awesome and intense guy. And it brings a lot of fun stuff out of me when we're working together. And he just like, we're working on the show called gruesome playground injuries, which is about this man and woman who grew up together who kind of like through self harm and through accidents and through all sorts of things that plays based around these like different injuries. And it's kind of like, it's a weird play and it jumps through time. And it just feels kind of crazy. And so we decided to like set everything inside of this enclosed space. We wanted space gallery to not feel like space gallery. And so when he walked in this mini theater was enclosed in these strips of gauze and everybody was sitting in a circle kind of enclosed inside of this space with these strips kind of trimmed back. And the out of the ceiling would drop different costume pieces and stuff. And so like there was the start of the show a child's bicycle fell from the ceiling into the middle of the stage because the kid had just rode it off the school's roof. And like so, so it's definitely like this kind of like Madhouse feeling. And then this mirror over here was two way mirror with a camera behind it. So in between the scenes they would be doing their gore makeup like they'd be like putting on their block eye or something, whatever they needed for that scene. And it would be projected up on this big eyeball screen at the back and then kind of reflected back onto itself sort of kind of formed this infinite video eyeball situation. And it just felt really like it was the first time where I was like where my set design was like free from context and which was a big moment for me where it was just like I wanted to feel this way and this doesn't have to be a thing. It's just like what like it can just be a space for this to happen in. And so that felt really freeing. And so like 2013 was like a big year for me as an artist. So this next section is gonna have a lot of GIFs. So if you get motion sickness, I hope that's okay. So I went to Hew and Oaks which was really great and I spent a week out there and just like spent a lot of time observing. And so this is a line drawing of the road outside my window. And I built stuff in the lake. This is a tribute to Saul LeWitt and his whitewood structures. If you're familiar with his sculpture. So that's about like there's a little over 200 sticks that I foraged and removed all the side sticks, all the leaves and it turns out sticks aren't straight. So I spent like 30 hours that week just knotting this whole thing together. As tall as me, I'll show you this will give you kind of another sense of scale. So it was as tall as me and about this wide. And so I was trying, it was really important for me to capture the complexity of it but from like a still image I just couldn't. It was like meant to be viewed in person. And so this is when I spent a lot of this week recording stuff to make video, trying to make video or present my work differently because people weren't understanding it from pictures. So that's why all these GIFs. And I was doing a lot of stuff photography and long exposures to like expose parts of installations. And this is my favorite thing that's like ever happened. This moth is laying eggs on my sculpture. But the whole sculpture, this one is called, it was called Transmission or Four Towers. I don't know, stuff has names, right? And it was four towers that lined up with a mountain peak across the lake from, you know, so it kind of like lined up the barn to the mountain. So it was like, there's not really like a reason why. I just like want it to. And so I like the four towers lined up and that's kind of been the motivation for a lot of things. I try not to overthink it, but then stuff like this happens and I just like, it just makes me so excited and it's simple, but that's all it is. And so here's another GIF of A, you know, lots of... So kind of on the invisibility and subtlety theme, this was a piece I did at Sacred Improvane in 2013 that was, this is cellophane, like clear cellophane, like rolls of it. And if you know Fort Gorgeous, battery steel, there we go, battery steel out there. It has like a 503 to 500 foot long main tunnel. And I was just like, yeah, I'm gonna make a sculpture that long and went there with a ladder and some rope and tape and this cellophane and like tied into the, all the like rusty metal bits into the ceiling and spent like eight hours in the fort just unrolling the cellophane. And so you couldn't really see it. And it was really exciting. And for me, because it became really creepy because like it is low, it would swag down the lane. So as lowest point is right above your head and the wind through there would like, so it was just like this like invisible menace and making it, I ended up being there longer than everybody else setting up. So I was in the fort at night by myself with like a headlamp on and my like weird cellophane noise machine. And it was like, it's for the experience. So much of this is just for me and my like person getting to be there. And so like I have such an intimate relationship with this building now because I like scared the crap out of myself. One night in the fort by myself while it was like raining. It was, so capturing my works always a challenge. So in this one, like this is the piece here and this is reflections of the candles on it but you can't really ever see it. There's like somebody put some candles on it which was controversial because that wasn't really part of my design but at least now you can see kind of this is, each of these is like a fold and they're about, each fold was about 20 feet in length. So it did end up being the full length of the tunnel. It was a workout. And then this is just installation up in Camden for the film festival. It was actually in Rockland. Reuse of material and kind of improvisation. I just showed up the console and Stevens had these skeleton, whale skeleton pieces. And he was just like, here use this to make something. And so this was the entrance to a party. I love making stuff for parties because it just doesn't have to make any sense. So 2014 was, I worked at home a lot and played around in a way that I hadn't really a lot before. I feel like one of the only times where I really feel like I had a studio practice where I was just like exploring and exploring and exploring. And then I turned 30 this year, that year. So I built a flower bonfire. Which I had to use lighter fluid to start because apparently dried flowers do not light on fire, which is something I would have assumed they did very easily. So this, I don't know, but it's just gonna keep going here. This for me, this was for a festival called City Drift that happened in 2014. This is the site down by noise storage where they would put big piles of snow plow, snow. I don't think they do it anymore on this site. They've moved it since, but it's always really fascinated by it and our neighbor and friend, Christian Milneal, had written this article about it and calling it the Bayside Glacier. Because it would hold on until May, June. There'd still be frozen chunks in this. And so this is kind of the remains of that I'm gonna call the vernal pool from the glacier. And so it's obviously a very polluted site. Because of all that snow is not clean, it's like on historic marsh that's also filled in with garbage. And so I was really interested by the history of the site and I wanted to get people to notice it differently. And so this is probably, I don't think I have like a side picture of it, but it's like, it's a good, probably like 60 feet long. And so I harvested a bunch of Japanese knotweed from the neighborhood, which is that tall invasive plant. And chopped it up and used that as the base for this Mylar strands and just kind of wove it across the site around the existing water. And I had this great moment where one of my husband's students had written about it for a class assignment, not knowing that I was like involved in it at all. And he's like, yeah, I went to try to find this thing and I like spent some time in the neighborhood, but I like didn't really see it. I don't really know what, but like, you know, I'm glad I was there. And I was like, wow, that's like the best review. Like feel like you didn't notice it, but you like, you went there and you spent time and you thought about like why I might have brought you down to that neighborhood and what the Bayside Glacier might be. And he had to like look up Bayside Glacier and found the article about it. And so for me, that was like a big success was that somebody like thought and looked at their environment. And for me, like, I feel like so many, I'm a very observation based person and I notice a lot of things and I wish other people would notice more things. So I think that's kind of a reoccurring theme in my work is like, hey, hey, look over here. And then to balance it out, we have like Christmas decorating. So this is the whole other side of me. So I asked, this was when I was still working with Harman's and Barton's at Victoria Mansion. This is a room celebrating the existing decorating of the room. So I also love Gaudi access. Like, I mean, these are like, these are fake peonies that are like this big on top of a 14 foot tall Christmas tree. And it's swathed in like thousands of lights. And I don't know, I just, some people I feel like want to like, especially in the Florida industry, they want to present themselves as so refined or like I have like such hip taste. And I'm just like, give me the project and we'll find the right thing. So if it's Gaudi, then like let's celebrate that. And so this is a great environment to work in because it's gold, it's like mahogany, it's marble, it's like delicate wall things. And so you got to be super careful. And so this is only attached like here and here, the wire is covered in plastic and has like felt underneath it so it doesn't cut into the mirror. And then everything else has to just like, it has to be so delicate. And the tree is like, getting the tree set up before I wire it back to the wall. I had nightmares for days that would fall and like rip the chandelier out of the ceiling. I had to work over marble statues. So I love this kind of access though. I like, I get to walk into that room. I get to go up to the ceiling. I get to touch things that nobody else gets to touch because and so like, that's a great, that's a big part of this job for me is like is access, getting to go places and touch things. So 2015, 16. So 2016 is the year I quit the flower shops that I was working in. I kind of forgot to mention them because I was working with Harman's and Barton's in the local flower shops in town for a number of years and I learned a lot from my time in there. But in 2016, it was time to be able to explore more. It was very traditional and I felt like I was being weighed down by their past and couldn't grow any more than I could. I learned the trade from working for them which is very vital. And from like floors who had been doing it for 50 years, I got a lot of direct knowledge sharing which is super important and something that I still invest in is education. But it was time to quit the flower shop. So this is from working at Broadturn Farm where I found myself after leaving the flower shops I went for the summer and worked sewing flowers in the seat, sewing flowers in the fields, harvesting flowers, making arrangements, installing weddings with them. I learned a lot about how this industry works, how flowers work. I learned a lot from Stacy Brenner who runs Broadturn as a great community force on top of being an amazing designer. And she really like, she helped me grow a lot but also working there made me realize that, oh, it's not that I don't like working for the flower shop, it's that I don't like working for people because I love Stacy and John, but by the end of the season I was just like, ah. And so at the end of the season is when I got my sole proprietorship going, John Sunling Design, it was like, I'm real, it's starting to happen. I got my first customer which was Hunt and Alpine Club starting to do their weekly like greened vases, like just little things, but it was really, it was exciting after, you know, at that point 10 years of working freelance, I was finally like forming this thing. It wasn't just like a theater job every once in a while but it was starting to like clump which was really exciting. Also that summer, I go back to the Institute for American Art. We got this space at 24 Preble Street which was a five office suite and for the summer we presented work from like 60 plus artists and different performances in this space. And this 24 Preble Street which is where Arcadia National Bar is has become like kind of a creative home, a spiritual home for me I guess. So Pete and Sally who own the building let us have this for a really great deal that let us present work and like really like, it was much more than we'd ever done before and like really kind of made me see in a way what I was capable of organizing and pulling together very quickly. And then later in that year after this was done they gave me my first studio space outside of the house in that building and I started teaching at the Maine College of Art this fall doing their continuing studies class. So this was the fall of 2016 and it was also the year that I first sold dried wreaths at tandem which we'll probably get to some pictures of those at the end which tandem coffee was great to host me for this dried wreath sale which for Christmas which I was like sure I'll sell some wreaths but like they've really become a signature item over the last few years and so it was just like all this stuff was just like these like one little thing here, one little thing here, one little thing here that's like really become the roots of where the business is now. That winter I worked on a movie for the first time which is Holly Star. So Holly Star was filmed locally. It's a Christmas movie, kind of a Christmas rom-com. It's pretty good. I enjoyed it when I saw it which I don't always love these kind of movies so but they hired me on to create sets for puppets for the film. So there were sequences told in puppets and so I was working for the camera for the first time at these weird scales and so I spent two months building all these miniature sets. So that's me hiding behind a Volkswagen, no not Volkswagen air string trailer that was like four and a half feet long and this is the gazebo in the park in downtown Bideford right on the water if you're familiar with that. And so I made, this is like 18 inch tall vending machine and you can see this is this is kind of the setup for shooting this is actually the mayor of Sacco's house that they filmed at and I made it in miniature. It was really a new kind of challenge because I didn't know how the camera was going to read anything and I have a theater background and so I spent so much time on details I spent way too much time on details each window in that house had like seven or eight pieces to it. There was like the front frame, the plexiglass, the like inner frame, the back frame and then it would have like the second window would actually be hung offset from it because I was like if they zoom in close I don't want it to just be like so it was all the shingles were cut like individually it was just, I just didn't know what I was doing and I didn't have a job. Well, I was my job, this was my only job and so I was just like, well, I'll just like spend 50, 60 hours a week just like in my studio by myself cutting shingles and actually gonna, I wanna show you the, so like this is what it looked like when we were shooting it but I'm actually gonna force you to watch the, a little bit of the introduction to it because the beginning of the film opens on my work and it was very exciting to see, to see my work on screen we got to see it in at the City Theater in Bitterford last winter on the big screen and it was like, you know, it's, I don't know, it's a Christmas movie with puppets it's kind of part of a tradition in that way and so, and that's a theater, not a theater, I'm old mill down in Bitterford it's all based on real location so I built all these sets, the benches, like there's the gazebo, you can see the airstream in the background so it was really like, it was a really fun project it kind of came out of the blue, I still don't know, I, how often would you get to do something like this? How often does this like film in Maine? So I just like feel super lucky that it came along and these puppets, it's figures of speech theater if you're familiar with them, they're in Freeport they do, they made all the puppets they're the ones who brought me on and they just do incredible work and then like the big pull out moment where they're like deciding that they don't like the puppets and then the puppeteer gets fired and it's really sad this is Constellations at Space in 2018 with Sean Musha again this is the view as you're walking into space so we wanted to create a whole environment so we blacked out all the walls with black plastic to give it a reflective quality and then all this is bungee cord that I strung, it was kind of inspired by neurological pathways and the universe a bit and it was pretty improvisationally put up after a while it gets really hard to move a ladder through a space like that it turns out but we made it work and then we also, we built the audience seating onto the stage so when you sat down you're actually looking back at space gallery so there's the bar if you're used to that space and this is from on stage and then you can see we built in these prismatic panels and you got this kind of like Sean lit the bungee cords differently throughout the thing so they would kind of like the lights would move along the bungee cords and the colors in the hologram would change and this is a picture of it in progress this is like a big show for me personally when I felt like, oh, I can build things like I'm not just like a set designer because I built almost every single one of my shows and it's always just like seems a little plotting and like, you know, like theater, carpentry, I don't know it's just, but like I was like, oh, like this is like it was a big moment for me when I was like starting to trust my skills a little bit more as a builder this is Ghost Fence, Justin took this picture this was with Temple Art in 2018, 17 and this is on Franklin Artereal looking, you're looking down from Congress towards the water this way and Ghost Fence, the goal of this project was to kind of bring attention to the history of Lincoln Park, which is right there and how it was cut off when Franklin Artereal was widened into what we know now as opposed to the small neighborhood streets that it used to be and so I kind of built this fence as close as I could to on the original boundary of the park out of construction materials you can see in the background here this is like that new condo building that's up there now and there's so much change going on in this neighborhood and the history of change like through like the mid century as buildings were torn down and roads were built is really interesting to me and so I wanted to draw attention to that so you can see here in the background this is the actual fence in Lincoln Park so these were built to mimic the entrances and they kind of had this great glowing effect at night that I really loved so that was up for a month in Portland that was like my first public art that was official not just me showing up in the woods so that felt really legitimizing that's like a thing for me that I've always struggled with is the identity or like titles of things like in college I was like, I'm a designer I'm not an artist I'm like, no, I don't make art I like, I read a play and then I make a solution to that problem like and then I kind of, I started to make art and it felt really like weird to me and then it took me a long time to actually say, agree with people who were telling me I'm an artist and it took me a long time to actually agree with them and that project for me was a big moment and then we get to this which is, this is at the Portland Museum of Art and it's like, I don't know they told me I could do whatever I wanted essentially for the art and bloom program which is when they bring flowers into the museum to react to works of art and they're like, asked me to hang it from the ceiling so the concept for this was that it was like a little chunk of main magic that's been lifted up and so all of this is like fake rock this is made out of rigid foam and paper mache it had to be super lightweight there's three pieces of wood in it total and everything was just painted and covered in fake moss and then as you walked underneath it the whole inside was hollow like a geode and filled with dried flowers and was lit up in different colors and had this great floating effect and I'm gonna show you another video here so it just kind of like hung there and which was, it was really fun and I wasn't sure, it took me a long time to get to this point because I just wasn't sure what to do when the museum was like create something pretty that has something to do with plants for our lobby you can hang it from the ceiling it's not really like clear what you do but it's, it was really exciting to see people were starting to trust me and give me freedom they're like oh we know you can do stuff we trust you to hang it from our ceiling like make whatever you want was like oh wow wow that's like, that's a new feeling and it started like these commissions of these kind of things are starting to show up more where people are asking for like weird stuff for parties to fly out to Ireland to make installations on ancient churches like so it's been a really exciting ride so this was the beginning of 2018 I changed the business name to plan office at this time again thanks to Justin's help he talked me into the name which I already had batting around because it's a found name from an old sign but he was like oh it's good, it's good use it so I relaunched the business got my name off of it because I was tired of seeing my name started doing more workshops and doing a lot of community focused stuff and it's just been like bumping up since then really once they got more of the community involved with it the more excited people are it's just, it's been really oops that again but then it's been really kind of crazy so I'm gonna like this is we're getting into weddings maybe I'll show some stuff off of Instagram right off after this so this is a big wedding I did last year I'm just getting into the wedding business in my own world they, this is a couple who told me to kind of do what I wanted but they wanted it to be fun so it was at their family's house in Wooster, Massachusetts this is all, this is all added you can see like this is a tree kind of in front of it but everything was installed day of on the front of the house for the wedding so that's like like probably like three main wires there's a wire here and like a wire here and like here oh I'm sorry I'm touching the screen I should probably and then this is all basically like I found some like nails that were already in the facade and just like attach the branches to it and just started shoving flowers in it so a lot of this kind of stuff is just very improvisational it's very less minute you have to work quick so you have to work with confidence and it's about showing up with the right material with enough time to do it because if you don't have material you don't have anything and so this was fun but what was really fun was well won her bouquet because she let me use weird flowers in it they also had me decorate every room of the house and then I made a flower mobile which was inspired by Calder stuff I think the video here is so during the whole reception it just like bobbed around in the wind and we just kind of came up with this and I said yeah of course I can do that but what this wire it's on a wire that's like I was on top of my ladder on the top of my ladder reaching as high as I cut up the pole to get that wire across between the two poles to hang that thing and so when I'm hanging this thing in the very middle of the tent there's nothing to lean your ladder against so I had like a person footing me as I stand on top of a ladder attaching this mobile which is like flopping and waving around so this is what I get myself up to this is like kind of my this is what people know me for now and I'm not sure exactly at what point it started to make sense and come together but I'm gonna show you just a few things I lost my phone I think I mentioned that so I'm showing you stuff on Instagram here for like just the most recent stuff so this is from last summer I built these letters numbers for an opera set those are the biggest ones are eight feet tall and they rolled around so it's very like it was a very challenging construction because it's super minimal and a lot of light bulbs to put in this is like some weirder floral arrangements that go with this which is this light up piece that I did for the Portland Society of Architects so at this point where I'm at is that people want weird stuff for me they give me a lot of freedom and I've been trying to take advantage of that it's the niche that I have I've always been like building the cracks the plant store I have because there wasn't one in town the like weird stuff I get to make it because nobody else was you know and so the more I make weird stuff the bigger projects I'm getting the more attention I'm getting and so I've been very much trusting in my instincts now which is a few years ago I didn't think I had any I wouldn't have thought I had any taste and then people kept on being like no, no, no no we just keep doing what you're doing and I'm like, okay, okay so it's been a gift from people this is I don't know more light up stuff this is Honell Pine Club Drifter's wife here's one of the wreaths that I make that people love and this is a really windy wedding installation so you're up against stuff like this when you're doing weddings like this on top of a mountain and it's not, you know it's not not windy and then I guess I'll wrap up this is kind of the most recent structural thing this is at the Portland Museum of Art this year what's not immediately clear from this is this is like a self like it's kind of a semi-rigid wire-based structure so it's this has a center pole here oh here I'm gonna use my finger this is a center pole but then these triangle shapes are suspended from wires that connect the top and bottom they aren't actually like the triangle's not actually touching the center pole and there's three of them together and when they're standing they're actually in bases here but when they're standing the engineering I can like push it and it kind of like walks but it doesn't fall over which was very exciting so I've been starting to play more with experimental architecture and engineering and trying to get it more into my flowers I guess so this was just kind of like a pavilion it wasn't meant to necessarily be anything except like a companion piece of this and the gucci and the uh was en mi mundo flotante flotante oh my gosh this I have terrible Spanish but it was just like I wanted to play with engineering and structure and not like necessarily make it like a pretty thing though it's I think it's pretty in its own way so this is kind of where things are right now so that's that's that's plan office open that's hey that's my Instagram oh and there's a pretty arrangement I'm going to leave it with a pretty arrangement and I also make beautiful flower arrangements or whatever so uh yeah that's that's what I do is anybody have any questions yeah city well theater a theater setting is so controlled I think one of the things I liked about set design was that you have this like it's like a theater's a machine for expression and right it's like this thing that you can do all the stuff in and you can control where the audience is what they're seeing what the lighting is on it and you're like it defaults to all black and so like everything you add is very purposeful in that way but when I'm working on projects outside you have to take everything that's around you it's uncontrollable not just because there's weather but also like you don't know what people are going to do like um that ghost fence piece got stabbed people were not I saw like like some of those plastic pylon things were stabbed by people and stuff was ripped apart by people or like uh when I was working in that 1200 year old church in the monastic site in Ireland this weekend there was tour bus after tour bus of tourists coming into the space taking pictures asking questions and so I you have to I I guess I had to approach the situation just a lot differently like you have to be more improvisational the piece at Bayside Glacier I did for the three hours before dawn because I was kind of like installing it maybe like illegally on a very visible site and so right as I was finishing the cops noticed not like right when I was starting and they're like well as long as you take it down at the end of the week and I'm like yeah it's it's for an art festival it's okay it's okay yeah and so so it's almost like you have the installation becomes much more part of the expression of the piece when it's outside of a theater context maybe then in the theater context it's a little more of a pure expression perhaps maybe it does that answer or is that yeah great can you talk about the barriers that you experience in terms of self identifying as one thing over another yeah I think one I'm like a super logic driven person and I always felt like I couldn't because I was starting with other sources like a play or something that I couldn't give myself credit for the expression of it that I had to like so that I think that was a struggle I think ever since I was I grew up playing music I started playing piano I was very young but I could just I could just play it was when I was five I just started playing and so it was like always this thing that I did but I couldn't I didn't take it was for me I didn't take pride in it in the same way because of it just happened and I feel like so much of my work has like because it just happened and because I didn't like labor over like the thought process and stuff that it wasn't like art somehow you know I don't which is silly because that sounds what like art is like just expressing yourself but it just like I guess I thought there was more like theory or more had to be more craft or that like oh I couldn't like I wasn't like a singer and I wasn't like the guy in the class who could like draw really good and I didn't I'm still not creating in a a like a traditional like defined like mode of art and so now I realize that that doesn't matter as much and perhaps that that's like more a freer part of working as an artist is being in the undefined areas but it took me a long time to see that the creative expression I was making was like was valuable beyond just like solving the problem in front of me