Off to Iceland

I leave on June 19th for the Gullkistan artist residency in Iceland. Lots to do as I collect supplies, make piles and muse on possibilities for work while there. The residency is located in Laugarvatn, a small school village 90 km east of Reykjavik. It is an agricultural area, close to some of the most popular tourist sites of Iceland and close to the highlands. The village of Laugarvatn has 250 inhabitants, one childrens' school, kindergarten, high school, and the department of athletic pedagogics of the University of Iceland. I've been told that there is one outdoor swimming pool and a good sports facilities inside and outside. There is a grocery shop, Lindin restaurant and summer hotels in the schools. The closest town is Selfoss, 45 km south of Laugarvatn.  Around Laugarvatn, there are farms and many summerhouses.

Check in periodically, as I will use this blog to record my experiences there.

Lines Left Out

  I recently revisited  "Lines Left Out", an installation that I made four years ago for the Big

Read Project of Sonoma County. I was invited to create an installation in response to the

selected book, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.  A friend's book group recently read the

book and invited me to talk about what I had done.

An opportunity to revisit, review and possibly rethink the project and how it is still

influencing my current work.  At the time I found it ironic that themes of the book that

interested me most, were issues that I needed to address in the making of the installation.

Issues such as: What gets seen? What gets cut? Who decides? How that process happens?

How pace can affect what gets seen, remembered and forgotten.

I received the invitation in July of '07 and installed it in early October, only three months to

create and install it. The Library Gallery at Sonoma State is a large space and I work slowly.

Could I do this?  Given my interest in the changing role of books and  screens of technology,

I had already started this work without knowing. I inventoried what I had: book covers &

parts, organza silk, silk-screened American target silhouettes, prints, a salvaged structure,

bamboo, and 4 x 4 blocks.

My challenge was to put them together in a form that spoke to the feeling and space of

Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's themes from 1953 are still relevant today. Magritte and the

silhouette, surrealism, photography, walls, mirrors, memory & memorials, and the dandelion

came to mind. I "burned to keep a focus!" to the rhythms of Bradbury's words: "Quick. Click, Pic,

Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What,

Where, Eh?"  Cut, Cut, Cut. A process; cutting became a way to reflect on a theme of the book.

After deinstalling, I made Lines Left Out, an iphoto book that records a poetic response to my

installation experience, using landscape, artwork, book parts, and images of the art

installation. The visual poem was inspired by Paul Klee's concept of drawing, "taking the line

for a walk", the words of New Zealand artist, Hadwen, as he described landscape as "the place

where everything we see, know, and imagine exists...a field punctuated by natural and

introduced landmarks that exist not only in the physical sense, but as signifiers of our

mental, psychological and spiritual world.", and Dorothy Richardson (Pilgrimage), turn of the

20th century author committed to wandering in territory of the tangential with the belief that

"nothing is a side issue".

I  showed this iphoto book as a slide show to the book group.  And upon reflection, I realize

how this work was a beginning and has since stimulated the iterations, "Cuttings" and

"Long Look".  I am soon to travel to Iceland for an artist residency this summer.  My

head is churning in anticipation for the next iteration.

Considerations when Making

Artifacts:

I am attracted to the worn and weathered.  So when I find an object with markings of use, I often pick it up and take it home.  My studio is filled with these artifacts, and each one once had a life of its own.  I love to look closely at their markings and patterns which often offer clues to a life of a particular action or way.  In this sense an artifact is a manifestation of a process shaped by it own history.

Artifacts often enter into my work. For the last few years, I have collected old hard covered books.  My studio is filled with piles of their extracted covers, often arranged by color.

Recently I have revisited an old favorite, some rusty bedsprings that I discovered years ago in our barn.  I incorporated them in an installation at SMOVA (the former Sonoma Museum of Visual Art) back in the year 2000.  The space in which I installed the piece was a hallway with doors and rather than fight what was there, named the installation "oR x do x Or".

When I took it down, I installed it on my property, next to a spring which was our water source. There the installation weathered with the wind, rain and sun, and finally fell apart. Three years ago, I moved to higher ground in Sebastopol and took the rusty bedsprings with me. Recently, they have become a focus for new work (a story for another time).

Artifacts are a source material that begin a process. When one enters my studio, I look at it. I can't recall who said "the thing seen is the thing seen" but this phrase, every time I read it, has a way of stopping me and reminds me to spend some time to look and contemplate what is before me. What is its "thingness"?  What is its shape?  How was it made?  What is its condition?  What did it go through before it arrived here?  How can its history inform my process of working?   And finally how can this object of the past move me to the present and forward to the future?  No answers, just passing thoughts.  And somehow these thoughts engage me to begin a process of working.

Back to the Bedsprings:

A rectilinear grid with coils protruding from its base and like an artifact, is also a source.

"Bed" from the root, "bhedh" means to dig. "Springs" from "spergh" means to move, hasten, leap; it also means to sprinkle and scatter.  Not only does this artifact  define itself; it also offers a clue. "Dig to move".  Look to a source for a direction or way. So where does one look?

"Bed" is a charged word full of associations:  sleep, rest, dreams, relationships, birth, death, desires, geology, gardening, base of a body of water, foundation, support, a press.

"Springs" too, has many associations: water, action, shift, release, emerge, season, wires and coils.

And with rust describing them, other associations arise: memory, ancestry, passing time, aging, a museum, an era, an atmosphere and environment.

Many associations suggest many possibilities.  Does it matter where or how I begin? Probably not.  No matter where I start, I hope to release the object from its charge of associations.  And with it will come a renewal, I hope.