Ordinary Notes Multiply

Christina Sharpe wrote the words: these ordinary notes multiply.

In a series of 248 notes, which could also be calculated as 261 notes if you were to count her selection of self titled beauty-everyday photographs as each holding a note of their own. She describes her photography as a collection of “flowers, trees, the light, clouds, the sky, moss, water, many things, in order to try to insist beauty into [her] head and into the world.” These notes as photographs appear as the ending, concluding the section: viii. to notice or observe with care.

A pile of books read and notes taken while snowed in over the weekend.

Sharpe’s collection of words and photographs, a body of observations with care, form the book, Ordinary Notes, published last year in April 2023.

In an interview with Jenna Wortham for The New York Times Magazine article, “The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought,” Sharpe asks “how do we find the words and grammars we can live in?”

A screenshot from the tab I’ve kept open, so I don’t lose access by hitting my limited free reading quota. (A note about pay walls).

Sharpe is poignantly talking, writing, and living an accumulation of notes that shape Black life and ways of Black being. And as a white woman it is important that I take notes.

I find her notes, vital, historical— gut punching and painful. They are persevering notes mixed with joy, nostalgia, and celebration. Heart warming notes on love and the hands that hold them. Here, collecting, recording, listing, and photographing take alternating forms of care, grief, and loss, but make visible beauty as a method.

“I’ve been thinking about what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible”

Note 51, page 79

Last weekend and continuing into this week, a beautiful blanket of snow, but mostly sinister ice covered up the city of Portland (OR). Powerful gusts of wind knocked down trees and power lines; rendering it impossible, rather dangerous and irresponsible to keep the gallery and my two-person exhibition with Renee Couture open for business as usual.

Installation view of Covered Up in Dailiness, featuring Elizabeth Arzani and Renee Couture, January 2024, documentation by Marcio Gallucci Studios

The irony of a show with a title, Covered Up in Dailiness, also becoming obscured and covered up by something as daily as weather in the winter was not lost on me.

Covered up in snow, Saturday, January 13th 2024

Instead of gallery sitting, I spent the weekend under blankets, returning to Renee Gladman’s book, Calamities. Where I began each of her essays with her repeated phrase, I began the day with.

I begin (most) of my days with writing in the form of a list of connected or disparate thoughts—quickly scribbled into somewhat legible notes.

“I began the day having given myself the task of compiling a list. I wanted to see whether I could trace all the problems—large and small…rather I wanted to document the questions that led to writing.”

Calamities, page 5

It was this time last year that I began each day of January focusing on (w)hole studies; researching relationships between text and clay—the project of an artist residency. As part of this study, I took a years worth of accumulated notes, and curiously reviewed what happens in a year that I deemed worthy of noting.

What didn’t I note?

I wondered, if it was possible to read my notes in a new way? Would I be able to find anything hidden inside? Did my ordinary notes multiply?

Looking for holes, I began line by line, selecting words in the order in which they appeared on the page. Words revealed against their redacted sentences shape-shifted the past in the present, forming a collection of erasure poems.

Detail of Monday (to admit), Elizabeth Arzani, 2023, documentation by Mario Gallucci Studios

There is no one way to create an erasure poem. Erin Dorney presents: crossout, computer, cut out, covered up, retyped and visual as variations on form categorized in the blog post,“6 Styles of Erasure Poetry.”

Presented in my exhibition with Couture, I used screen printing, collage, and hand-built ceramics as methods to cross out, cut out, cover up, rewrite, reprint, remold and make visible the beauty of a line.

The morning the show opened, I spent some time covered up in my own observations.

January 6th 9:02 am, I noted:

  • pipes covering tree roots (memories of entanglement)

  • wire wrapped tubes covering absence (spray painted blue)

  • a tree stump also covered blue (found chopped and discarded at a neighbor’s curb)

  • letters covering shelves in small nooks and crannies, spilling out onto the floor (where do our words go when they are lost?)

  • branches turned upside down in the shelf (a stomach, an inside suspended, a limbo, reaching, wanting, yearning for touch—to take root)

Notes (continued):

  • flattened words covered in layers, repeated out of order (whispered underneath, softly, asking a memory to remember, to hold it dear)

  • three dimensional words covered in fragments, disintegrating, cracking, illegible (words that ask you to read by walking around them)

  • pedestals covered in domesticity, furniture holding a capsule of stories shelved (recycled souvenirs sentimental to former selves)

  • phrases repeated cover up time, reflect a time, diminish time, question time, talk to time (the time I cried while I blow dried my hair, looking in the mirror, I saw my tears evaporate from my cheeks)

  • grief circulating time and mincing words, slipping in and out of a room subtly, abruptly, loudly (and quietly)

  • color painted over texture covering the simultaneity of a day filled with multitudes

I noted Couture’s work after viewing it in person for the first time:

  • structures held together by single screws (is this motherhood?)

  • skeletal ladders, posts, boxes without walls, stairs without steps (interior outlines of a home holding a body )

  • a large body of small undulating, hypnotic, mesmerizing lines (mediations of clouds, the sea, the sky above and fields on fields on fields below)

  • moments of time (encapsulating thin paper, draped, exhausted, held on by t-pins)

  • the color of prescription pills (pale pinks, minty greens, sky blues)

  • faces obscured in embrace (heads on a pillow, legs in the bath or cheeks kissed)

  • collaboration of marks (the complexity of mother and daughter)

While I was still making the work for this exhibition, I was reading, Motherhood, by Sheila Heti. Grateful for a book about not knowing if you want to be a mom, written by a childless woman in her late 30s. This year I go from being a childless woman in my mid 30s to a woman in my late(r) 30s.

Heti begins her book with a note about how “flipping three coins is a technique used by people who consult the I Ching, a divination system that originated in China over three thousand years ago. Kings used it in times of war, and regular people used it to help them with life problems.”

Flipping three coins on a desk. Two or three heads—yes. Two or three tails—no.

Does it really matter how I’m feeling?

no

No, no I didn’t think so. So many feelings in a day…What’s a better thing to steer your life by? Your values?

yes

Your plans for the future?

no

Your artistic goals?

no

The things the people around you need—I mean, the things the people you love need?

yes

Security?

no

Adventure?

no

Whatever seems to confer soul, depth and development?

no

Whatever seems to bring happiness?

yes

Motherhood, page 11-12

Written on Wednesday, December 13th 7:57am:

Motherhood as a theme keeps resurfacing. Within twelve days of each other, two friends in their thirties, both living in a different country than me, gave birth. While here, in the same city as me, another friend in their thirties was diagnosed with cervical cancer and had a radical hysterectomy. I wrote these notes down the morning before I went to see her in the hospital, still questioning what brings me happiness.

I take pictures of the sky and color of leaves on the days when my friends give birth and I can’t be there. (Polaroids above are for Jil & Samuel)

Couture’s work pulls from the many (small, big) moments of motherhood, with its romantic imagery and contradicting reality. Where time is held together by bursts of flimsy starts and abrupt stops.

Days swallowed whole, filled with lines that have neither a beginning nor an end—leaving only a brief space in-between, a hole to pause and hear the sound of a deep breath: inhale, exhale. Repeat.

Installation view, Covered Up in Dailiness, Elizabeth Arzani and Renee Couture, Carnation Contemporary, January 2024, documentation by Mario Gallucci Studios

Motherhood or not, both our repetitive routines and patterns comment on our respective everyday, noting the complexity of loving and wanting to be loved in return.

And while the gallery remained closed, I finished all three books.

Noted & underlined:

  • time we are seeing

  • the soul of time

  • so many feelings in a day

  • the cause of the stars in the sky

  • a secret I keep from myself

  • keen to kill an afternoon

  • lay your hands on reality

  • worries over paths not taken

  • a loose ends feeling

  • hiding in your voice

  • catching a breath

  • not there

  • nooks and crannies of the soul

  • there is never an end to holding

  • the pain that opens the door

(Heti)

//

  • an empty flaming room

  • two words at a time

  • closed quotes

  • i opened the quotes again

  • map a problem of space

  • can you translate problems into lines

  • something without edges

  • a picture-feeling

  • to think in paragraphs with a single sentence

  • the shadows said so

  • writing that also drew

  • un-alphabetic

  • endmatter

(Gladman)

///

  • held by a note

  • note to take hold

  • i felt i knew it

  • wounding work

  • listen to what i did not say

  • this telling

  • try daily

  • the space of weeks

  • hidden in air

  • a different note

  • gesture: a bodily grammer

  • not not sadness

  • dear, dearer still

  • time and untimes

    (Sharpe)

Weather permitting, the gallery will be open the last two weekends of January and by appointment. We will also be giving an artist talk, moderated by Jay Ponteri on Saturday, Janaury 27th at 1pm. Please join us for this in person, free event.

And thanks to Alan Viramontes, if you missed the artist talk, you can watch the recording below.

What is covered up in your dailiness?

(W)hole Studies

As I type these words, my month long artist residency with New Harmony Clay Projects is coming to an end. I am sitting in the corner house situated between a Roofless Church and a Grapevine Bar. The church is as roofless as it sounds and the bar lives up to its name with its charming vaulted ceiling covered in painted grapevines.

I’ve been living in this corner house, one of the original Harmonist log cabins built in the early 1800s, known as the Barrett-Gate House, with two other artists in residence: Sarah Alsaied and Grant Akiyama. Together we live amongst the many ghost stories that permeate old historic buildings secluded in sleepy ghost towns.

This one in particular is located in New Harmony, Indiana.

Between the creaking floors and flickering lights and from behind the door that unlatches itself, I finished reading Jenny Boully’s Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life, concluding with the essay “On Beginnings and Endings.”

“An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost.

An ending is a puzzle without a picture; an ending says that despite whatever it is that one of us wanted, nothing more can be done.”

“A beginning is asking: more please.”

On my first walk around town, it didn’t take long to notice a theme of labyrinths. Graphically they appeared in various scales. Some stretched above my head, painted white on red brick, while others greeted me in small details— painted blue and white on the town hall sign.

Adjacent to the studio, I found an interactive walking labyrinth. Officially it is called the Cathedral Labyrinth and Sacred Garden. Its path is burnt onto the surface of polished granite, following a geometry based off of the French Chartres Cathedral, considered the “mother labyrinth.”

In New Harmony labyrinths are embedded in the history of this town. In 1814 it was the site of a religiously oriented Harmonie Society inspired by ideals of a utopia and the work of German theologian Johaan Valentin Andreae who designed a utopian labyrinthine city called Christianapolis.

On my orientation tour facilitated by New Harmony Clay Project’s Program Manager Mitzi Davis, it was noted that a labyrinth is different from a maze.

According to Hermann Kern’s in depth research that traces the histories of labyrinths from the Bronze Age to the present in his book, Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings, the reason that mazes and labyrinths have become obfuscated over time is due to the way they have been employed as literary motifs.

I stumbled upon this thick compilation of research at the Working Men’s Institute first floor library. The second floor houses the museum and art gallery. Davis aptly described the museum as a wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities; recommending it to see the taxidermied eight legged Siamese twin calf from the 1800s.

It is a thing of nightmares with true New American Horror Story potential. Which I suppose is fitting for a town that Joni Mayhan, local paranormal investigator and author of Haunted New Harmony describes as:

“a thin place — a place where the veil between the living and the dead is especially transparent, like a sheet left on the line too long.”

While Mayhan writes about how the entire town is haunted with each chapter touring you from one haunted building to another; spiritual places such as labyrinths are the only exception.

The Roofless Church being another.

Kern pinpoints that as a metaphor the labyrinth signifies a difficult, unclear, confusing situation. He notes that its proverbial usage links the labyrinth to the concept of a maze as a tortuous structure, appearing with many paths, dead ends or blind alleys. However, Kern emphasizes that depictions of labyrinths (graphic or physical constructions) from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and up to the Renaissance only demonstrate one path with no possibility of going astray.

“The most important part of a labyrinth is the negative space of the path formed by those lines which determine the pattern of movement - the shape of circuits inside.”

“As a graphic, linear figure, a labyrinth is best defined first in terms of form. Lines appear as delineating walls and the space between them as a path…the sole function is to define choreographically a fixed pattern of movement…a walking path between the lines.”

How to construct a labyrinth

Just as a labyrinth is not a maze, Kern also stresses that they are not spirals, meanders, knots or concentric circles either. A meander doesn’t have a center. A knot or woven pattern are many lines intersecting or single lines that circumscribe themselves. A spiral is not completely enclosed by an outer line or continual, pendular changes in direction. And concentric circles can only be a labyrinth if each circle has an opening that can be entered.

While the layout of the path is not fixed and has many varying designs throughout history and cultures there are principles of form.

The transformation of a square into a circle or the phenomenon of squaring a circle reveals, according to Kern, how both shapes: squares and circles can simultaneously orient locations and symbolic meanings. A square mimics four points of a compass and a circle reflects the circumference of surface area.

Both shapes are inherent to a labyrinth and represent a worldview of the circle as a symbol of the heavens and the square as a symbol of the earth. The sign posted outside of the Cathedral Labyrinth shared that Native Americans consider the circle sacred, referring to the circle as “the hoop of life” — the continuity of life and eternity.

Circles keep reappearing. Before arriving in New Harmony, I listened to Lisa Congdon’s podcast: Episode 30: A Conversation with Morgan Harper Nichols on Wholeness. Throughout the episode she discusses her definitions of wholeness deriving from a Rilke poem:

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out”

For Harper Nichols, wholeness is a circle— many circles. “Wholeness is drawing from the present in unlikely places with unlikely connections.”

I found this to be true while walking by the Wabash River behind the Antheneum Vistor’s Center and stumbling upon Eames Demetrius’ site specific markers: “written stories (often in bronze, concrete or stone) that emphasize not only what is written but where you experience the reading (and often the forms).”

These markers are part of his ongoing series titled Kcymaerxthaere - the name of an alternate universe that he claims to coexists with ours.

The title derives from two cognate words (words in two languages that share a similar spelling, meaning, and pronunciation):

  1. kcymaara: true physicality of the planet

  2. xthaere: a shape with almost an infinity of dimensions or sides

Demetrius, who refers to himself as a “geographer at large,” describes this series as a storytelling experience, “reading as a fulcrum into or with another world…stories as renavigation.”

“ A sentence is an archipelago of words.”

I came to New Harmony Clay Projects as an artist in residence to research and experiment with creating a series of vessels designed with holes using methods of additive and subtractive clay construction to mimick the homonyms: whole and hole.

In preparation for my residency, I purchased Hilary Plum’s latest book, Hole Studies. I was intrigued by Plum’s definition of a hole as how to care for a question. Although she doesn’t directly say this. Plum writes of holes on various topics that encompass the personal and the political. She writes about holes as boring, unsupervised, slow paced office jobs with sentences that say “when your husband is dying you get a job that pays better.”

A hole is an email that begins with sorry i’ve been slow to write back.

Many of her studies of holes exists as but are not limited to: tunnels and research on jobs in academia and writing and for caregivers or those caring for the caregivers. She reflects on her role and experience as a teacher. In teaching, a hole becomes “a space for a circle…a threshold between knowing and unknowing, attuned to surprise…a willingness to adapt and shift..and how to care for a question.”

At the heart of my inquiry of the homonyms whole and hole is a question that I keep coming back to — when is absence present or presence absent?

While ruminating on this question, I began to compile sets of definitions and proceed to cut them out by hand, either subtracting the words letter by letter or the space around the words. The leftover remnants, the in-between shapes or lone letters broken from their words, became material for new compositions.

Burrowing further, pieces began to connect in the process of arranging, assembling, gluing, scanning, printing, tracing, painting, transferring, burning, screen printing and then repeatedly painting, cutting and pasting for a second time.

Holes are subtractions that reveal what is missing, acting as a threshold between interior glimpses and exterior facades. Added objects prod and poke, nestle in crevices and corners, turning holes into containers. These elements fill in gaps, mend what was broken or meet you in the center.

Words can be vessels—deep wells to fall into and shallow entrapments.

An erasure practice is both additive and subtractive simultaneously. Poet and scholar Robin Coste Lewis lectures on the many forms of an erasure practice. Language itself being one. Lewis articulates that erasure is the art of creating a new work out of an existing one. What the poet Jeannie Vanasco calls “absent things as if they are present.”

These abstracted ceramic letter forms are erasures. Initially found as fragments on the ground, I reproduced them with clay pressed into a plaster mold. Rather than translating a word or phrase, I was more interested in their materiality. By allowing the letters to touch they become something new, a (w)hole, a meandering path, lost in thought and lingering in cast shadows and the ghosts of stories they once knew.

A week into my residency, I finished a notebook I had started a year prior. Curious, I decided to collect the found fragments from my own writing to see what they might say.

While cutting and cropping my words, erasing and pasting their fragments back together, I decided to see what happens when I take them off the page and allow them to sit upright.

I am very grateful for this time to experiment and ask questions of ceramics. Thank you to Lenny Dowhie, Mitzi Davis, Elizabeth Garland, and the welcoming community of New Harmony as well as financial support from The Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Arts3C Grant for this opportunity.

And to Mo, the studio cat

In many ways this ending is a beginning that says more please.

Notes on Translation

For a second consecutive year, I have had the opportunity to attend a workshop hosted by Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Alejandro de Acosta led a three day Translation Class asking participants to read, write and experiment like a translator; inviting all monolingual, bilingual and multilingual learners to participate.

Which one are you? (quote from Lily Meyer)

As a maker of things, my relationship with the concept of translation has predominately been focused on capturing or replicating the essence of something (i.e. an experience, a form or tone, a mood, a perspective, etc.) in different media. Translations between image and words (including those that were never there to begin with).

Translation as connection: lines assembled by their color and texture. Sometimes they are continuous lines of clutter - an attempt to translate grief from a fine tipped leaky pen.

Things I heard Alejandro de Acosta say about translation

For this workshop the lines were a vast and varied reading list. Many of the articles were a dense discussion of famous writers’ styles and varied perspectives on the art of translation. Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Ezra Pound, Augusto de Campos and Macedonio Fernández are prominent in these selections. It also covered the Oulipo group (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) with their writing constraints, citing Georges Perec’s famous French novel, La Disparition (1969) written entirely without the letter e, later translated to English adhering to the same rules by Gilbert Adair in 1995 under the title, A Void.

I’m new to Perec’s writing and currently in the midst of reading his book, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, which I decided to use for de Acosta’s first assignment.

Step One: Translation as Research.

By intentionally focusing on the translator’s notes, in this case provided by, John Sturrock, I began to read his introduction and footnotes as a set of index cards, a trail of histories, tracing down clues, and recovering hidden backstories. For Sturrock translation acted as a type of collaboration. As a reader, the experience made me feel like I was being let in on newly found secrets.

Excerpt from Sturrock’s Introduction to Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

Step Two: Stage a Return.

I followed Sturrock’s footnote on page 33 that explained the source of Dame Tartine’s Palace in Perec’s line:

“…it could be a sort of Dame Tartine’s Palace,* gingerbread walls, furniture made from plasticine, etc.”

In my staged return I discovered the nursery rhyme which details a beautiful palace made of fresh butter with praline walls and biscotti floors; illustrating the specific interior design of Dame Tartine’s French gingerbread house, which I would not have pictured otherwise.

By day two de Acosta was arguing against definitive translations, preferring a more open door method; translation as ongoing. In the section of the workshop titled: Pound & The Cribs, de Acosta shared ways in which American Poet Ezra Pound approached translating Chinese poetry without knowing Chinese.

Pound relied heavily on the help of scholars, dictionaries, notes and the word for word “cribs,” written by Ernest Fenollosa in order to write and publish Cathay, his famous book of translated Chinese poetry in English.

Example of Cribs used by Ezra Pound

de Acosta encouraged experimenting with translation in this way. Calling a text with facing pages, a two page spread of something already translated, as a modern day crib. I selected Francis Ponge’s poem, Pluie, translated by C.K. Williams.

Excerpt from Francis Ponge Selected Poems pg 6-7 (I would have liked to have shown you the entire page of “cribs” but Wake Forest University Press would need to give me permission)

My translation is as follows:

This exercise in translation gave me a new understanding of what de Acosta meant when he said “translation is a painful thing, always imperfect - a source of joy.”

I still prefer translating in visual media over translating between words.

Like the way I can translate a bottle from glass to ceramic with the use of a two-part plaster mold as my Google translator, a similarly inconsistent mystery box with varying results.

Or most recently in the form of a traveling sketchbook, if we are to think about translation as a process of moving something from one place to another.

The sketchbook started in Portland, OR with me in August of 2020 and traveled to three other people in Luxembourg before returning to my doorstep this week. Collaborators include: Sarah Ketema, Carole Stoltz and Anne Krier, for which each of their contributions to this project I am so very grateful.

Translation as collaboration: it is the best feeling to send a project out in the world and have it reciprocated by friends.

Inconsistently Consistent

Paradoxes keep reappearing, like the inconsistently consistent way I write and publish my thoughts here.

They sneak up in my everyday encounters and attempts at routines. Like my ‘daily’ (sometimes once a week or whenever I can) practice of writing lists - a whatever comes to mind, walking list.

One list came to me in the middle of the night, written on September 17th, 2020, after moving to a new city in a pandemic while also under the threat of wild fires.

weight is the.png

It became a poem embedded in the sculpture, Stack of Words, made from a balancing act of modular components.

Something about a secret poem that couldn’t be read shelved within an absurd sculpture made of everything from: packaging cardboard to carpet padding, embroidery thread, a twig and copper wire to plaster and repurposed wood, a leaf and a rock, plaster and cement, bicycle tire tubes and a ceramic candelabra. It represented a layered complexity that words felt incapable of containing.

Paradoxes like ‘alone together’ emerged for many as a mantra at the beginning of the pandemic, but it was the oxymoron, ‘faraway nearby,’ the title of Rebecca Solnit’s collection of essays, which had been living with me prior.

The title itself is said by Solnit to be gleaned from the painter, Georgia O’Keefe, noting the way she signed her letters after she moved to New Mexico, although as of yet, I’ve only found a painting with this title.

Solnit’s words, ‘The Familiar Edge of the Unknown,’ became the title of my recent two-person exhibition with painter, Tanner Lind.

Video courtesy of Alan Viramontes

"The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story...just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore." 

pg.31 Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

My individual work featured in the exhibition was about what Solnit describes as going underground, ‘the digging deep.’ I had dived head first into personal experience, private conversations and inner dialogues.

In many ways, I was referring to a category of study that the artist and writer, Moyra Davey defines as ‘the Wet.’ In her essay, The Wet and The Dry (The Social Life of the Book), ‘the Wet’ is introduced as a problem, a ‘welling up’ of something not ready to be told, what cannot be faced, the opposite of ‘the Dry.’

Installation View

Installation View

This process of working is a visual language of in-betweens, similar to how Jan Verwoert defines abstraction in his essay, The Beauty and Politics of Latency: On the Work of Tomma Abts. It holds two or more things at once, what Verwoert describes as “temporal latency in twofold: that which is not yet and that which is no longer present…an echo chamber of the yet unthought and the presently forgotten.”

It is not that unlike how Davey details her ‘daily rehearsal of lost and found,’ the moments of looking for what-was and the feeling of there it is.

“The ritual is about creating a lacuna, a pocket of time into which I will disappear…Lost and found is a ritual of redemption. If I find the thing then I am a worthy person. I have been granted a reprieve…I know this ritual is a rehearsal for all the inevitable, bigger losses. I think if I can only find X, then I am holding back the floodwaters, I am in control.”

Moyra Davey, Index Cards

(Left) Why Can’t You Hear Me?, 2020, (Right) Is It You?, 2020

(Left) Why Can’t You Hear Me?, 2020, (Right) Is It You?, 2020

My own lost and found story occurred on a late afternoon, in the middle of summer. The branches were swaying in a welcomed breeze when I found Allison Cobb reading from her recently published book, Plastic, An Autobiography. Sitting in 1122 Outside, a backyard gallery, I listened, to her detail ‘the yes’ and ‘the no’ as a different way of saying ‘the Wet’ and ‘the Dry.’

It was my own ‘yes’ and ‘no’ that led me to accidentally, yet eagerly, join a poetry reading I didn’t know was going to happen. In a series of unfortunate events: wrong turns that I couldn’t correct until seven miles later, the spraying of sticky cold-brew coffee, fumbling the dates for hotels and arriving without a place to stay; a heat wave and an early fire season, accompanied by the hazy skies above the dry desert and the blood orange ominous sun that I’ve seen more than I’d like to. This was my no, my hell no.

The color of the sky during the fires, September 2020, Portland OR

The color of the sky during the fires, September 2020, Portland OR

Yet, each spill, wrong turn and incorrect combination of numbered dates are what led me to my yes. To the happenstance of sitting at a new-to-me place at the right time on the right day after driving through the night to return to where I started. The no meeting the yes.

The bizarre shift of unexpected circumstances, in under 24 hours lead me to sitting on a bench listening to Cobb read aloud.

“ I am the no and the yes - a line from the poet 'Annah Sobelman’s first book. It has lived with me for years, sometimes whispering through my mind in its old remembered rhythm.”

IMG_1612.jpg

As I continued to read on my own, I found Cobb pulling this line along, entangled in her writing; explaining her own lived experiences and identifying them in others.

Found in both the pages of Cobb’s book as well as beside her at the backyard podium, I listened and witnessed as visual artist and third generation atomic bomb survivor, Yukiyo Kawano described how she constructs her ‘no,’ as life-sized sculptures of bombs made with her ‘yes’ - deconstructed kimonos from her grandmother, weaving them back together with her own hair.

I also learned about Eve Tuck, scholar, Unangax̂, an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul, Alaska, and Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Tuck is identified as having a “yes that takes the no with it, desire as synonymous with life in all its contradictory, disconcerting complexity.”

“Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore…desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanness.”

Eve Tuck, Suspending Damage, a Letter to Communities

I find my ceramic work to be a similar desire - an effort to encapsulate the truth of contradictions. I approach this material as a novice, asking the impossible to stand with its head held high, but instead of being disappointed by its inevitable slump and pull of gravity, I am intrigued by the attempts. These surprising moments where expectations have folded in on themself, but still stand, if only slightly; remaining as a failure to fail.

Notes V.jpg

Defining Anthropocene

Last month I was invited by Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low Residency Creative Writing Program to participate in an EcoPoetics Workshop led by Allison Cobb, author of, “Plastic: An Autobiography.”

My definition of the word Anthropocene is Constellations of Scattered Bones & Hand Me Down Snippets, 2018, made mostly from beach collections

Prior to the class, I was asked to read Linda Russo’s “Counter Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene,” and to write my own definition of the word Anthropocene - a word I felt embarrassed to have never heard before.

Anthropocene Definition.jpg

Attempting to disregard my intimidation, I did a deep dive into Russo’s compiled glossary. I was comforted by the notion that this collection of curated definitions is presented as a guide of “roomy questions,” concerned less with answers and more with possibilities of uncovering new and future methods.

“ language: a living archive. A communal lung that holds and remembers all things through us. Made between our bodies, language lives everywhere. It travels and absorbs. A neural interconnectivity; the kinetic sensation is felt by all. It is composed of edges, imposes edges, but has no edges. It is a phenomenal organism, an extended nervous system that we all share. Capacious and metamorphic, infinitely adaptable, composed of and running through everything: all the meat of our bodies, this recyclable air, the earth and the universe that suspends it, all the physical spaces that contain us, and even all of the invisible, silent or silenced spaces where language rests, waiting for us to bring our attention through sound. Language absorbs all things: silt, soil, your ear against air, each word, earth against the mouth. To make room, in language, for language, listen closely. See repair.”

-Counter Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, Danielle Vogel*

Interdisciplinary artist, Christine Howard Sandoval’s practice is also a glossary of definitions that unpack cultural, economic, and social framings similar to how Russo pinpoints intersections across and within disciplines that determine ecological relationships.

Christine Howard Sandoval, (Left to Right), Land Form II- Diversion (diptych), 2018, Land Form III-Mother Ditch (diptych), 2019, Land Form I-Distribution (diptych), 2018, Adobe mud and graphite on paper, 52 x 40 inches on view at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center as part of the exhibition Timelines For The Future

Exhibited at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center as part of Timelines For The Future, Howard Sandoval’s glossary is defined by materiality, situated within the specificity of contested lands of Native and Hispanic heritage.

The multi-media passage of sculpture, video installation and mixed media drawings in the work of Channel trace the history of complex relationships between agrarian societies with riparian rights and land uses in the present; poetically using language to also identify a multiplicity of meanings that a word can hold simultaneously.

Still Image of Christine Howard Sandoval’s Channel 2017, three-channel HD video with sound 7:43, taken during my visit to Disjecta Contemporary Art Center’s exhibition of Timelines For The Future, curated by Lucy Cotter

Still Image of Christine Howard Sandoval’s Channel 2017, three-channel HD video with sound 7:43, taken during my visit to Disjecta Contemporary Art Center’s exhibition of Timelines For The Future, curated by Lucy Cotter

My experience encountering Channel within a gallery space felt like an invitation to be still and present in Howard Sandoval’s movements: her meandering walk, witnessing the carrying and placing of found offerings, her running her hand against the surface of the land, all the while hearing her footsteps, the water beneath her feet. I listened to her calming voice narrate:

“ Without water there is no irrigation. Without irrigation the land will be lost. Without the land base the family will disintegrate and without family the community will die. Without community the language will be lost. Without language we do not exist.”

In the EcoPoetics Workshop, Cobb discussed questions of ethics, desire, grief, trauma and responsibility (response - ability, ability to respond); burrowing further into the meaning of language through nets cast by etymologies.

Excerpts of etymology research shared by Allison Cobb during an EcoPoetics Workshop, 2021

I was asked to respond and use my ability to collect plastic and to pair words with my findings - to speak about a method in prose poetry. Methods could be a point of view, a sound, an approach or theme, a story -maybe it is image and metaphor.

In searching for methods to define Anthropocene, I was reminded of the Danish artist group, SUPERFLEX (established by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Reuter Christiansen and Rasmus Nielsen). In 2019 they exhibited a large scale site-specific installation, It Is Not The End of The World, flooding Cisternerne, a former water reservoir turned underground contemporary art venue in Copenhagen.

Me walking through It Is Not The End of The World, by SUPERFLEX at Cisternerne in 2019 ((click for video and sound snippet)

It Is Not The End of The World used language to make both a declarative statement and instigate curious reactions, begging the question: if it isn’t the end of the world, then what is it?

In visiting this exhibition, viewers like myself became active participants, wading through the dark halls in provided waterproof boots, experiencing a dystopian future not that unlike our present and imagining a world void of humanity, but not the end of the world itself.

In the center of the exhibition was an exacting replica of the executive toilets of the Bonn headquarters of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), flooded with commentary on global consequences caused by human consumption.

Almost a year after wading through the Cisternerne, I found myself in Portland, Oregon, talking with Jay Ponteri, Director of Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at PNCA and the one who invited me to attend Cobb’s EcoPoetics Workshop.

It was by happenstance that we met beyond the virtual world of our online classroom. Our chance encounter was also simultaneously an unexpected opportunity to collect leftover materials from former students, of which was ironically a copy of Colors Magazine, specifically #82, a 2011 fall edition on Shit: A Survival Guide.

(Left) the cover of Colors Magazine #82, Shit: A Survival Guide under a pile of dog shit in the snow, (Right) Pages 6-7 of Diarrhea in the first section of Danger: Biohazard

The entire edition is exclusively and thoroughly dedicated to the topic of poop - its many names, stigmas, dangers and underrated resources from different locations around the world. It cites that nearly two-thirds of the world, who have no toilet, must live intimately with shit.

Colors Magazine #82, Shit: A Survival Guide, pages 44-45 from the chapter, Do-It-Yourself, referencing the work of Dr. Kamal Kar and the Community-Led Total Sanitation Foundation

A complicated aspect of defining Anthropocene is its entanglement with social and economic systems such as but not limited to capitalism, classism, settler colonialism, and systemic racism. Ten years later, Colors magazine could very well make an updated survival guide substituting the word shit for Anthropocene.

Yet, reducing a complex definition to a smelly pile of feces is about as paralyzing as the (valid) feelings of helplessness and grief that often results from discussions centered around climate change and environmentalism. Rather lets refer back to Linda Russo’s glossary. See repair.

“repair: begin with what you have. Here, a clutch of syllables tied with blue string - carnation, elderflower, gardenia, thyme, and thistle. A white candle. A ring of hair. Ink. Let it warp. To gather all absences through a door in a tongue. Silence to sound to skin, to restore all things. See language.”

-Counter Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, Danielle Vogel*

Using Vogel’s definition of repair, I attempted to start with what I had. At the time Portland was experiencing a snow and ice storm and Portland General Electric was reporting at least 4,000 power lines down, leaving tens of thousands of people without power (myself included).

Wearing extra layers and taking cues from the late Dadaist, Tristan Tzara’s chance instructions on composing poetry, I took my copy of Shit: A Survival Guide and began to cut out text, rearranging them in a new order.

These words live in my latest installation, Sentences I Keep Near, forming a different type of survival guide.

Sentences I Keep Near, mixed media, 2020-21

*Edit 7/9/22 It has come to my attention that I incorrectly cited Linda Russo as defining language and repair While Russo compiled the glossary, these definitions were written by Danielle Vogel. “Counter Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene,” is a collection of ecopoetic definitions by a collection of various contributors.

Unpacking & Color Coding

On my last class of my first semester of grad school, I heard the same phrase (in so many different words) that I’ve heard all term, “I feel sorry for how robbed you are of this experience.”

When contradictory feelings overlap

As I write this I’m looking through my collection of polaroids. It is Christmas and there are only 6 days left of 2020. I am still unpacking (in all of the literal and figurative ways you can imagine) from both an international move last summer and the many tragedies of this infamous year.

These polaroids, a timeline of: pictures, portraits and portals are a color code of what can be pictured and not pictured.

Yes, you should always have multiple pairs of scissors

Mary Ruefle color codes sadness in her book, “My Private Property.” Blue, purple, gray, black, green, yellow, orange, red, brown, pink, white. In no particular order they are each their own sadness.

Gray sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and unguents and movie theatres. Gray sadness is the most common of all sadnesses, it is the saddness of sand in the desert and sand on the beach, the sadness of keys in a pocket, cans on a shelf, hair in a comb, dry-cleaning, and raisins. Gray sadness is beautiful, but not to be confused with the beauty of blue sadness, which is irreplaceable. Sad to say, gray sadness is replaceable, it can be replaced daily, it is the sadness of a melting snowman in a snowstorm.

p. 46, Mary Ruefle, “My Private Property”

Yet (spoiler alert) hidden in the last sentence of the last page under acknowledgements, Ruefle also notes, very slyly, that the word happiness can be substituted for the word sadness and nothing changes.

How does this work?

Is gray sadness the same as gray happiness?

I’ll try.

Gray happiness is the same sadness as an invisible horizon line- sea becoming sky and sky becoming sea. It is ferris wheels on rainy days and second hand buildings selling second hand chances. It is the questions you ask yourself when you are watching strangers shop. Which people donate the chances and which people take them? Gray sadness is the same happiness as the gate blocking your view of the city at the top of the historical Rundetaarn (round tower) observatory.

It is the gray patch of paint used to hide graffiti that resembles the shape of a rectangle, but will never be a true rectangle and the wall will never be the way it was before. Gray happiness is the same sadness of the trick of mirrors reflecting the clouds as if they were living inside a room for Magritte, but knowing the truth of it is that they are always out of reach. Gray happiness is the same sadness as Notre Dame before her fire.

According to Ruefle these gray feelings are replaceable. So what makes blue feelings so irreplaceable?

Blue excerpts from Why Art? by Eleanor Davis

I’ve already mentioned in Parisian Doors & Color Histories, how Maggie Nelson wrote an entire book, “Bluets,” dedicated to the color blue. For just under 100 pages, Nelson’s prose chart literary histories and relationships in objects, locations and songs in a numbered list from 1 - 240.

Is blue irreplaceable?

My collection of blues are my own snapshots. You see the clouds parting above the tiled roof, but I don’t expect you to know about the argument that was building behind it or the quality of the quiche lorraine and conversation below the umbrella in a crowded courtyard. The same way you wouldn’t have guessed that a blue box of matching pots and pans was my clue to finding my way back from a detour on a cold day lost in Copenhagen.

Blue is the repetition of the striped portrait in Trier years after having painted a portrait of the same person wearing stripes, sitting in a striped chair in the suburbs of Mint Hill, North Carolina. Or the crisp air of fresh snow in my old neighborhood in Gonderange, one of the few places I have lived where you still have to go to work on a snow day.

It is the reflection of water underneath Lorenzo Quinn’s Building Bridges, (2019) sculpture of oversized pairs of hands arching over the Arsenale’s waterway in Venice and the icy cold temperature of the lake after sweating from hiking only halfway up a mountain in Switzerland.

Blue is walking on the land of past tragedies now presented as painted bridges between one’s own legs or labyrinths of sorrow encased in cement columns stretched out for as far as you can see. It is in the fragile tension of “elemental choreography of aerial theatre” presented in Tomás Saraceno’s Disappearance of Clouds, (2019) and is the unexpected hiss of a swimming swan or the amount of trinkets you can shove under a tent at a Sunday flea market in Vienna.

Blue is wearing out your shoes to finally reach the base of the Eiffel Tower and wishing you could have spent more time in Aldo Rossi’s domed (space ship) tower at the Bonnefantenmusem on your Tuesday afternoon.

Black happiness can be found in a collection of silhouettes, outlining horizon lines, bridges, Cologne’s famous gothic cathedral and the Parisian clock at the Musée d’Orsay. They are shadows dancing with time. What sound might they make?

Poet & painter, Etel Adnan’s most recent book, “Shifting the Silence,” talks about shadows, sounds and time.

“Yes. The shifting, after the return of the tide, and my own. A question rushes out of the stillness, and then advances an inch at a time: has this day ever been before, or has it risen from the shallows, from a line, a sound?

…A particular somnolence takes hold of you when the shadows start growing. Then, the heart creates different beats. You want to touch the leaves, look intensely at each tree. The night falls, already tired, already bare.”

-Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence

I suppose green happiness is Middle Eastern palm trees, the Witte Huis in Rotterdam, one of the few buildings to survive the bombing of World War II and Vianden Castle, dating from the 10th century, fully restored after a long history of abandonment and ruin.

Green sadness is retired signage, the amount of time it has been since i’ve seen my sister and the city I said good bye to after almost two years in Europe.

Green happiness is the color of leaves shining in the sun, the Palmenhaus Schönbrunn greenhouse, with it’s spiral staircase and Japanese pear trees from my new backyard or the day my friends got married and having an entire vacation with my parents to myself.

Yellow happiness is the same sadness of sitting in the sun on your golden birthday drinking lemonade when a bird poops on your head. It is the reflections in the canal, umbrellas, and restaurants by the waterfront in Nyvan that provide outdoor heating and blankets or cubed buildings in Rotterdam that you can tour if you are into that sort of thing. (This was all pre-covid of course.)

Yellow happiness is the same sadness of finally meeting your friend’s baby after 9 months and only getting to know her for a day and a night. (This was not pre-union striking in France.)

Yellow sadness is the same happiness when it is your last day in France or the small town of Ptuj in Slovenia. It is touring your grandad’s 4k+ beer glass collection, knowing it is now being packed up and sold or your first (film) selfie on your fifth anniversary after eating ice cream on a not so warm day.

Yellow sadness is the same happiness of faded buildings and sunshine filtering through the Musée d’Orsay’s many windows.

While red happiness is the bustling Carmel Market in Tel Aviv, round-a-bout, center-of-the-road poppies, stripes and French bistro chairs. It is Alexander Calder’s “Eagle,” at Olympic Sculpture Park, a European motorbike and the leaning canal houses of Amsterdam.

Red happiness is house boats with jacuzzis, retro volvos, fruit stands, salvaged type, faux windmills and the last christmas we spent with the legendary Carl Holt.

Red happiness is vintage tin containers at the Waterlooplein market, red Parisian doorways and outdoor café seating (back when people used to sit close together). It is brightly painted homes in the neighborhood village, international dog-sitting in Vienna and retro Beetles that are probably really difficult to drive.

Pink sadness are cotton candy like blooms swaying in the wind on your walk home from the gynocologist. They are the lifesize dollhouses you could only admire from the sidewalk or the roses that cheered you up when you were crying in public.

Pink happiness is the Majolikahaus, designed by Otto Wagner. It is the greeting of a friendly mascaron at your doorway or the blooms of Spring matching the neighbor’s house.

Orange happiness is the Hundertwasserhaus and the rejection of straight lines, pumpkins at the Torvehallerne market, sunflower patches and golden frames next to hanging chandeliers.

Orange sadness is the color of the sky during wildfires and sculptures that die after a site specific installation ends.

While white happiness is the first snowfall in a new city, Clervaux Castle, housing the permanent exhibition, “Family of Man,” curated by Edward Steichen, Rundetaarn Tower’s many “hidey holes” and happy accidents within double exposures.

White happiness is the view from behind Mudam, touring the Ptuj Castle, new Spring blooms and finally finding the Jean Dubuffet sculpture at the Louisiana Museum Sculpture Garden - which is strategically hidden in the courtyard only accessible through the café.

White sadness is fog hiding your view of the Eiffel Tower and running out of film. It is the same happiness of finding the trailhead after getting lost on backwoods gravel roads, dodging potholes and eating a donut after hiking for seven miles.

White happiness is the same sadness of a new holiday tradition when you can’t be with your friends and family except through screens.

Sitting in Strange Times

In the last several weeks, the frequency of sitting behind screens has inevitably increased as a result of lockdown and shelter in place restrictions around the world.

Too much screen time, 2020

Last week I found myself watching a documentary of the Vitra Design Museum’s expansive chair collection called, “Chair Times.” It felt appropriate in this strange time to willingly go down the infinite rabbit holed history of chairs and their varied seats.

What fascinates me is that (chairs) have personalities. Each of them tells us something about the time it was created in, about the person who designed it, and of course about the society that utilized this particular chair. And also the fact that they’re basically all the same; that they are all an invitation to have a seat, that they’re all small sculptures make them comparable. This allows us to illustrate an era.

- Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman Emeritus of Vitra

The documentary begins with a focus on bentwood chairs designed by the innovative cabinet-maker, Michael Thonet (1796 - 1871).

Currently behind the closed doors of the MAK Museum in Vienna is the exhibition, Bentwood & Beyond, Thonet and Modern Furniture Design.

Last year when I visited the exhibition, I learned that bentwood furniture is not a Viennese invention, nonetheless, the bentwood chair is most well-known as the “Viennese Chair.”

The center aisle of the gallery displays each chair’s unique silhouette projected onto translucent screens; brilliantly allowing you to focus on the overall form before fussing over the details.

In a conversation between curator, Serge Mauduit and Vitra Design Museum Director, Mateo Kries, they discuss how the Industrial Revolution and the societal development of the 19th century contributed to the emergence of a middle class and therefore a middle class public life.

“What interests me is the public aspect. Suddenly, furniture is designed for public space.”

-Mateo Kries, Vitra Design Museum Director

Fast forward to 2020, when public space becomes eerie and vacant.

This collection of Parisian café chairs was captured back in February of last year, when sitting close to people felt annoying, not nostalgic.

Similar to Masion Gatti proudly producing their chairs by hand, Danish design also emphasizes old school techniques and craft as good quality versus a mass produced object meant to be sold at a lower cost.

The Danish Chair An International Affair is a permanent collection at the Design Museum Danmark. Exhibited beautifully in a tunnel display of stacked chairs, is a collection of 110 chair classics with an emphasis on Danish Modern design.

“The chair is the piece of furniture that is closest to human beings. It touches and reflects the body that sits on it with arms, legs, seat and back.”

-Exhibit Curator, Christian Holmsted Olesen

Chair Tunnel, Design Museum Danmark

An innate element of Danish furniture is simplifying antiquity. Much of the Danish modernist approach was a combination of functionality and craft tradition as well as the result of collaborations between architects and cabinet makers.

Klismos chair, on the stele of Xanthippos, Athens, ca. 430-20 BCE.

Many Danish designers rediscovered the Klismos chair, a type of ancient Greek chair, with curved backrest and tapering, out-curved legs. This inspired reinventing different versions of frame chair designs - a type of chair with a top rail surrounding a person who is seated.

In architect, Witold Rybczynski’s book, “Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History,” Rybczynski explains that in ancient Greek art, the Klismos chair is represented as more democratic than a throne or symbol of status.

Rokoko Chamber, State Room at the Albertina Museum

Yet, in most cases throughout history, a chair portrays a status or identity and is often reserved for the elite. This is evident in the State Rooms of The Albertina Museum, a former palace that was once the residence of the Habsburg archdukes and archduchesses. 

I’m typically more fascinated with a used chair. A favorite pastime of mine is scavenging for the rejects - the “one’s trash is another’s treasure”, side of the road or flea market gem.

Through this process of hunting and gathering, chairs became a reoccurring theme in my own artistic practice.

Chair Series II, 2011

Largely inspired by artist, Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines,” I began investigating the relationship of painting to sculpture by deconstructing everyday objects.

Chair Series I, 2011

Similar to how people say that pets resemble their owners, I felt the need to discover the relationship of a chair to a person. How do their frames compare?

Looking again to masters before me, I fashioned my own “Alice Neel Chair” by repurposing a used chair in painted stripes, inviting willing participants to sit for me.

Self Portrait, 1980, pg. 252, Alice Neel Painted Truths

During this process, I was also very preoccupied with various presentations of chairs and the concept behind the installation titled, “One and Three Chairs,” by artist Joseph Kosuth, which compares an object, an image and words as representations of a chair.

Josef Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965 (photographed at the Centre Pompidou in 2019)

This resulted in a repetitive series of paintings depicting seated portraits, and then hanging the painting of the person sitting in the chair behind them while they sat in the actual chair and had their picture taken.

As the series evolved, I lost interest in the figure and focused fully on the chair itself, examining it’s relationship to interior and exterior site- specific locations.

The chair became smaller and smaller, disappearing into wallpaper or miniaturized in the alternative world of dollhouses.

“ A house within a house, the dollhouse not only represents the house’s articulation of the tension between inner and outer spheres, of exteriority and interiority - it also represents the tension between two modes of interiority. Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouses’s aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center, within within within. The dollhouse is a materialized secret.”

-Susan Stewart, On Longing Narratives of the Miniature, The Gigantic, The Souvenir, The Collection

Which brings me back to where I started - chairs with personalities that reflect a time or the object’s maker.

Artist, Ellie Richards humorously captures the strange times we are in with her rocking chair that doubles as a game and a workout (you have to physically stand and rock the chair to move a steel ball through the maze’s tracks) all the while commenting on the psychology of feeling stuck in a labyrinth.

Rocking Chair by Ellie Richards (@ellieinthewoods)

So tell me - what kind of chair are you sitting in?

Residency in Transit(ion)

I began my first artist residency at Kulturschapp, a former freight depot in the village of Walferdange, Luxembourg back in mid-February. At the time, I was blissfully unaware that this would later become one of the hardest projects I’ve undertaken.

Idea vs Reality

I’ve worked in unusual places before, but never in a location layered in so many histories.

From old lift machinery built into the floor to metal hooks and former pulley wheels lining the stone and brick, this industrial building wears many cracks, holes and patches, from a life along the railway.

The sudden thundering sounds of a train speeding by takes some getting used to, but after working alone for hours on end, you start to welcome the noise - a reminder of the world still moving outside.

Thinking about trains as a symbol of escape, freedom, progress and adventure; a journey from here to there -it’s a strange time in history to find myself working next to the train tracks.

Arlanda Express, February 2020

Before the lockdown, I took a brief one day research trip to Stockholm, paying close attention to artwork exhibited in public transit space.

In Sweden the subway system, known as the T-Bana, is often referred to as the world’s longest art gallery with 90 stations designed by artists.

On my commute, I came across new-to-me Swedish artists: Signe Persson-Melin and Anders Österlin. Together in 1957, they created a collaborative series of abstracted traffic signs in geometrically patterned tiles for the T-Centralen Station.

I kept thinking about abstracted shapes, where they come from and how we interact with them; the windows we look through to the arches we walk under.

Play and assemblage of shapes and forms became a central theme during my residency at Kulturschapp, culminating in a final installation titled, “Excavated Reveries.”

Unfortunately due to the coronavirus, the exhibition is postponed, but I am adapting to our new reality by featuring this series of collages and sculptures as a virtual vernissage.

Installation View (Grid Side / Pink Side), Kulturschapp, April 2020

Detail (Left) “Unpredicable Loops" (Right) “Shelves too Small to Hold Anything Useful,” Kulturschapp, April 2020

With many pieces throughout the installation created from recycled materials, such as salvaged metal, domestic ephemera and collected paper advertisements, there is an underlying curiosity about the relationship of people to their surroundings.

The symbolism in the places people carry with them are embodied in souvenirs and each composition is a collection of objects as memory markers.

(Left) “Positive Interruptions Are Like Gaps In the Clouds” (Center) “The Mountain in your Mind’s Eye” (Right) “In The Blue Hour” Kulturschapp, April 2020

“Stuck Underneath The Weight of My Days” Kulturschapp, April 2020

“Stuck Underneath The Weight of My Days” Kulturschapp, April 2020

Throughout the residency, ideas shifted as access to materials became limited. I scavenged and substituted empty toilet paper rolls and cardboard for less accessible wood; surprising myself with the materials I had on hand and experimenting with paper maché and plaster.

I was reminded that the very act of making is a form of resiliency. From the beginning, I pushed myself to use this time and space as an opportunity to work differently, roll out 10 meters of paper, suspended as curtains or test new ways to translate flat drawings and prints as sculptural forms.

I also started new experiments, keeping a little notebook where I recorded a stream of consciousness list every day (with some entries a day late) and a walking journal. Partly inspired by the literary style of Jenny Slate in her book, “Little Weirds,” and to pay closer attention to little big things.

This daily practice was my own way of training myself to attempt a consistent routine and record my train of thoughts. I reveled in the slower moments embodied in the color, shape, or texture of nature’s visual elements.

I found myself attracted to the budding yellow and pink blooms, chasing the golden light and smiling in the sunshine; looking up to clear blue skies and feeling a soft sadness about the color blue, wanting to hold onto what was never within my grasp.

As fortunate as I was to have an artist residency like Kulturschapp as a refuge to escape to during this strange time, it was difficult to stay focused and have the headspace for creating. I had to regularly remind myself to be kind and adjust my expectations as everyday tasks felt harder to complete.

(Day 35 of quarantine) Words of encouragement from my former painting professor, Maja Goldewska. I still remember being asked if a group of us wanted to exhibit in a one day show, she said “It is crazy, but you can do it.” I’m still doing it.

Big thanks to Joël Rollinger, Artist & President of Kulturschapp, for this opportunity and to Spencer Gaddy for being my forever artist assistant.