Field/Ground, Ice Cube Gallery, 2015

Arrowmont, Tennessee, July 2015

So many violets and blues in this landscape. 

All image unfiltered and taken with my iPhone.

Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama

Power of Place, Winifred Gallagher

Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard

Space, Site, Intervention, Erika Suderburg

The Necessity For Ruins by J. B. Jackson

A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time by Jon Brinckerhoff Jackson

My Notes:

• National Land Survey 1787, Jefferson, divide land, each a square mile (640 acres). Created a landscape. Did not take into account/make adjustments for rivers, hills, marshland. .
• The grid a way to organize, not live by. When it was planned, a view from above was not possible.
• America had acquired a vast amount of space - needed to organize it. This space was free of factories and cities - romance of open space. We took the land - driven by desire/romance of space/freedom - which turned to greed.
• Roads not part of plan. Pioneers - wheeled transportation rare, followed Indian trails by foot or horseback. Eventually roads outline the grid - rough, unkept. 
• "…the road is a very powerful space; and unless it is handled very carefully and constantly watched, it can undermine and destroy the existing order." Roads could lead people with ill intentions to a place. 
• 17th century - increase in wagons/carriages - new type of road to accommodate. Also, new farming methods and urban sprawl - travel to get food to people.
• Archetypal road - serves daily needs and preserves ethical values of community. Territorial instinct. 
• New roads disrespect the grid. Sinuous layout. Eliminates right of passage.
• "…the gradual but total destruction of the distinction between the life of the street and the life behind the facade. What has taken place is the elimination of those immemorial rites of passage that were once the hallmarks of our culture. Those architectural monuments - the church, the university, the office or place of work, the public building, the restricted residential area, all once characterized by a degree of isolation and internal privacy, are now wide open and accessible to the street." 

• "For what makes the landscape so impressive and beautiful is that the it teaches no copybook moral, no ecological or social lesson. It simply tells us that there is another of of measuring time." p. 17
• "They knew their landscape by heart." p. 20

Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan

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

Oak by William Bryant Logan

After reading Dirt, I sought out other books by the author.  I think I connected with Oak a bit more than Dirt because of the results of wood seem to yield an abundance of objects and the connection with imagination and making.  A few excerpts from the book that I find the most interesting:

"In most tribes, only a woman and her daughters had the right to use her mortars and pestles.  When she died, one of her mortars would be broken and buried upside down."

"The hollows in them have been used as post office boxes around the world, and people have hidden precious items in them."

"...the oak often bearing red galls, which were the source of red dye for royal robes."

"...oak itself became the prime materials of the crafts that helped hominids become humans."

"The climate of the emerging Holocene made the boat and home important, and oak became the prime material for both."  Walls, frames, doors, furniture, palisades, barrels, looms, tools, coffins, boats, tanning, ink, fences (henges), roadways, bridges, boats.  Fire for warmth, fuel, cook, pottery to contain the grains.  Acorns/nuts for food/bread.

Objects as offerings - back to Neolithic, throw objects in the fen from a wood island.  "There were until modern times more than three thousand "holy" wells, springs, pools, and bogs in Ireland alone.  Clothing, pins, jewelry, buttons, buckles, brooches, coins and little stones were regularly thrown in to them or piled or hung beside them."

"It was the first durable material in the West that could be transformed by individuals into shapes that they saw in their minds."

Dirt and Oak, both by William Bryant Logan

Yes, I read a book about dirt...and I would do it again.  This book was fascinating and magical.  Links and references are made to salt, sugar, scent, touch, birth, death, the human body, astrology and even architecture.  A few excerpts:

"A few inches down, it is pure black acrid matter having a  texture like a cross between cotton candy and damp sawdust.  This is the stuff from which all life on the land is born."

"The wealth of America is based on  the black soils of its prairies, whose broad, flat expanses are often compared to the sea."

"The hand is the symbol of the whole body.  It is the only part of us that is made both to give and receive, both to repel and to grasp."

Cathedrals - "...by their very weight intruded on the earth, insisting on bringing it into relations with the heavens." Often built with an underground crypt to store relics.

"There are only two things in the universe that require liquid water for their existence: organic life and clay."

"But without the ability to contain, as well as produce, no culture can be created.  To the inhabitants of the first cities, a warehouse was a miracle.  The first discover of settled life was that it was possible to save.  To preserve and to transport what had been preserved, it was necessary to have containers.  A cave had to be found; a house could be built.  A niche stayed where it was, but a pot could travel."

The last excerpt probably the most significant for me as it fuels my interest in objects.  Why we make them, why we give them away, why we have to touch and look at them.


Below is a piece I made in response to dirt.  The earth was cut in a perfect square; the soil was a deep, rich black, the blackness absorbed so much light, I thought, that is sparkled.  The scent was overpowering, fresh and invigorating.  I was searching for this experience, I just happened to come upon it.  The piece measures approx. 4 feet wide and 5 feet from top to farthest bottom.  It is made entirely out of yarn and is installed on the wall.

Spell of the Sensuous

I just got David Abram's new book, Becoming Animal. I am a huge fan of Spell of the Sensuous. My copy is marked up and tagged with post-its notes. Ants that take rice and spiders in caves are two of my favorite memories from this book. A few years back I assigned Spell to my advanced sculpture class. Each week we read a chapter and discussed in class. In addition to discussion, students were asked to make a small, visual piece that responded to the chapter. All the work produced was reflective and thoughtful visual interpretations of the chapter. For one of my students, a love affair with using rice in her work began with this book.

"In prose at once poetic and precise, Abram demonstrates that our most cherished human attributes - from the gift of language, to the awareness of past and future, to the rational intellect itself - all emerge in interaction with the animate natural world, and remain wholly dependent upon that living world for their coherence. Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this astonishing and intensely ethical work." Source is Wild Ethics. Link here.

"The book touches on a wide range of themes, from our perception of the natural world to the way we use of language and symbols to process our experience." The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram by Scott London. Link here.

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

An important book for me is A Natural History of the Senses.  There is a wonderful chapter in the book on "Touch".  I have my beginning sculpture students read the chapter to point out that we rely on more than one sense to understand and communicate.

Link here for Diane Ackerman's website.