Faithful John and Faithless John
2025. Dogwood, tissue paper, stone, foil, wire, plaster, graphite
gblekkenhorst
June-August 2025
Section 01: Project Brief
The intention of this project was to spend time with material without aiming at specific goals - to focus on exploration and playfulness, and use materials on hand and only source what could be found for free - to especially take advantage of unusual materials I came across.
However, a few potential end points were kept in mind, should the opportunity arise:
- Artifacts that could be of possible use in my thesis project. My thesis involves fabricating objects to be indexed by a digital archive and tell a story through their juxtaposition. However, the thesis was in quite early days at the start of this project, so this wasn’t something that could be used as a prompt. Instead, perhaps the materials would reveal interesting directions the narrative of that project could take.
- Future use of OCADU studios. OCADU has a variety of wonderful studios, but their use is largely restricted by summer hours and the materials can be quite expensive. These early prototypes attempt to exploit the potential of the lo-fi materials themselves, while also projecting on how these materials may represent other materials that require more precision and care.
Section 02: Development
My first few days of experimentations were entirely without direction, just trying to play with materials that I already had in my studio.
I attempted to just play, but I was still trying to drag this project back into my thesis - a thesis that was not yet formed enough to find anything with it to give me prompts, except for this very big idea of “infected” objects which felt quite ungrounded. At the time I was thinking of infected as a potentially fungal infection and therefore I was thinking about potentially expressing this infection through a repeated visual or textural motif that could be applied to whatever else I happened to fabricate for the archive.
My earlier experiments involved working with some materials scrimmaged at the MAAD textile studio. I was just seeing how different textures could arise from combining these materials using glue and embroidery techniques.
I had a length of rubber hose from a previous project, and I worked for a bit and chopping the hose up into medallions and hollowing them together, or experimenting with the heating the medallions to fuse to each other. I enjoyed the textures that I was able to bring out of this, and the three dimensional forms that could be sculpted by angling them against each other.. If I were to continue with this technique, I would invest in hoses of different widths to create a less uniform look. This relatively cheap technique could be easily replicated, and while a little tedious, it was also quite meditative.
These are different techniques on turning two-dimensional fabric into three-dimensional objects, using materials scavenged from a previous project.. The top left is supported with wire. The bottom left is Modge Podge - soaking the fabric and then shaping it at different intervals during the drying process. My favorite is on the bottom right - it's difficult to capture in the pictures, but this is just hot glue on the back to hold its shape. The shape holds quite well, and the tactile experience of touching and pressing it has a strange quality like the bones with a small creature, but with the ability to bounce back to its original shape.
To track what these materials were doing, and my feelings about them, I tagged these experiments, I sewed tags on to each. I also considered it as a preliminary prototype for how archive objects might be cataloged in a casual archiving system. I may return to this cataloging of mysterious organic forms later in the semester.
The Empty Vessel/Media eater
The next day I had an idea that came all in a rush - a tiny creature that was empty inside and needed to be fed something to keep it’s balance. I had a vague notion of what the rocks might mean, it was about ingesting other peoples art - about needing other people's art to fill me up to feel stable and steady. This would be an exploration in balance, and using sculpture to represent an ineffable feeling that is otherwise hard to describe.
I had two ideas: As a positive connotation, the ingestion of other art would keep the creature balanced, while its huge hands try to pull it off of the edge of the table. I imagine it as an interactive art piece where the audience could fill up and pour out this empty vessel.
Or a more negative connotation, as my relationship with consuming art changes - if it’s guts were to deform and distend by all this media filling it up, would more reflect my toxic relationship with social media and doom scrolling.
Faithless and Faithful John
This very rapidly evolved into another idea working with similar materials. Faithful John and Faithless John. These are characters that I have represented multiple times throughout my work in my self-portraits. The titles Faithful John and Faithless John come from recurring recurring characters in Germanic fairy tales. Again, thinking about balance and texture, I had a vision of these huge heavy metal limbs, positively or negatively balancing other lighter materials for the rest of the body, and how that metaphor could be used more intent with more intentionality than in the media eater project.
Faithful and Faithless John, 2007. g blekkenhorst
Disintegration or Cortisol Spike
This led me to a third idea. Since I was already plumbing my past for motifs I've used before, I recalled a project that I have been looking for the resources to finish for years.. For many years I've had a reoccurring dream about my body being disassembled in the moments that I wake up. I've always wanted to express this idea in porcelain. When I'm trying to pull myself out of this dream, I imagine my body being reassembled by pulling these strings up through all of my limbs. I give myself an aspirational new porcelain body that can heal itself more cleanly than flesh can.
Previous Expression Attempts
I already had sketch ideas for this project back in 2023. Although I did not dig up the sketch until after the 2025 prototype was already created. But I’ve had the dream many times since then so the idea is relatively consistent.
FEIV - Dissociation, 2024, 2024. g blekkenhorst.
Because it's been many years of me having this dream and being unable to express it in porcelain as I would like, I've also previously expressed it through a short comic I created for the friendship edition for anthology in 2024. This is very satisfying, but my dream of this project involves the weight and especially the sound of the pieces clinking together, which is something that paper cannot communicate.
Prototype
I created this prototype out of paper towel rolls and some cardboard left over for my landlord's construction project. The affordances of the toilet paper rolls for the limbs is that they came already rounded. This particular cardboard was significantly thinner than other cardboard available and therefore easier to roll and form - somewhere in between a cereal box and corrugated cardboard.
As I built him, I experimented with the strings. I ended up creating chambers throughout the different pieces of his torso to keep the strings from tangling with each other. This was only partially successful. Play testing with audiences, the impulse is to pick him up like a puppet, and under these circumstances he tends to twist around, and his limbs can no longer be pulled together. His pelvis kept ending up backwards from the rest of his body.
The movement he implied did not give the feeling I was going for. When I imagine him pulling together, it is without gravity. I ended up using this prototype as part of the stop motion workshop and created this short piece with Liv.
I decided this project would need to be shelved for a fourth time. I am sure that I will return to it again, when the last puzzle piece clicks in place and I have the resources that I need to express it with the materials that I feel like it requires.
Faithless and Faithful John (Redux)
I returned to my previous ideas - I tried Media Eater first, I spent a good few hours messing around with the heat gun and some plastic scavenged from a previously disassembled project - I quickly realized that I hate working with plastic I don't like the symbolism of the environmental aspect, I don't like the way that it sounds, I don't like the way that it feels, and I certainly did not like the way that it felt when I tried to cut it.
So I returned to Faithless and Faithful John. And as I worked on these two, I became increasingly obsessed with what they meant to me, thinking about my own relationship to faith - both the structured faith that I was raised with, and now feel the absence of, and the more abstract faith that I still struggle to maintain all the time in my adulthood.
The John's eventual materials, I pictured as having metal hands and feet - the metal being a metaphor for the faith that is supposed to keep you grounded in this world but often makes you inflexible. In my illustrations of myself, when I'm feeling insecure, I draw myself with this lump body and super pointy, inelegant hands and feet. When I draw myself with confidence - even disrespectful, monstrous confidence, throwing around my weight in the world - I have these huge hands and feet, with very clearly defined knuckles and joints. Hands and feet, and them not working properly, is a repeated motif in my work.
The Johns came together incredibly quickly once I put my mind to it. I worked with some newsprint - a fresh pad of newsprint that has been in a portfolio case for probably 20 years.
I started making this simple little round creature and once his body was taped in this loop started just cutting back everything that wasn't John.
With Faithful John, I had already worked out a lot of the mechanics of the limbs that I wanted in the sketch, and was delighted that my first idea worked exactly as I hoped it would. Faithful John's legs were wired in a specific way to create flexibility at the hip knee and ankle but to be relatively, but not perfectly, stiff in the thighs and calves.
I also worked out exactly how long I wanted faithful John's arms to be. I love these really long floppy arms with too many fingers and thumbs and joints. I was very considerate of how the arms and legs would move when the creature was manipulated. The proportions of the arms and the legs versus the body was very important for both movement balance, and for him to be a charismatic person that would invite people to touch him. Welcoming, but unsettling.
FEIV - Dissociation, 2024. Renters Market, 2025. g blekkenhorst.
I burnt almost a week of this project trying to find a piece of metal that I could use to prototype faithful John's hands and feet. The metal shop was closed while I was prototyping this project so I did not have access to their scrap bin.
Faithless John’s metal is a bit less important - his metal limbs simply mirror of Faithful's Johns, they are impractical. But Faithful John's hands and feet were important for being able to test their balance relative to the rest of his body. I was hoping that I could at least find a piece of metal that would be similar in weight to what I would eventually make them out of. This never never surfaced - however I did manage to find some pieces of wood that actually almost seemed like strangely stylized limbs in the XFab scrap bin.
Faithless John was actually more time consuming. His role was incredibly important - his whole life is about tipping over, he needs to be good at it. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of good pictures of fabricating his legs, which took an incredible amount of engineering that I did not anticipate from the sketches. He was built mindfully, that the pieces of paper that built his body could be cut back out again and used as pattern pieces to recreate him out of hardened canva, or perhaps built over and used for a mould cast. I wanted him to have wire, so his legs could be manipulated, to struggle and fail to get him to stay upright. This ability to bend his legs was not something that I could replicate with paper, it’s too brittle. However it was still satisfying to try to stand him up and have him fall down again.
Section 03: Faithless and Faithful John
I'm extremely pleased with how these prototypes worked out. They speak to their future materials well.
Unfortunately the ceramic studio is closed for the summer. With further material experiments, I can see how I can stiffen canvas so it will make the sound it should when the Johns move. If I continue this project I'm looking forward to spending time in metal studio, and discussing how the effect I want can be best achieved with the tech there - I imagine the plasma cutting is going to give the rugged effect that I'm after - I'm not sure if etching is going to get the creases that I'm imagining, but I would love to use this project as an excuse to see what's possible with the material. I've always wanted to learn how to weld properly.
I think they communicate to me exactly what I intended them to, while still being esoteric enough that audiences would read their own metaphors into it.
I had a really interesting experience while I was showing these to people, both as part of the critique and earlier on while I was working on them - Professionally I work as a game designer, and a big part of my work at studios is running playtests and collecting data from play testers to see how people are experiencing our games and we need to change in order for them to communicate in the way that they're intended - this playtesting can extend to other media! I've been really pleased by how playful people are with these objects when they touch them.
Section 04: Personal Insights
I recognize some things about myself working on this project. My undergraduate was in illustration and animation, so character design is a big part of how I express myself. It seems I have some strange insecurity about this - like contemporary art can't be figurative in this way like charming characters or somehow too silly to express real feelings - even though I have always been adamant that “low brow” art and fiction can cut deep! It's funny to wrestle with this insecurity while I'm working on this project about insecurity.
Reassurance 2025 gblekkenhorst insecure attachment 2025 gblekkenhorst and Wenjia Quan
When I had both the Cortisol project and Faithful and Faithless John project next to each other on the table during the critique - I realized something that they had in common that I hadn't before, and recognized from previous projects.. They're both using the body in different ways. Cortisol was about making myself a new, better body. Faithful and Faithless John are about creating a body to capture a feeling that non-corporeal. Taking something intellectual, conceptual or spiritual and turning that into a body that can be understood and sensed by other people. A lot of my work is about using speculative fiction and horror to communicate more conceptual problems - and I recognized that my working with cartoon bodies is an extension of this, even when the subject matter isn't explicitly science fiction.
Section 05: Further Questions
I am interested in continuing to work on the Johns, but I’d also like to fabricate something for my thesis if I’m able, which has been evolving in parallel with this project. So far I've decided to keep the two threads separate to not let them weigh each other down. However, I still have a few weeks until Project 2 is due - there is a chance that some material exploration for my thesis will serve this one, and Faithful and Faithless John will be shelves, or somehow absorbed into my thesis in a way that I cannot see from where I'm standing. Either way, many of the projects in my life get shelved and reshelved many times until they’re finally realized. . Art is a long game, and the time spend with them usually builds to something, even if it’s not what you were aiming for.