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Who says sculpture has no business in business?

by | Mar 27, 2015 | Assemblage, Clay Yandle, Collaboration, Creative Process, Design, Display, Eggbeater Creative, Experimentation, Form, Found Objects, Ideas, Inspiration, Marketing, Martha Rosler, Painting, Recycle, Sculpture, Semiotics, Surrealism, Typography, Unfixtures, Upcycling

Picture“Unfixtures”: Found lamp bases, utensils, gesso.

I liked the idea of messing with the overlooked and the banal to open up possible new understandings about preconceived notions.


There was something delicious about a collection of attractive objects — flat white familiar forms at a personal/counter-top scale — that is also just a little disturbing for its wrongness. Those little electrical cords suggest hazard. They seem to say, Whatever you do, don’t plug us in, so in a sense they have some visual power.
I was thinking about Martha Rosler‘s groundbreaking feminist video, “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975 – edited version below) when I came up with my “Unfixtures” sculpture series.
Ah, the power of uncertain objects. What was an experiment in found-object sculpture is an eye-catching visual for a company in the business of creative work.


PictureEggbeater Creative’s new brochure (Clay Yandle photo)

“I love the plug part,” my brother Clay said in a text the other day, after sending me pics of his company’s latest brochures and business cards. “It makes it real… like you could fire it up and it would start doing whatever the hell it would do.”

Unfixtures are a permanent fixture (when they’re not showing in a gallery) at my brother’s office. One of the pieces in particular seemed to be speaking to him as he was trying to come up with a name for a new web-design/branding partnership a while back.

“It was the perfect storm of me trying so hard to come up with a name and just staring at the sculpture led me to understand how this business was the mix of two companies,” he wrote. eggbeater creative was born.

“It was whimsical and interesting, and then there was the obvious part of the eggbeaters working as light bulb (idea) metaphors. The sculpture had traditionally conflicted parts, but they were together in a way that worked.” 

The company logo (seen at the bottom left of the brochure in this image) riffs on the sculpture and the lower-case ‘e’.

Below: A time-lapsed view of a painting commissioned for Eggbeater Creative: