Mark Parrish, the founder of PointB and Speaking Waters, is an American design artist from Texas who lived in New York City for over 30 years starting in the 80’s and more recently resides in the woods. Primarily self-taught, Parrish started his own design-art studio in Austin in the mid 70’s. His practice often involves analysis of movement and portability, cultural norms and systems of living. His work takes form in sculptural furniture systems and architectural space, designed both as tools and as experiential spaces. His various ‘artworks involving design’ function as objects invented for practical use as well as a participatory means to a contemplative situation.

Working from a humanistic, utilitarian, modern tradition combined with American Shaker values and Eastern influences such as Wabi Sabi, Parrish’s practice resonates with that of Japanese-American artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, whose work was widely considered a professional classification conundrum even after he represented the United States in the 1986 Venice Biennale. Parrish’s interests in social engagement and practical form also recall the furniture, design and architecture of late-period Donald Judd and his Chinati Foundation project of combining social space and art in its inspiration context.

Parrish’s first solo shows were of conceptual furniture, although some works would fit in either art or design contexts. In the early 80’s Parrish showed with Grace Designs Gallery in Dallas, along with art-designers such as Phillipe Starck, Michael Graves, Ron Arad and Arata Isozaki, and became colleagues and friends with Etore Sotsass in Milan as well as the Memphis group. Taking that inspiration to New York, he showed with the Art et Industrie gallery in the late 80’s and early 90’s, among other hybrid artists such as Forrest (Frosty) Myers and Terrence Main. Parrish, however, continued further into art through design, with the central focus ranging from natural phenomenology to space and social relation. While his work runs parallel to design-art blur practices in the 90’s, Parrish gives equal or greater attention to the experiential activity in his forms, and is more related to Relational Aesthetics in a broader realm that encompasses studies of dynamics of nature and participant use. 

Making in-situ works in natural contexts with interstitial edge conditions such as beach shores, escarpments, and clearings in woods, Parrish’s ‘portable experience structures’ are situations of discovery where the piece, the enabling apparatus, the activity, and sometimes he himself as a guide, all become components of the work. For example, in ‘Sweater, 2004’, a PVC and clear plastic portable sweat lodge for four people, Parrish guided a group of three to an experience on a remote rocky beach during a stormy night. The transparent plastic sweat lodge created an inside-outside atmosphere of coziness combined with exposure to the elements, activating a ‘core emotional switch’ in an ‘art experience sequence.’

Parrish’s activities and projects in nature and his blend of work and life also refer to the ‘aktion’ approach of the German artist Joseph Beuys, who defined ‘social sculpture’ as a form in which dialogue and ideas are an artist’s primary media. Part of the conception of Parrish’s experiential pieces is to create a transcendental moment, the point where the design object works in the service of art.

written by Patrick Meagher