Mimi Abers throws back the lid of her backyard kiln. As the blast wave of 1,500-degree heat smacks her tiny frame, she eyeballs her newest artwork. It glows like amber Jell-O. Submerged in the squarish puddle of liquid glass are handprints, splay-fingered, like paintings on a cave wall.
This is actually Abers’s second crack at the piece—an earthquake near her Berkeley Hills home destroyed the first version. Not a problem. Abers’s taste runs to what she calls “weird glass”—semi-opaque, highly textured. After the quake, Abers, ’60, rescued the broken bits and melted them into something even funkier.
Think her glasswork has texture? You should see her clay. The studio floor is littered with humanoid sculptures-in-progress that bend and twist, many of them in poses Abers invented before a mirror. They are pockmarked, gouged, spread with clay as thick as cake frosting. Abers’s love for clay is all about tactility. Cutting it. Lifting it. Fusing it with metal or glass to create lumpy, unpredictable surfaces. Recently, Abers crafted an entire gallery show around the concept of touch, casting set after set of hands that clutch and applaud and flex.
These pieces are pretty different than Abers’s last major work of art. You might have seen it. It was a little movie called Transformers.
Last summer Abers retired as a compositor at Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects powerhouse, where she helped put the digital smoke and sizzle into films like Titanic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. She was behind half the Harry Potters, a third of the Pirates movies, and uncountable cop flicks in which things blow up spectacularly.
She is probably the only digital artist of her stature who regards movie-making as, essentially, a day job to feed her sculpting habit. But Abers is a study in contrasts: a studio artist and a grandmother of three in a field dominated by computer whiz kids, a devotee of touch in one of the least tactile arts imaginable.
She didn’t intend to be an artist at all.
Abers came to Stanford from Portland, Ore., in 1956 on a scholarship. She wanted to study history, and she remembers herself as a shy, small-town girl. That changed her junior year, when she and a friend ditched college for Europe. She returned to Stanford a totally different person, she says, determined to join the foreign service and continue traveling internationally.
She met her longtime friend Larrie Loehr, class of ’60, soon after that trip. He recalls a dynamo who turned everyone in their bohemian group of friends on to Dylan Thomas and would happily go for rides on Loehr’s Vespa. “She was always so cheerful, she sparkled.”
But at the end of her junior year, when Abers tried to take the State Department’s foreign service test, she was told she could apply only to become a secretary. “I am utterly devastated,” she recalls of that time. “Now my life doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Needing a new direction after she graduated in 1960, she took classes at UC-Berkeley.
She met theoretical physicist Ernest Abers; they married in 1961. Staying home to care for their children, Geoffrey and Rebecca, she says, allowed her to continue exploring as an artist. She recalls thinking, “This worked out well—while the kids are sleeping, I can paint.”
Painting soon became sculpting and, after she divorced in 1976, Abers taught ceramics students while earning a master’s degree from Cal State-Northridge. “I was very into the physicality of it,” she says: building kilns, making smoke pits, harvesting scrap metal, using gigantic tools to bend metal to her will.
When her son left for college in 1979, Abers “did this crazy thing and dropped out in a major way.” She moved to Santa Cruz, and bounced among jobs—bartending, working at a school for kids on parole, doing illustrations at an ad agency.
But her real love was still sculpture, so imagine her distaste when a fellow sculptor suggested they look into learning this newfangled thing called computer graphics. “I said, ‘I hate computers,’ ” Abers recalls. “My ex-husband was a physicist and he did Fortran programming, and I was like, ‘That doesn’t interest me at all.’ ”
Nevertheless, the friend persuaded her to attend a show of early computer art in San Francisco, where Abers met a software designer who’d developed a new color animation system. Coincidentally, he was a client of the ad firm where Abers worked. Abers made a deal: she’d design his logo if she could learn his system. A few weeks later, the agency went out of business, and Abers found a job in computer graphics.
She immediately had misgivings. In the ’80s, the interesting work was being done by programmers, not artists. For someone used to pushing around glass, metal and clay, just pushing a mouse was tedious. But there was hope, and it looked like Tron. That 1982 movie proved that computer graphics could be moviemaking art. “I must have seen it 12 times,” Abers says.
In 1997, she joined Industrial Light & Magic as a compositor. Compositors work in Abers’s speciality—layers. They add overlays of special effects—fog, sparks, computer-generated critters—to the film footage the director has shot. They ensure that the resulting scene looks real, that the timing, proportion and color all mesh. It’s a high-tech job that needs an artist’s eye. “People think this job is so much about technical things and worrying about computers and programming, but really it’s more a visual art, more like photography,” says Abers’ ILM colleague Patrick Tubach, who led the compositing crew on Transformers.
Tubach says that Abers’s sculpting trained her to see how light and shape interact, crucial for making effects look real. “Seeing how these forms look in the light—it sounds abstract, but it’s a hard thing to learn and it’s not something that somebody walks in knowing.”
Abers may have been a reluctant convert to computer graphics, but she definitely loves film, and the skill and collaborative effort needed to create them. “I like the fact that I am making something, even a digital thing.”
At one point, she tried mixing her two artforms, embedding televisions in clay sculptures that would run animations she made. To this day, she watches TV on a set stuck in a rather racy sculpture of an al fresco couple.
Her works are deeply personal. One of a woman clutching her belly was inspired by her own bladder surgery. Another piece, now planted in her front yard, shows a woman with her limbs awkwardly akimbo. “This piece is all about being scattered,” Abers explains. “I’m doing too many things and so I feel like I’m a contortionist.”
“I have been surprised at the painfulness of it,” says her friend Loehr. “She’s working through her own demons that you can’t dream of when you talk to her.”
These days, Abers’s biggest demon may be in her hands. She has arthritis—and can barely bend her right hand’s pointer finger. Worries about perhaps losing her touch with clay are clearly reflected in her recent focus on tactility. “My hands are really strange to me,” she says, looking down at them wistfully.
Abers keeps protesting that she’s had enough of digital art and is ready to devote her retirement to sculpting. Transformers was her last film for ILM. But in truth, she might still be a little in love with moviemaking. Last winter the Academy of Art University in San Francisco coaxed her into teaching digital filmmaking to a new generation.
“I thought, ‘Well, you know, why not?’ ” she says a little slyly. “I can always retire after that.”
KARA PLATONI is a freelance journalist in Oakland.
