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00:00For the mathematical problems we are trying to solve.
00:03We try to integrate the math and the art together.
00:06I kind of like it.
00:09Climate change is scary. It's terrifying.
00:12But artists can translate the science so that everyone can understand it.
00:18Biology is the study of life.
00:20And I carve feathers into intricate art.
00:24People say I capture the essence of the birds.
00:26I kind of just feel them in my body.
00:29Through generations of passing knowledge from person to person,
00:33people in our family make very distinct pottery.
00:37It is a cultural science that 50 years ago we didn't even think was scientific.
00:44My mission was going to be at the International Space Station.
00:47Now that I've tried my hand at sewing in space, I can say it's tricky.
00:59The motto of MIT is mens et manus, which is mind and hand.
01:09So it's not just about thinking about things and solving problems in your head, but it's also about physically doing things.
01:19My dad and I started getting interested in art and craft because we were trying to solve math problems.
01:29We'd work on a problem, get stuck, and then build something that helped explain it.
01:43Computational origami is quite useful for the problems we were trying to solve.
01:55As we made more and more models to understand what was going on geometrically, at some point those models started looking beautiful.
02:05Now we try to integrate the math and sculpture making together.
02:19The more we do it, the more we view them through the same lens.
02:23At least I like to think about art also as a problem-solving endeavor.
02:32I'm a theoretical computer scientist and usually we're trying to understand what problems are easy for computers to solve
02:38versus which ones are hard for computers to solve.
02:42But I got interested in folding just because it seemed interesting mathematically.
02:47I was curious about becoming a lawyer. I went to law school for a term and decided I definitely did not want to be a lawyer.
03:00So I headed to Northern New Brunswick, Canada, and I built a log cabin.
03:06It made me not afraid to try anything.
03:09I homeschooled my son. I became a single parent before he was three.
03:15What I decided about learning is that it's not what you learn, it's to become excited about learning.
03:23I think our first collaboration was the Eric and Dad Puzzle Company when I was five and six years old.
03:29We made and sold wire take-apart puzzles to toy stores across Canada.
03:34I helped design the puzzles. Marty made them all.
03:39And then we split the money 50-50, which was pretty cool as a six-year-old.
03:44In the beginning, Eric wasn't interested in math, so there was no pressure to do math.
03:50I was playing lots of Nintendo. I asked my dad, how do people make video games?
03:56And a neighbor had one of the early personal computers.
04:00We borrowed it and made a video game.
04:05I took advanced calculus, and then I really saw the beauty in mathematics.
04:10You have this ultimate truth. You can prove that some theorem is true and know for sure that that is true.
04:17I think there's no other aspect of human existence where you have that kind of certainty.
04:27What was it like to be a 12-year-old in college? It was great.
04:30My peers, of course, were much older than me. They treated me like any other student.
04:36They invited me to parties. They tried to keep the drugs in another room, I'm told, so I didn't know that was happening.
04:43But I ended up doing undergrad in two years. And then I was like, well, I want to learn more stuff, so I guess grad school?
04:50And I saw this world of origami mathematics that seemed really cool.
04:56Finished my PhD when I was 20 and was lucky enough to get a job offer at MIT.
05:02The unusual thing is that when Eric was offered a job, they also offered me one because we had a reputation for working together.
05:12Well, that's not bad. That's a good test.
05:15Eric and I have published 100 joint papers.
05:18Interesting.
05:19The most important problem now is to prove that mathematically these curved forms exist.
05:36We use a ball burnisher to put indentations into the paper.
05:40When we first started folding paper, we used a laser cutter, and then we decided everything had to be handmade, every step.
05:59The paper wants to fold along the score lines, but we have to really encourage it to go around all the creases.
06:06And as we do that, the paper just pops into this 3D form.
06:12Nice.
06:14It's a very simple constraint in origami that you're not allowed to stretch or tear the paper.
06:20And so all you're allowed to do is deform it by folds.
06:25It makes it a little bit harder.
06:27It makes it a lot harder, to be honest.
06:30You're doing a better job than I am.
06:33When we started working in computational origami, I think part of the appeal was that it seemed useless.
06:42But years later, it turned out that if you want to build a structure that can change its shape, folding is a pretty natural way to do that.
06:51Like if you want to make a giant telescope lens in space, you first need to fold it up into something small, so you can put it in a shuttle to go into space, where it can then unfold.
07:05So origami is actually super useful for engineering and medicine and things like that.
07:10Let's go up, maybe.
07:17Yeah.
07:19My dad and I had been trying to understand the mathematics and explain how paper behaves in curved crease folding.
07:27And we were starting to realize, hey, geometry is cool. Let's try to make them even more beautiful.
07:34Yeah, I kind of like it.
07:39Around that time, MoMA contacted us and said, hey, we're doing this show. It's about science and art. Got any cool objects?
07:47That was quite a surprise. And so it ended up in their permanent collection.
07:53I guess rarely does an art career start with MoMA.
07:56And soon after, various galleries would say, hey, we're doing a show about paper. Are you interested?
08:06Hey, we're doing a show about book art. Do you have some pieces?
08:09And so that became, let's make more and more sculpture and explore that deeper and deeper.
08:15Now the main idea is we're threading a string or a few strings through a series of disconnected components such that when you pull the string tight, now this is like a pretty stable structure.
08:35I think I tend to attract the students who are also interested in building physical manifestations of their work.
08:41Vertices.
08:42That means there's two strings going through that tube.
08:45It's not always easy to do that in mathematics.
08:48Exactly. Yeah.
08:49But I think it enriches the whole experience.
08:52Yeah.
08:54So the shape of the pieces might affect it, I think.
08:56A couple of years after being at MIT, I get this phone call from the MacArthur Foundation and they're like, you've won this award.
09:03The MacArthur Fellowship exists to say, that's cool that you're working on things that other people don't explore.
09:12That confirmation for me sort of encouraged me to go even more in that direction and explore the more obscure things and whatever I found exciting was okay.
09:22As an artist in the 60s, I tried different things.
09:31And then I saw glass in a school in England.
09:36I spent nine months there and then returned to my log cabin and started a studio to make art glass.
09:43I had never seen my dad blow glass before. It was all before I was born.
09:53At MIT, we just jumped back into glassblowing.
09:58And then I got to learn to blow glass so we could play in that space together.
10:02We've evolved blowing these hollow forms and then the idea was you can't just have a playing glass vessel.
10:15And one of the techniques is almost randomly putting cut glass over the glass.
10:23And that produces an optic effect that distorts what you see inside.
10:29We wanted to combine these two interests that we have of blowing glass and paper sculpture.
10:40Those are two materials that generally are thought of belonging together.
10:48This is the complete works of Shakespeare, but only the words that have red in them.
10:54I see Frederick, labored, favoredly. All of these have red highlighted in the middle.
11:02Here's a folded one.
11:04And we're going to embed this paper inside the blown glass vessel.
11:15Come on in.
11:16Yeah.
11:26Sculpture, I guess, is not a normal activity as an MIT professor in computer science.
11:32Oh, that's nice.
11:34Staying coiled like that.
11:36Whoa, that's awesome.
11:38But I think for us it's really a benefit to have two careers instead of one.
11:42Doing art we inspire new mathematics.
11:53And doing mathematics we inspire new art.
11:56I think some of my most interesting art comes out when I am just pissed off.
12:21Environmental issues have been a theme throughout my life.
12:25And our addiction to fossil fuels has very serious consequences for the entire globe.
12:34Climate change is depressing.
12:37It's scary.
12:39It's terrifying.
12:42But artists must be leaders.
12:45And leaders must be artists.
12:49Clay transmits all of my feelings.
12:52If a person is drawn in by a piece of my art, maybe the story I'm trying to tell about climate change will reach them.
13:06I did not begin my ceramic journey until I was 30 years old.
13:22I had a career prior to that as a teacher.
13:25And I decided to enroll at Otis College of Art and Design Extension ceramics classes.
13:33You want this blended in, huh?
13:37Yeah.
13:39I had no art background when I arrived at Otis.
13:42Zero.
13:43But as soon as I touched clay, I knew that this was going to be something I could do for a very long time.
13:50My mother was actually a beauty queen.
13:55And my father was in US military intelligence during World War II.
13:59He was educated as an architect.
14:03He could draw anything.
14:04He could build anything.
14:06And so when I told my parents I was going to quit my job at Crossroads School in Santa Monica,
14:11my mom looked like she was going to go into complete cardiac arrest.
14:16And my dad said,
14:19you've finally come to your senses.
14:23Otis College of Art and Design has a hundred year history.
14:26The first campus was close to downtown Los Angeles.
14:31Many prominent Los Angeles artists at some point graced the halls of Otis.
14:39Peter Volkus arrived in 1954.
14:43Volkus could throw beautiful pots and he started tearing them apart, abstracted them.
14:50Pete Volkus opened the doors for all of us to create much more expressionism in clay.
15:00I became a faculty member at Otis teaching English.
15:04And faculty can sit in classes.
15:07I, of course, took ceramics classes.
15:10Ralph Vissera was in charge of the program.
15:13He taught us so many technical skills from glaze chemistry to plaster mold making to potter's wheel,
15:25hand building, slab building, coil building.
15:29It was rigorous on all technical fronts.
15:32It was the Harvard of American ceramics.
15:37But when we moved to the new campus, Otis closed the ceramic program.
15:45Later on, the school decided to bring it back and I was tapped as the ceramic instructor.
15:52The idea is to make this part blue and then cover the whole thing in red.
15:57If you do the bottom side first, then you don't mess up anything.
16:04Joan's biggest influence is her belief in her students.
16:09Her belief is so matter-of-fact so strong that you start believing yourself.
16:16These are going off to your first gallery, huh?
16:20This one just came out of the cone.
16:22That's sexy. Really sensitive glazing.
16:24I've been an extension student of Joan's for the past year and a half.
16:30And just from, I think, day one, she really took an interest in my work.
16:34I have met so many interesting extension students.
16:38Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
16:39Yeah, somebody's going to cut themselves.
16:42You're going to draw a little blood with that one.
16:45I really like surfers because they have strong upper body strength.
16:49I also like dentists and orthodontists because they have good hands.
16:54That's why I...
16:56Same problem.
16:58Yeah, I can't sell those, but...
17:00You won't ever do that again.
17:02No, definitely not.
17:03Right?
17:04Yeah.
17:06Joan really helped our ceramics department recapture that past prestige.
17:11Her work has appeared in the Smithsonian and just been in a lot of different museums internationally and nationally.
17:20Her shows are taking on environmental issues through representations in clay.
17:25My brain and my heart are connected to my fingertips.
17:35That's how I transmit my thinking.
17:41As we create more greenhouse emissions, we have atmospheric tipping points.
17:46So I have one cup that's tipping with SUVs spilling out.
17:57And then I did another one with a little sushi that have oil derricks on them, along with all these contributors to climate change.
18:06Whether it's airplanes, cars, or the way we produce food in America, overconsumption is what we do best.
18:22About 2009, one of my students came back from Christmas vacation with a bag full of bleached coral.
18:29And she gave me a few pieces and she said, these are all over the shores of Guam and our coral reef is sick.
18:40And she said, what used to be the colorful coral is now just turned white, breaking apart and landing on our beaches.
18:51The warming oceans are creating bleaching events.
18:54And because the coral are so sensitive, the entire ocean ecosystem is under pressure.
19:05I carried that bleached coral in my apron for a couple of years thinking about it.
19:13And finally, I decided to switch my work from flamboyant, colorful theatrics to all white.
19:24I started thinking of the bleached coral events as the canary in the coal mine, warning us of climate disaster.
19:35I think this is the next step in the climate change series.
19:48It's called Water Warrior, and it is about the future issues of rising sea levels, but also of potable water for people.
20:01We can all do our part to decrease our carbon emissions, like growing your own food or buying what you need and not waste your food and throw it out.
20:22We can avoid climate disaster, and artists can translate the science so that everyone can understand it.
20:35Feathers are symbols of our aspirations.
20:51Of flight and hope.
20:53Kind of our dreams.
20:55kind of our dreams those ideas are why i chose to use feathers in my art
21:13people say i capture the essence of the birds and that's really a compliment because
21:18i i like to feel them like kind of just feel them in my body
21:25biology is the study of life
21:39birds shed their feathers and i carve them into intricate art
21:44this feather is from an asian jay and this is about as small as i go
22:02this is part of the wing it's not the main wing feather they're little
22:05coverts they're called they cover up the other feathers
22:08and this just has these little bits of blue on them
22:15i want to support laws that protect birds most of my feathers come from natural shedding
22:23in zoos and private aviaries so i can be sure that they're legal
22:28this is from an argus pheasant some of the biggest most heavy feathers in the world
22:40these are the primaries it's what the bird powers its flight with and these are the secondaries and
22:47on most birds secondaries help the bird just float in the air these are beautifully patterned so the
22:54bird uses them for display kind of like a peacock but when its feathers are all tucked in it just blends
23:01into its forest background
23:06feathers are made out of keratin which is the strongest of animal materials
23:11it's like your fingernail but then inside it's more pithy because the other thing about feathers is
23:17they're really light another function feathers have is to enhance the bird's sense of the environment
23:26this is like one big lever that goes into the bird's nerve-rich skin each flight feather is attached
23:35by a muscle and a tendon so they can move those feathers more or less separately they can do things
23:43that we can barely imagine
23:53i grew up near seattle my father was an eye surgeon my mother was a professional artist
24:01but having three sisters and no brothers mostly i would just go out and explore the woods
24:05i was a biologist and i focused on entomology i do know the plants and the creatures
24:21and then i worked with the hydropower industry i was sitting behind a desk in meetings
24:28so 10 years ago i was thinking about what's my mission in life
24:36and it appears to be to foster appreciation and understanding of the natural world
24:46my father used these glasses for eye surgery i need them especially as i get older
24:51and these were my dad's tiny little forceps they're grooved so they don't slip back and forth
25:02and these were his scalpels they're really sharp
25:11my mom really encouraged creativity she would teach classes in her home and paint
25:17after she died i got her notebooks and i'm looking through one of them and there's there's birds
25:24that she's just probably saw outside the window went from her drawings i've made some pieces
25:35i wish she was around to see the results
25:47i'm carving these little bugs from feathers of the central american oscillated turkey
25:55they're shiny like a bug so i'm making what i call bug bird
26:03i want to honor the birds and i want to honor the feathers
26:08i could paste them flat against the background but i don't
26:13i pull them away so that they have their natural curve
26:21voila
26:30when i photograph it i want to get the light just right so that i can capture the shadows
26:37what i feel is important is this feeling of space and design
26:47and also a feeling of motion
26:55i have a barn that the swallows love
27:00in the spring there's hundreds of them
27:01when i'm watching the swallows i have this kinesthetic sense of soaring with them
27:19i'd like to dance and i get that same feeling of lightness
27:35my art is seen all over the world
27:37and if somebody can see feathers in a different way hopefully it can give them a new perspective
27:48unfinancial world
28:02and if you're in a different way
28:13come on in come on in come on
28:22for me everything starts with the pencil
28:25the pencil is the application of the thought to the paper
28:28so you start just fooling around with a direction
28:36and once you see the direction you begin to see that this could work in this space
28:41then the idea begins to develop to be able to be functional and built
28:46so i'm dealing with glass steel water and light so all of the senses can be experienced seeing hearing touching smelling
29:07there's never a boring moment that's the beauty of being an artist
29:16i've got a lot of different ideas going all the time
29:31i'll be working on something for 40 minutes and then i go to something else it's just my nature
29:37i'll be working on something that's what's going on in the future
29:40john is like an overgrown eight-year-old
29:43it's either full speed ahead or stop nothing in between
29:50i remember my first week in kindergarten we did drawing we did cutting things out
29:56we were just having fun as kids
29:58frederick freudel was the inventor of kindergarten in the 70s and 80s i spent time studying his work
30:10freudel was born in germany his father was a lutheran minister
30:15in university he studied botany mathematics and he was an apprentice of samuel weiss at the museum
30:23of crystallography samuel weiss was one of the discoverers of how crystalline structure develops
30:30drawings of samuel weiss show how the cube grew to the other crystalline forms
30:37after having an education in sciences freudel worked as a teacher that changed the rest of his life
30:53you know as a little kid i wanted to be an architect but in college architecture was mathematics so i got into majoring in art
31:03i started working in clay i love the feeling of the you know how you get manipulated
31:09so i got a master's in ceramics and then that's when i went to europe
31:13i was working with a queen's royal blue delft company they established a factory in delft in 1653
31:27we built ceramic murals some that were 50 by 150 feet in the netherlands i also worked with leardom glass
31:36i saw transparency translucency and all those qualities of glass that everything else in the
31:43sculptural world did not have i was kind of wooed into that glass world when i said i got to do this
31:57the educational system pre-1800 was rote learning strict discipline the teachers were dictators
32:04and then freudel published his philosophy in 1826 for him the kinder is the child the garden is for planting things and growing
32:17so within the mind of the child that seed would grow and he helped nurture that growth with his
32:24kindergarten teaching system which is based on the crystalline structure concept from samuel weiss
32:30this cube cylinder and the sphere by spinning this cube it becomes a cylinder and this one when you spin this
32:44cylinder it becomes a sphere
32:48freible began to break it down into its elements the solid cube becomes a fragmented cube
32:55the children begin to arrange it in the different ideas so this is the gift of knowledge like mathematics
33:04halves quarters the gift of beauty is to take the shapes and to arrange them into any kind of a pattern
33:12and the gift of life the children create buildings out of blocks chairs out of blocks
33:18after the block system they play with parquetries paper cutting paper folding peas and sticks
33:29so freible was presenting objects for the children to learn through sense perception experiential contact
33:37with the world
33:38when i got back to america i didn't have a job but i found a teaching position in la
33:49and i liked it because it was fun my approach to teaching is actually freible derivative because it
33:56deals with opening up freedom of expression and freedom of feelings but in order to express that freedom
34:04you have to have the techniques and i always felt that you must understand your media in order to create anything
34:15i made a series of small blown forms
34:19i played with this idea i thought that's kind of cool that's fun
34:24but once i took this apart and i looked at this form
34:28i saw it standing 10 feet tall now in order to make that 10 feet tall you have to have furnaces
34:37that are big enough to be able to put the glass in to bend it so i built a walk-in kiln
34:48you start with a flat piece of glass and you put it into the kiln suspend it over the mold
34:54we use steel pipes we run that up to a temperature of about 1100 degrees 14 to 16 hours to get to the
35:04bending point then the cooling takes three to four days once those pieces are bent in the large kiln
35:13then we transfer those to the taping table
35:16it does all that taping single-handedly freehand and they're perfect
35:28from the taping process i wheel them into the sandblast booth
35:35once the piece is sandblasted surface is etched then we bring it into studio remove all the tape
35:42so the pattern then is finished
35:50in 1817 freudel built a school in kilhow and then in 1837 the kindergarten in bodblankenberg
35:59which is over the hill and he would hike back and forth it's about nine miles
36:05from there freudel system spread around germany and then around the world
36:12england japan russia the usa
36:16can you open the door and put your finger in
36:22what can you do with these blocks
36:26the freudel system was kind of lost in the mid-20th century but it's really coming back
36:31freudel usa is trying to get this into the kindergarten system today
36:44it's the rebirth of freedom and education
36:47now this is controversial but freudel's kindergarten is the origin of modern abstract art
36:58children learning that system became 20th century painters sculptors designers
37:05frank lloyd wright wrote in 1876 my mother went to the philadelphia world's fair and saw
37:11the presentation of the kindergarten system and he says when my mother introduced these blocks to me
37:19they changed the way i saw the world
37:22he had mondrian began as a teacher so he knew the freudel system i think that he integrated that
37:31totally into his work another perfect example is buckminster fuller
37:37he said i discovered my geometric structures my geodesic domes from freudels peas and sticks
37:51goldie and i went to germany in 2019. we went to his birthplace
37:56we went to where his schools were john's got freudel on the brain so we tracked the freudel trail and went
38:07up to the hill and on the top is a monument to him the cube the cylinder and the sphere 10 feet tall almost
38:18i'm getting goose pimples now because it was just something this really exists
38:23go ahead go ahead you're up we got it we got it go up
38:31i learned so much about life from freudel
38:39his ideas connected me to a whole new world a visual world
38:53no
39:05pottery is such an integral part of our family
39:10and things like where to dig for clay and the polishing method how to fire pieces
39:16Those traditions have been in our family every single generation for the last thousand years.
39:25I knew it was important when I went on a field trip to a museum and my mom's pot was in there,
39:33and her mom's pot, and my great-grandmother's pot, and my teacher was like,
39:39oh my goodness, that's your family?
39:44Sergio and Joseph are brothers. They come from Santa Clara Pueblo.
39:49Each Pueblo has a different style of pottery that they traditionally make,
39:52and it really is based on the type of clay that is in the surrounding area.
39:57New Mexico has so much variety and types of clay.
40:01What is that?
40:03Oh, that's cool.
40:04Yeah.
40:05So this is really pigmented stone, so this we would pulverize to make slip.
40:13And we'll find different color ones, and that's why you get variations of different types of reds.
40:21I've been working with clay since I was about three.
40:24I was told by everybody, you're going to be making pottery.
40:28It's kind of, it's expected.
40:30When we build the pots, we use what we call a pukie, and it's basically just a pre-made bowl.
40:39It's all coil built, and a lot of the process is dependent on the weather.
40:45You don't want it to be humid, because if your piece is too wet, it will collapse.
40:50It won't be strong enough to hold its own weight.
40:53But if a piece dries out too much, the coil will crack.
40:58A lot of it is just feel and knowing from experience.
41:04Joseph Lugo, his pieces are thoughtful.
41:08And he really thinks about Pueblo culture, Santa Clara culture in particular, as the foundation for the pieces that he makes.
41:15Unlike pretty much every other tribe, we make our pieces very thick.
41:23So we are able to carve very, very deep and create a lot of dimension.
41:32I had my first show when I was seven years old.
41:36It wasn't something I really wanted to do, and I took a break for a very long time.
41:42And one day, I just fell in love with it again.
41:46It's really cool to show people what you can create with your hands.
41:54Sergio Lugo is part of this younger generation that take traditional aspects of the work
41:59and make it part of their contemporary world.
42:03The Avanyu, or the water serpent, is a protector of water.
42:07I created my own water serpent.
42:10I wanted to make it more modern.
42:15I've always thought that polishing is the most technically difficult part.
42:21We're using just basic materials.
42:24A mixture of clay and water to make slip.
42:30And polishing stones.
42:32No glaze at all. Everything's traditional method.
42:35We all use in the family her grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's stone.
42:42And just knowing that it's passed so many hands,
42:45it gives me a lot of confidence to do the same thing that they did.
42:49At Santa Clara Pueblo, the people were farmers.
42:56So typically the women made pottery.
42:59Men might paint or design pieces, but they didn't necessarily make pottery.
43:03Pottery was meant for utility and for ceremony.
43:07But in the late 1800s, when the railroads were developed, they would stop at every Pueblo.
43:16And there would be people selling pottery.
43:19About 50 years ago, the men began to make pottery as well.
43:23Generational knowledge is passing information from person to person.
43:31One person that did a lot of that was my great-great-grandmother, Serafina Tafoya.
43:37She had different types of impressed pieces, painted pieces.
43:42And she was a massive influence to the next generation after her.
43:46Especially my great-grandmother, Margaret Tafoya.
43:53Margaret Tafoya is one of the most important Pueblo potters of the past century.
43:57She's one of the few potters that won Best of Show twice at Santa Fe Indian Market,
44:01two years in a row when she was already in her 80s.
44:05So they come from a lineage of extraordinary potters.
44:09Joseph and Sergio's mother, Nancy Youngblood, is also one of the leading potters working today.
44:14We still ask her for input, all three of us, my brothers.
44:20She's taught us to make everything handmade, hand-carved, hand-polished, traditionally fired.
44:28It is a cultural science that is about Pueblo life, Pueblo art, and it's all learned knowledge.
44:36That's something that we're starting to understand is a really important part of science today
44:39that 50 years ago we didn't even think was scientific.
44:46There's so much time and effort you put into a piece of pottery
44:49that you don't want to lose it to the wind or a major temperature change.
44:53My mom created the shed to control all of that.
45:00Each pot is red before the firing, and the firing dictates if the pot is black or red.
45:08When we started the fire, the pieces were getting sooty.
45:20Once we put the boards on, the fire gets really hot, and all of that soot starts to burn off.
45:26You have to look in and see exactly when the soot is burning off the piece.
45:37I'll get it.
45:40Yeah, it's still sooty on Joe's.
45:43If it gets over-fired, the piece will dull out.
45:47It's starting to burn off here, too.
45:49Oh, yeah.
45:50When it reaches that perfect temperature, the finish is very shiny.
46:00Yeah, my pot's done.
46:02Once it kind of reaches that molten stage, that's when we cover it with manure.
46:11This shredded manure keeps all of the smoke inside.
46:15Beautiful.
46:16That's how the color change is happening.
46:20It's a chemical reaction of the manure and all of the smoke.
46:27We've covered the fire now, cutting off the oxygen.
46:31If you didn't cut off the oxygen, the pieces turn brown.
46:35And they're just sitting in, like, a cloud of smoke right now.
46:39Let's get it nice and packed.
46:40Just making sure that temperature goes down slowly is the key to a successful piece.
46:52We don't know the scientific detail of it, but we know what happens when you do certain things.
47:00And we know it works.
47:01Swipe it a little bit.
47:10It's a whole lot of work, but when it comes together, it's magical.
47:19After everything's clean, we've got to sign the wall.
47:21You know, I look around and I see dates and history and relatives.
47:28I can add my name to them.
47:32And keep it going.
47:34I think that 500 years ago, they would have had no idea that we would still be doing this.
47:42But it is because of the resilience that they had that we have continued to pass it through every generation.
47:49I remember the first time I saw the full curvature of the Earth.
48:05I could not believe what I was seeing.
48:08The vibrancy, the colors, just how thin the atmosphere is against the blackness of space.
48:15In 1978, NASA selected the first group of astronauts that had women.
48:32I had just turned eight years old, and that's about the time I said, I want to be an astronaut.
48:37I grew up on a lake in Minnesota.
48:40I was drawing and crafting when I was little and asking my mom, can I use the sewing machine?
48:46Can I use the sewing machine?
48:47Apparently, I was a little bit annoying about it.
48:50In college, I studied mechanical engineering, got a PhD.
48:55NASA hired me as an engineer, and I was selected into the astronaut class of 2000.
49:03My first flight was on the space shuttle Discovery in 2008.
49:06When those solid rocket boosters ignite, it's like, boom, a kick in the pants, and it's like, okay, we're going somewhere now.
49:21After about eight minutes, the main engines cut off, and we're in space.
49:24I'm like, I did it. I'm here. This is the goal I had when I was a little girl.
49:34Unbelievable.
49:37We rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station.
49:41Then there's so many tasks to be done.
49:43With the robotic arm, I had to take the Japanese laboratory out of the payload bay of the shuttle, get it onto the space station.
49:52And then, after two weeks, we landed at the Kennedy Space Center.
49:58I remember thinking, somebody could convince me I'd never done it, you know, if there weren't pictures, because it seemed so dreamlike.
50:05It was just so fast and surreal.
50:13All the way through my time as an astronaut, I would do drawing and sewing as a kind of relaxing outlet.
50:20I even went on a couple quilting retreats to learn techniques and just started dabbling in it and trying it.
50:26And now it's my favorite thing to do, to turn a picture into a quilted art piece.
50:41My second flight was five years after the first.
50:45I was now married to Doug Hurley, who was also an astronaut.
50:49We had a three-year-old son.
50:50I was launching out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, getting to the space station on the Russian Soyuz.
51:02My mission was going to be six months long, rather than two weeks.
51:08The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes.
51:13It is a collaboration between the United States and Russia, Japan, Canada, and the European Space Agency.
51:24The interior part of it is about the size, maybe, of a five-bedroom house.
51:28It's quite spacious.
51:31One of my favorite things to do was go to the cupola, which is a set of seven windows.
51:37There's a round one that faces directly towards Earth.
51:40From there, I really liked taking photographs.
51:44I would see a view and try to get the different textures of Earth, from the mountains to the deserts, the coastlines and farmland.
51:53You notice the cloud patterns and the different colors of water, like in the Bahamas.
51:59It was amazing.
52:03The space station is mostly used for science.
52:06We probably had at least 150 different experiments on board.
52:11And we would do maintenance on all the different hardware, because we had a life support system running, thermal systems running.
52:19We also do two hours of exercise every day.
52:23When we were living there for so long, there was a little bit of downtime.
52:27This is Mission Control Houston.
52:28One of the things that astronaut Karen Nyberg has been doing on board the space station.
52:34She took up some sewing supplies to make a piece of a quilt.
52:38Now that I've tried my hand at sewing in space, I can say one thing with certainty.
52:43It's tricky.
52:44You know, you can't lay things down and measure and cut.
52:48The fabric doesn't.
52:49I found myself taping the fabric to a surface.
52:52I'm almost done with one single 9x9 quilt block that has taken me quite a while, a lot longer than you would expect.
53:02I'm inviting all of you to create your own star-themed quilt blocks.
53:05We'll be combining them with my block to create a quilt for next year's 40th anniversary International Quilt Festival in Houston.
53:20The Houston International Quilt Festival ended up getting enough blocks for 30 king-size quilts.
53:26They got over 2,400 blocks from people all over the world, over 30 countries.
53:30There were space enthusiasts who had never in their life quilted anything that made a block.
53:40And there were blocks from quilters who were now excited about space, which I think is pretty cool.
53:54From space, there are no borders.
53:57Every border on Earth is imaginary.
54:03Everybody on Earth, we have so much more in common than we do different as human beings.
54:09And it makes me just empathize with people more.
54:14Even if I don't know them, I never will meet them.
54:17But they're my neighbors.
54:19We're all neighbors here on this planet.
54:20We're all neighbors here on this planet.
54:21We're all neighbors here on this planet.
54:24I'll see you next time.
54:54For additional videos and more, visit Craft in America at pbs.org.
54:59This episode of Craft in America is available with PBS Passport
55:03and on Amazon Prime Video.
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