This is the fifth post about the making of my wall installation regarding Apple and the EEOC. To read the whole series from the beginning, start with It's Raining Men, then Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Have You Ever Seen the Rain, and Purple Rain.
With my clay colored, my next task was to shape the raindrops. Each discrete drop represents a fixed amount of money ($1,000) to show the scale of Apple's discriminatory pay practices. To ensure a consistent size across hundreds of drops, I needed a template.
At first, I ordered a set of teardrop-shaped metal cutters of different sizes ($8), but after they arrived I decided they were a bit too lean. I wanted a contour that felt heavier, more pregnant with possibility
I have access to a 3d printer in my home, so I decided to make my own. First, I drew a vector image in Inkscape (free, accepts donations) with a more bulbous shape. Then, I imported the file into CookieCAD (free to $15/mo) to model a cookie cutter. The software makes it easy to extrude the sides, bevel the cutting edge, and add a handle. Working backward from my final desired dimensions, I scaled up the design to account for my clay’s shrinkage rate of 13.9%.
Finally I printed the cutter on a Prusa with some PETg filament ($30/kg) my partner had around from upgrading the printer parts (see how it's the same yellow). This worked fine because the cutters are for clay, but be aware that PETg isn't foodsafe if your goal is actually cookies.
Now I could bring the colored clay to my community studio ($275/mo), where it was straightforward to use the slab roller to press out sheets of clay with consistent thickness, and impress them with my cutter, to make the drops.
I fired them in batches of about 80 at a time in my tiny trusty kiln named Spite (because it is both out of and in spite of my experiences that I make the art I do).
I'm glad I began this project with the raindrops. It was a joy to open the kiln and observe the expansion of colorful drops on my work-in-progress shelf, first as pale bisque, then vibrant and glossy after glaze firing.
In this piece, 259 raindrops depict $259,000 that Apple paid eight close male peers beyond what they paid me. This is the core of the information I gave the EEOC, though I also fulfilled their numerous requests for everything from my transcripts to performance evaluations—even though as a victim I should not have been on trial.
Soon, I'd learn the hard way that professionals responsible for enforcing fair pay laws are actually far more prone to catch and kill stories like mine than to compel employers to change.
Which leads me to the second phase of this project. In the next post I'll shift to the process of creating the clouds, and raging against the dying of the light.