Transcript:
This interview has been edited for time and clarity.
In a few minutes, we’ll hear about the new documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” that will be screening at the Providence Place Mall. But first, I recently visited the studio of artist, fishmonger, knifemaker, and North Providence resident Joyce Kutty. Her studio in an old Fall River textile mill has several workbenches filled with neatly arranged tools, a band saw, and a sketchbook. There’s a woodblock print on the wall that has three women hammering an anvil. And in one corner, there’s a large pot, slowly simmering.
Joyce Kutty: The word for weakfish is pesukutwik, which means where the glue comes from.
Narration: Joyce is boiling down the swim bladders from weakfish to make glue used in instrument-building. But Joyce isn’t really an instrument maker, she makes knives. Simple but beautiful knives with wooden handles and high-carbon steel blades. And fish are an integral part of her story.
Kutty: I started using a knife at a pretty young age. and then fishing too. I grew up fishing with my dad. We would go and catch the fish, and I would play in the tide pools, and kind of just explore. That was like, you know, Point Judith, Camp Cronin, and that was just my playground. And he would catch the fish, we’d bring it back, and then my mom would cut the fish. So I would watch her cut the fish and dissect the belly, see what the fish are eating, see the little heart, like, you know, just all on the floor on newspaper. And just seeing that full circle we also grew up with a big garden. When my parents came here, they made sure that they had a garden. So growing our own food was really important.
Narration: Joyce studied jewelry making and metals at Rhode Island College, and then worked in production at Tiffany for a few years, but her heart wasn’t in it. So she took a detour into interior architecture and exhibition design at RISD.
Joyce: I went to grad school, graduated 2019 Started to apply to, like, design jobs. And then COVID hit, of course. Yeah, just thought about what I wanted to do, and I really wanted to work with metal again, and I’ve always wanted to make knives. I did some blacksmithing before, and yeah, just, just sort of decided to, to just try. And I just got bit by the bug.
Narration: She took that basic knowledge of blacksmithing and metal working and started to learn bladesmithing. She took classes at the New England School of Metalworking in Maine and then started making spoons and knives and gave them to friends in the restaurant industry. She walked me through the knife making process which starts with a 1/8th inch thick rectangle of metal, called a blank.
Joyce: From there I’ll take it to the bandsaw. Shape it and then take it to the grinder That will start to give the bevel And then drill the holes for the scales.
Narration: The scales are the wooden parts that form the handle.
Joyce: And you, you get it to a certain point where it’s ready to be heat treated in the kiln. you don’t want it too thin. You don’t want it too, too close to, the, the final dimensions because the thinner it gets, the more likely it is to warp.
Narration: She puts it in the kiln at 1750 degrees fahrenheit for 30 minutes, then quenches it with compressed air and then tempers it.
Joyce: So, you know, when it comes straight out of the kiln from 1750, you air cool it, It’s very hard, but it’s very brittle, right? So you have to take that into the tempering cycle, that sort of relaxes it a bit to make it strong, and not brittle.
Narration: And then there are the finishing touches like creating the almost liquid-looking patina for the blade. First she sandblasts the metal.
Joyce: And then I, just put, it’s just like yellow mustard. Is it Heinz? Heinz yellow mustard? I tried using fancy mustard before. It didn’t work, actually. So I needed to go to the gas station and just, yeah just grab some. Let it sort of oxidize for maybe ten minutes. And then wash it away and then you have this really beautiful patina.
Narration: Along with making knives, Joyce teaches metalwork and jewelry at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and works as a fish monger at Dune Brothers seafood in Providence, gutting, cleaning and butchering the fish, preparing them for the kitchen or to be sold at the fish stand. I visited Joyce at Dune Brothers and saw how cutting fish has helped her refine her knife-making.
Joyce: As I’m working with these knives, and these fish, I’m really kind of focusing and trying to figure out exactly what part of the anatomy of the knife I am relying on heavily.
Narration: Joyce showed me how she preps a black sea bass using shears, a scaler, a mass-manufactured fillet knife and a fillet knife of her own design. Both fillet knives have narrow tip, but Joyce’s knife is thicker on the dull edge, allowing her to push more with her index finger.
Joyce: But I like this because there’s also some power behind it as well. Yeah, and to get clean cuts I realized you need confidence.
Narration: Luke Mersfelder is the manager of fish butchery at Dune Brothers on Ives Street and he’s been using Joyce’s knives for a while. I asked him what made her knives special.
Luke: It’s just the difference in seeing something that somebody makes by hand and the like craft that goes into that and that kind of one of one production. It just gives such a cool feel to the story of what we’re doing to the fish.
Narration: While working at the fish market, Joyce found that she was exposed to a new world of knowledge about fish.
Joyce: I thought it would be fun to document it, because these are all different, there’s so many different species that I’ve never seen or heard of before.
Narration: The result is a sketchbook with detailed drawings and watercolors of the fish that she works with at the market. She’s not sure what the final product might be with the sketchbook, but for now you can see a few of her illustrations on her instagram account.
Joyce: So let’s say Thursday to Sunday I’m at the fish market just cutting fish. Monday to Tuesday I’m here. Wednesday I’m at school.
James Baumgartner: That’s seven days a week.
Joyce: Yeah, it’s seven days a week.
Narration: Joyce says that while art, knife-making, and fishmongering might seem like three really different kinds of work, for her, they’re intimately connected – the fish mongering informs the sketching, the knife making works with the fish mongering, the fish get repurposed to make glue. It all goes in a circle.
Joyce: Yeah, I guess I figured out a way to sort of create that circle and, and kind of, yeah, just stay in it.
Narration: Joyce still goes fishing early in the morning in Narragansett or Point Judith, casting her line from the shore.
Joyce: I think it’s just what I grew up doing. It’s a spiritual practice, right? So it’s something that is a part of my life. I love knowing where my fish come from and kind of, I don’t know the satisfaction of being able to catch your own food, I think is my favorite part.
Narration: You can find Joyce’s work at Kutty Knives dot com, that’s K-U-T-T-Y. And we’ll have pictures of her work at the public’s radio dot org slash arts.
[music bumper]
Narration: In 2003, a group of artists discovered an unused space, deep inside of Providence Place Mall.
[excerpt from trailer for “Secret Mall Apartment”]
Over the next four years, they brought in a couple of couches, a TV, a playstation and eventually a door and over 2 tons of cinder blocks and turned the 750 square feet into their own Secret Apartment. A new film opens this Friday that documents how it all came together… and eventually came apart. Political reporter Ian Donnis and I got to see a sneak preview of the new documentary “Secret Mall Apartment.” At the screening, Ian talked with Michael Townsend, who was one of the eight artists who created and lived in the apartment.
Ian Donnis: When the story broke about the discovery of the secret apartment at the mall back in 2007, Providence Police seemed kind of intrigued and bemused even as they were enforcing the law. But a mall spokesman did dismiss the idea that the space was an apartment and he said what you did was “wrong on a number of levels.” Now there’s a documentary about what happened and people seem fascinated by it. What do all these sharply divergent reactions tell us?
Michael Townsend: Yeah, back then the Providence Police were sort of the first hint that this was a really cool story. So even in handcuffs, the police officer who grabbed me was like, it’s pretty cool what you did in there. I was like, huh, that’s interesting. And they were exceedingly kind to me because they obviously deal with a lot, a lot of crime and a lot of more serious things. And I’m a fairly cheery fellow. So when the detectives took the time to interrogate me to try to find out all the information they could about the space, I did my best to tell them the 100 percent truth about everything. And I realized in that moment, I was like, you know what? Okay, back to the mantra, if you have a piece of artwork that you truly believe in, you think it’s good, you have nothing to worry about. And that ended up being very true all the way up to the judge where the judge looked at it and said, Hey, this is not a criminal act.
Donnis: So Michael, when the mall opened about 25 years ago, there were a lot of questions about how it would affect downtown Providence. What was your view about what the mall meant for Providence?
Townsend: Yeah, I was, you know, had a good front row seat to sort of seeing the optimism behind the idea that this mall would have a radical change for Providence. Now, I arrived here in the late 80s. And Providence at that time effectively was, it felt like a ghost town, downtown. Like, if you, on a Saturday night, if you went downtown, you could walk around for hours and never see another person. We’re talking just a mere ten years later. That a structure this size would show up in a town that felt kind of abandoned. So this is a really radical idea. And there’s an argument to be made that it sort of helps spearhead all these major changes, like Providence has changed a lot since this mall showed up, and whether it was the beginning of it all or just part of the, you know, the beginning of a grand vision, I don’t know, like what its direct effects were.
Donnis: This mall, Providence Place, has fallen on somewhat hard times. It’s being managed by a receiver. What do you see in the future of this mall?
Townsend: I’m hoping for a future where there’s still the anchor of the retail experience because that drives people to the building, but that it expands more from the fundamentally private retail experience to more of a public experience, where you have public services, where you can, you could leave this space having gone to a clinic or gotten a health scan, or maybe attended some classes and picked up a skill or some sort of skill sharing, or experienced just even a hint of the wealth of imagination and creativity that is just within a half mile of this building. And I think, and I hope that the receivership will find that implementing some of those types of ideas will benefit the people who walk into the space. Because they’re not just, you know, they’re not just customers. They’re fully fleshed human beings that need a lot of stuff. And all that stuff can happen under this roof. The mall’s in a ton of debt. It’s the type of debt I don’t even, I can’t even comprehend. And I think the path out truly is diversifying the human experience that happens here instead of just selling stuff.
Narration: This is a remarkable film. It’s like a fun heist movie as it shows the work that the artists did to create the apartment. But it’s also a moving portrait of an idealistic group of artists and Michael Townsend in particular, who’s known for creating temporary murals out of masking tape. “Secret Mall Apartment” is also a portrait of a lost era in the Providence art world. The mall went up in 1999, and it seemed to kick off a wave of development of what some city officials called “underutilized space.” This resulted in the loss of many artist live-work spaces like Fort Thunder in the Valley and Olneyville neighborhoods as the old mills were torn down or converted into high-end residences. In 2003, when the artists found the crevice that would become the secret apartment, they were still dealing with the loss of those places for making art. Michael Townsend and his friends found their own underutilized space in the center of commerce and turned it into an inspirational artwork, and the documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” is an inspiring film.
“Secret Mall Apartment” is playing at the Providence Place Mall, as well as the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport, starting on Friday. And you can see some of Michael Townsend’s tape art scattered around the mall.
