The fabric of the body is this wise: that it should be bitten, bought and bulked up. The fabric of the body is thus: Its edges and inter-weavings are part and parcel–internalized as one substance and interred as another (open for interpretation.) The fabric of the body is the fabric of the non-body, only insomuch as it demands a rematch. But the fabric of the non-body allows a less tenuous balance. Its heart might stop yet its heart still beats. All of our hearts are hot in the belly of the planet; all of our planets give up elements for correct placement: metals for meals, motions for memory. The fabric of the body is the metallic motion of memorable meals.
For my recent solo show at G.Gibson Gallery in Seattle, I had titles on the wall and extended titles for each piece on an accompanying sheet. For a few posts, I am documenting those here:
Shelter: Cast off the long lost line. The birds are eating, the squirrels digging. Our homes have become bitten and worn but there is wood for the fire and some volunteer lavender.
Sky Measurements: In great patience and hope, the sky is observed.
Take on Me (A Taxonomy): It becomes clear that each of us, no matter how open we are, seem to be responsible for a handful of ideas that repeat in various forms throughout our lives.
Tryptophilia: Once I discover there is a word for the fear of many holes packed tightly together— tryptophobia— I realize that I have the opposite—tryptophilia, maybe. Pores and honeycombs are focused patterns of interaction between an interior and exterior world. A sign of life, permeability, vulnerability, and hope.
Red Shift, White Album: Wooden planks, light through a barn window, eye to the sky, women astronomers, new language, old songs, bouncing pencil, spacecraft.
Remember when we used to live together? Give me an inch and I will wax poetic. This inch contained the remains of two sea creatures, and their symbiotic calcium-white leftovers became a drawing meditation.
Rock with Interior Secrets: We mete out the details, cautious step-by-step, those of us who pray, who find ourselves praying.
Rock with a Mouth of Jewels: I sang a song to pass the time and, instead, it breathed new life into the day.
Ruffle and flutter: Furl and spatter, spread and wave, drift and scatter, slake and stave.
From the Sea: Tubes and balloons and stripes and polka dots, ruffles and sequins and costume jewelry – they all come first from the sea.
Gardening Matrix: In an inconceivably graceful burst, seeds become robust stems and leaves and, soon, flowers, marked by sculptural genius, the embodiment of energy itself.
Lichen: These loose bits that litter the floor of the forest are spendthrift castoffs with more grace than most big human pursuits.
Alluvial Fan: When parallel paths split, and split again, and again, because of obstacles, because of silt or other diversion, the branching pattern appears. An elegant answer.
Magnetic Trio: I have pulled you to me in every way I know. The rest is left to time and physics.
Family Group: Our first impulse is elbows up, defending the sharp edges that have been jabbing one another by way of additional sharp edges. At last, we round from friction like so many river stones.
Fluent in at least three languages: I do not speak Icelandic or Czech. Even though I visited both countries for a spell, thinking I would catch on when immersed, I found both languages to be firmly outside my grasp. Instead, all of the French and Spanish I know came fluttering up like loose bits of ashy paper from a smoldering fire.
Folds and Chains: Tender version of chemistry, come. I have made you a bed of sulfur, I have nursed you with calcium and carbon. Surely, you will be eased. Surely your platitudes will unfurl like linen banners.
Last May (2017) I found myself in Thingeyri, Iceland, as part of an international group residency. My experiences there helped craft a new body of work that is currently hanging at G.Gibson Gallery in Seattle (until January 20, 2018) “Particle Playlist”. Above is an earlier installation of the work, while still at the residency, as a study table looking out toward the fjord. The book that is being propped open with a stone is, appropriately, “Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman,” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, which I like to think of as my updated “Poetics of Space,” the influential book by Gaston Bachelard. What I experience when reading both of these books is a sense that disciplinary gates have been pushed open to scholars who may be passing by. The texts are idiosyncratic, but accessible, oneiric and well-mapped, infused with wonder and curiosity. Bachelard was a philosopher whose focus was science and poetics, while Cohen is a medievalist with a PhD in literature, who collaborates with contemporary artists and planetary scientists, among others. These minds that traverse the gap between imagination and data, between observation and intuition, between the ancient and modern, appeal to my own sense of being “in between.” Want to hear more? If you are in the Seattle area, join me at G.Gibson Gallery, along with the illustrious Justin Gibbens, who ALSO treads ground in the land between poetics and science, for an artist talk on Saturday, January 13th, at 1pm.
I have been looking for a quote, the spirit of which lingers in my mind– something to the effect of: “There are many times I have preferred the sound of birds over the sound of the human voice.” In any case, as I prepare for my show “Biographic” at G.Gibson Gallery in May, I have been thinking about what I like to listen to. Boy do I like people. But, as a city dweller in the pocket internet age, I get a lot of human voice without even trying. It jams the circuits, and it only goes so far. It circles the same spots in my brain. It makes ruts. The question I have been asking while making this new work is: “What does life write when it writes about itself? How does life draw when it draws itself?” As a human who has inherited visual language developed over thousands of years, I illustrate from a particular dialect. Drawings that have looked at other drawings, lines that have eaten up gestural painting and comic books, scientific identification and cursive and calligraphy. But there is another set of graphics that are innate, and they come from living inside a body built of patterns that I share with a broader family than the human one. While working on the drawing above, I wanted to know if calcium had a tendency to grow in florets. I didn’t find anything that pointed to that specific query, but I ended up on botanical sites (thank you pocket internet) that described various flower growth patterns. On this one, I found out that there is a classification of growth patterns called ligulate, the root word of which is ligula, or small tongue. I love this. From Encyclopedia Brittanica:
Ligulate flowers superficially resemble the ray flowers of radiate heads in having a corolla that is tubular at the base and prolonged on the outer side into a flat, strap-shaped ligule. They differ from ray flowers in that they are perfect (bisexual) and the ligule consists of all five lobes of the corolla and generally shows five terminal teeth. The dandelion is a familiar plant with ligulate heads.
The growth pattern happens to look like what I was drawing, at least in one iteration. I have also been drawing inspiration from diatoms and other shapes found in pond water, from incidental marks made by plants and animals… anything that speaks as if with small tongues.
I found the following passage from an old journal, about trying to know the mountains that I can see when I look across the Puget Sound and how that relates to trying to know people. It fits my mood for this day-after-Valentine’s. I was solo (not because of a break-up, but because of divergent travels) for this Valentine’s day, so I found myself thinking about love from a distance, and love that is multi-faceted:
Every day, in different light, at different temperatures and different angles, The Brothers look different. To know them truly, I would need to climb them, but then their closeness would cause me to lose their shape. If The Brothers are seen on a topographic map, then the two peaks might be more clear. But everyone knows that a map is a severe reduction. Its clarity is helpful, but not accurate to the complexity of actually being in a place. As it is, the two peaks appear to me, across the Puget Sound, more as 3 1/2 peaks. And this feeds into my purposes well, as a mother of three sons. Knowing a person– even one closest to you– is not at all unlike this difficulty of ascertaining a mountain. Part of the process is a matter of finding contours, and slipping them, often temporarily, into a category. But each contour is approximate, each category permeable. As a mother, I have a common practice– that of identifying characteristics in my sons in order to understand and know them. Part of this is a constant and evolving compare/contrast exercise. What aspects do all of them share? Which similarities are shared by each pair? What traits stand alone in each boy? I group and name, only to be foiled by their complex natures. They defy my labels; they prove me wrong. Every day, in different light, at different temperatures and different angles, The Brothers look different.
Image of The Brothers from summitpost.org
The Country Of Marriage
I.
I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.
II.
This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth’s empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.
III.
Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.
IV.
How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.
V.
Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are–
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen tine and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.
VI.
What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.
VII.
I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy–and this poem,
no more mine than any man’s who has loved a woman.
Wendell Berry
“Dark to Dark” Gala Bent: A piece I made based on Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Country of Marriage”
^ A detail from an etching made by me with the help of Scott Kolbo and a group of students for the inaugural print residency at Seattle Pacific in 2014: “230 of an infinite number of possible universes,” and…
^…an illustration based in super string theory found here.
It occurs to me slowly that my art practice as it relates to science is not unlike the way that I have spent my life collecting, keeping, storing, packing and displaying rocks I find and like. These rocks do not end up in gridded boxes with identifying markers (though I do like that natural history museum aesthetic), but instead get shoveled into bowls and lined along window sills, funneled into glass jars with other curiosities– rubber toys and unidentified mechanical parts– charms and seeds and coins. I have collected them because I like how they feel in my hand– or their opaque luminosity or their unusual shape or texture– without, to be honest, thinking much about their classification. Theories or principles in mathematics and science are collected by a similar aesthetic process. I collect ideas that I like in my hand– the ones that give the world a shift of perspective and a “freshness deep down” (a la Gerard Manley Hopkins).
The print at top is a direct example of this mode– I love to think about the possibility of the multiverse, and the way it falls into my hand becomes a stream-of-consciousness free write imagining the shapes of unborn universes. It is not likely to be used as an illustration for hard science, dear reader, since it contains, in addition to string-theory-like forms, universe seeds that look like fried eggs or walnuts, or like 1950s decorative linoleum.
Bathsheba Grossman allows herself to dream around math as well, but some of her 3D printed sculptures are so wedded to “pure math” and so stunning that I wish I were more committed to the irresistible linkages between disciplines. Alas, my mind wanders, and there I am in class, doodling in the margins.
Bathsheba Grossman
Here’s her description of the piece above:
“This is one of a delightful class of objects known as Seifert surfaces. Every knot and link (in mathematics knots are closed loops, links are assemblages of knots) has a continuous surface which it is the edge of […] These surfaces are often beautiful, especially for symmetrical knots and links, and here I’ve produced one of the sweeter ones. This surface has three edges, each a simple closed loop, which are locked together in an ancient form xcalled the Borromean Rings. Named after its use in an Italian coat of arms, these three rings are locked together inextricably although no two of them are linked. Their Seifert surface twists through the loops smoothly and gracefully, and I’m very happy with the organic mesh. It’s wide enough to let light through, while responding sensitively to the curvature and giving a tactile texture.”
I have been looking for a quote, the spirit of which lingers in my mind– something to the effect of: “There are many times I have preferred the sound of birds over the sound of the human voice.” In any case, as I prepare for my show “Biographic” at G.Gibson Gallery in May, I have been thinking about what I like to listen to. Boy do I like people. But, as a city dweller in the pocket internet age, I get a lot of human voice without even trying. It jams the circuits, and it only goes so far. It circles the same spots in my brain. It makes ruts. The question I have been asking while making this new work is: “What does life write when it writes about itself? How does life draw when it draws itself?” As a human who has inherited visual language developed over thousands of years, I illustrate from a particular dialect. Drawings that have looked at other drawings, lines that have eaten up gestural painting and comic books, scientific identification and cursive and calligraphy. But there is another set of graphics that are innate, and they come from living inside a body built of patterns that I share with a broader family than the human one. While working on the drawing above, I wanted to know if calcium had a tendency to grow in florets. I didn’t find anything that pointed to that specific query, but I ended up on botanical sites (thank you pocket internet) that described various flower growth patterns. On 
drifts and scatters 