Rob Rhee is a New York born artist now based in Seattle. Rob explains the crux of much of his work deals with distortion, normativity and the body. Through these interests, it leads him into many realms of materials and processes, much of it being organic materials, but sometimes more performative acts of social engagement. One body of work that combines both these directions is now a year’s long collaboration with gourd farmers.

Comprehensively titled The Occupations of Uninhabited Space, this process starts in Rob’s studio fabricating steel wire cage forms. They are treated in different methods, either brass plated, chromed, or color powder coated. Next, the form is sent to decorative gourd farmers and placed in their gardens. The farmer encourages the gourd to start growing from inside the steel form. As it grows, and starts to push up against its constrained cage, the gourd starts to bubble past and grow outwards. The end results are a mutated fusion of nature moving forward, while being formed from its industrial constraints.

Gourd growing through metal form. Photo Credit: Rob Rhee

The collective title Occupations of Uninhabited Space, is borrowed from a fictional collection of sculptures described in the novel The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, a science fiction writer who recently passed away. The book is about a planet and its moon: one an agrarian civilization, while the other is a baroque, industrial capitalist state. Le Guin explores issues from different systems of structure in society and being stuck inside them, or managing ways to move fluidly in-between them. Rhee’s gourds are a perfect metaphor for this aspect of life, navigating between cultures, religions, languages, politics, laws, arts and endless features of cultural capacities.

Cover of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

A certain level of uncertainty from the beginning of this project also fueled a curiosity of what the products could reveal in the end, or if it would even work. Rob started the collaboration by sending a photo of one of his steel frames with a balloon inflated inside.  to a professional gourd farmer. By doing so, this helped explain what Rob was hoping to achieve through this process.

Photo Credit : Rob Rhee

The farmer specialized in decorative gourds, like birdhouses and domestic seasonal decorations. So naturally, he really didn’t flinch at this being weird or out of the blue, but he was so surprised and excited about the outcome. The farmer then shared the first outcomes with his fellow gourd farming community, and all of a sudden, multiple farmers across the country were expressing their enthusiasm to help cultivate more gourds for Rob.

The farmers also had a specialized process to dry the gourds, cure them, and then seal them so they won’t rot and are more archival.

Photo Credit: Rob Rhee

The Gourds range in all types of forms depending on how elaborate the steel forms or the different types of Gourds. Other things that fascinated Rob were that Gourds were among the first plants to be domesticated. Once dried and hollowed, they are perfect vessels to transport water, grains and other items, an essential to the foundation of civilizations nomadic sprawling, and settling.

In the end, Rob’s gourds stand as confounding objects, clearly showing that an action has occurred: one that is natural and one that is cold and industrial. However, the marriage of the two reminds us of all the aspects of life and cultures that mix, undulate, and become completely new things­. This is the power of art– to mix up the materials and thoughts of life to create newly never before seen or felt things, bringing the future closer.