Collaboration by Lynne Yamaguchi, Anne Ogg, and Cathy Peters

Anne Ogg, Cathy Peters, and I made this on the first day of collaborations at the WIT eXchange, after drawing the words “pointed” and “flavor” as our starting point. I barely slept the night after we drew our words: I kept hopping out of bed to turn on the lamp to jot down more ideas. I finally left the lamp on all night, with my notebook and pen at hand on the bed beside me. “Sleeping on a solution”—submerging myself in the parameters of a challenge—is a strategy I use often when I’m trying to solve a problem.

I had five pages of notes by morning, approaching the words both literally and figuratively. Examples of a more literal approach to “pointed flavor” include pepper, Tabasco, poison, cactus fruit, a spiky salt shaker. M, an apple with a razor bladeetaphorical examples include criticism, “yet she persisted,” a scream.

When Anne, Cathy, and I met in the morning, we shared ideas. We all liked the idea of lemons, and loved the idea of making the lemons as boxes with teeth inside to represent their sour bite. We decided to each make our own lemon box. After turning them independently, Cathy and I ended up carving them together using rotary tools, while Anne used burning tools instead. The burning added a terrific color element to the inside. To our surprise, the teeth ended up looking like the material remaining after a lemon is juiced, so the lemons looked far more realistic than we had intended.

Anne began turning a bowl to contain the lemons, but we realized that we had run out of time. Instead, we torched the bottom for contrast and used the blank as a pedestal for the lemons.