SENSE OF PLACE

Notes from 
Wisdom Sits In Place 
by Keith H. Basso

"Place is the first of all beings, since everything that exists is in a place and cannot exist without a place" -Archytas, Commentary on Aristotle's Categories

"lived relationships that people maintain with places, for it is solely by virtue of these relationships that space acquires meaning"

"...familiar places are experienced as inherently meaningful, their significance and value being found to reside in (and, it may seem, to emanate from) the form and arrangement of their observable characteristics."

"places come to generate their own field of meaning."

"Even in total stillness, places may seem to speak."  "places express only what their animators enable them to say" - linking to reflection

Drawing

Collecting From The Forest

Mechanical pencil on paper

11" x 14"

Detail

Codex

Mechanical pencil on paper

11" x 14"

Found In The Clearing

Mechanical pencil on paper 

11" x 14"

The Dance, Historic Illustrations, by An Antiquary

Objects needed to make music.

Space needed to perform.

Costumes needed to adorn human body - or disguise.

Source link here.

Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich

Language
"Just as we were acquiring the ability to argue and rationalize, we needed a more primitive emotional mechanism to bond our large groups...Something deeper and more emotional was needed to overpower the cold logic of verbal arguments.  It seems that we needed music and physical touch to do that."

Dionysus
"The fact that the Greeks felt the need for such a deity tells us something about the importance of ecstatic experience in their world; just as their pantheon included gods for love, for war, for agriculture, metalworking, and hunting, they needed a god to give the experience of ecstasy a human form and face."  Objects - what we can't understand we make human and then scale it down to miniature (small scale statues of saints) or produce a two-dimensional image.  So that we can see and touch  - seeing and touching reminds us, comforts us and can control us.

Capitalism
"...the repression of festivities was, in a sense, a by-product of the emergence of capitalism." Middle class - calculate and save, defer gratification.  Lower class - factory-ready, fewer holidays, work six days a week.  

Sacred Origins of Profound Things by Charles Panati

Why we make objects, what purpose they serve, the origin of a concept - all of this interests me.  The above book is one of my favorites - I have had it for years and refer to it often.  Awhile back I started researching rosary beads.  I had read in another book, A Natural History of The Palette, how tied knots in a rope were used to communicate within Native American tribes.  This made me think of how the touching of an object, in this case rope with knots, is used for communication.  Although prayer beads not used to communicate between two people, the idea of touching something tangible intrigued me.  The tangible is needed for many reasons - guidance, memory, nurture, symbol, class status, control.

Image source here.

Notes from the book:
"Rosary" - fromt he Latin rosarium, "rose garden"- over time came to mean any grouping of similar things (such as beads on a string).  Practice, reciting - quantity important.  Knotted strings a memory aid for reciting - repetition of prayer believed to increase efficacy in early religions.  People in all cultures devised memory aids - stringed pits, sharks teeth, fragments of bones of a beloved deceased. Wealthy - precious stones, gold nuggets.  Rosary - reciting a certain number of prayers could limit your days in purgatory.

Drawing

Drawing

A Dialogue With Discarded Objects with Leslie Robison

Leslie Robison, colleague and friend, and I collaborated on a body of work a few years back. The work was selected for an exhibit at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville that took place in April. Below are images of the collaboration, our own work and a description of the collaboration.

Mixed Media on wood 4" x 6"

Mixed Media on wood 3" x 8"

Ink, charcoal, pencil, wax, salt on tea stained paper. Each drawing measures 6" x 8".

Detail

Detail