leap into the void

Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without the darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing or shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.

-Rebecca Solnit, ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’

 

2 things

1) calgary, canada.

2) melbourne, australia.

one wish

i picked this dandelion on my second day in Calgary, when i walked to ACAD in the morning.

no particular reason, i just kept it on my desk for a while. i’ve been thinking about wind-borne seeds, and the beauty of natural aerodynamic objects. i like to look at something that is designed to move on air. i also like the way that in their movement they illustrate the unseen current, and can be sensitive to the gentlest breath.

i made this dandelion drawing in this cabinet in the hallway at ACAD. when i started, there were still students around. it was very difficult. the movement of someone walking past was enough to disrupt the seeds. the seeds were even responsive to people talking in the hallway, perhaps the compression of the air from the sound…i don’t know. anyway, i eventually ended up waiting til everyone had left, and it was fine, though i had to be very careful with my breathing.

dandelions close their petals every evening, and open again with the sun. the switch at maturity from the yellow flowers to the white puffball happens overnight, almost spontaneously – the petals close, and open the next morning as a puffball, never to close again. i learnt about the life-cycle of dandelions when i was making a gift for two friends of mine. i was out looking for dandelions – dandelion seeds actually. dandelion clocks. dandelions only germinate or flower when the soil is above a certain temperature. Canberra is cold and frosty in winter, and at that time, early spring i guess, there were scant dandelions around and yellow ones only. whenever i was on my bike i kept my eye out for dandelions, and when i spotted one, i would keep visiting it day by day to see if it had turned. that felt like a very lovely thing, returning to these various individuals growing by the side of the footpath, knowing exactly where they were. those temporary but significant markers suddenly made the whole city, my everyday surroundings, seem a little bit more invested with meaning.

in Calgary, i walked to ACAD every morning until the snow came, and started to collect many dandelion clocks everywhere i walked. as the days went by, the stems would often be frozen when i picked them. one morning, i met a guy who had a big garbage bag full of empty cans and bottles over his shoulder. he asked me what i was collecting, and then he asked me if i was crazy. i didn’t tell him what i was doing with them, but i kinda had this thought about making a quilt filled with all these dandelion seeds. i liked the Canadian word for it – ‘comforter’. i had met a young woman in Winnipeg, who grew up in this community/cult that i stayed with for a few days on my travels (a story for another time). she told me about how when she and her siblings were children, they would sew their own comforters. she told me about collecting lots of old down coats from the thrift store, cutting them open, and filling these comforters with the contents of all of these emptied out coats.

i didn’t end up making a comforter. though i had quite a collection of dandelion seeds by the end. on the night before i left Calgary, i went out on the balcony with Adrienne and Beth, who i was staying with, on the 11th floor of this apartment block downtown. it was not snowing that night. we let go of all of the seeds and watched them float over the city.

i think of them often, and i hope their wishes come true.

snow

seeing the snow in canada was an amazing experience, as much as anything in this world can be if you have the opportunity to encounter it with open eyes. i’m interested in that kind of interaction with the world, in a more everyday sense. even if it’s ordinary, even if you’ve seen it before, you can still see it anew. everything has the potential to be a quiet, tiny wonder. i love those moments when you realise how profound and miraculous everything is. the world opens up, time disappears, there are no words. i suspect that everything is actually like that, all the time, but we learn to shut off from it in order to function – you know, to get from one place to the other, and to not lose our minds.

here are some things i wrote about the snow from my notebook and a couple of letters to people.

and i’ll say it again

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

(jeanette winterson, ‘The Passion’)

intersections

i took these photos in toronto. i really love the staple patterns on these telephone poles. i find them very beautiful… there’s something about each mark that’s driven into the wood, and how some of the staples have stained the wood, and the accumulation and overlap of peoples’ movements intersecting on this one spot… layering and getting darker and darker over time, the traces of all these people trying to say something.

 

 

 

getting there

there was this sweet little nest in the forest, suspended from a fork in a tree branch.

it was made with strips of birch bark, and lined with pine needles.

bev told me that birds use their chests to shape the inside of their nests.

common knowledge

in a little wooden cabin in the haliburton forest in ontario, there was this amazing natural history museum that was crumbling into dust. it was like everything was escaping slowly.

the tree museum

so, to go back in time a little bit…i have a backlog of information that i hope to put out here, eventually, as i get around to it.

here are some photos of the work that i made at the tree museum in september.

this is an image at noon…

and a few minutes afterwards…

i found this rock face opposite a grove of trees. there is this sheltered part which faces north and is constantly in shadow. the image is made of reflected sunlight from a series of mirrors mounted onto several trees in the area. they are all fragments of a circle, which only align on this rock for a moment each day when the sun is at solar noon – the point where it crosses the local meridian of that particular place on the planet. i find the idea of ‘noon’ really fascinating, like a threshold between rising and setting, where it is neither. how do you define this moment, which has no duration? you know it has to exist in order for one to change into the other, and it is created in transit, in crossing over. the marker of the noon is the wholeness of the circle, which breaks up as the sun (or the earth, rather) moves on.

these are the mirrors as i was working on them, and some of them up in the trees (before i cut them to make the circle). i found most of these materials in the basement, which was lucky.

the act of picking any one image only makes it obvious that everything is in constant motion. this moment (this image) is not terribly different from every other moment. the only thing is that it is made visible, through being defined by a form that we can recognise. we don’t read randomness, and unless one learns how we assume that it is indifference…meaninglessness. that’s why most things go unnoticed – the passage of time, the movements of life, things like that.

this is what i think, so far.

i like to think about the things that exist all the time, but depend on our perception and our conditions of seeing for us to be able to realise that they are there.

the earth turns.

throughout my practice so far i feel like i have been grasping at something that is impossible, or if it is, its existence in our (perceptual, experiential) world is incredibly fragile. at the same time i believe that it is revealed within all the most ordinary things. i keep returning to these ideas of equilibrium, wholeness and balance, but not as states that are able to be sustained. i don’t know what this means yet.

the process of making this piece was really interesting. i don’t know if i can really articulate it properly yet. i think that it’s in the carrying out of creating an idea, the physical act of doing it, where you understand the meaning of it, beyond the initial intention or the conscious effort. this entire process has been about my limitations – the limits of my understanding, and of my efforts and ability to work with something that operates within such a large system. it becomes about my own relationship with the world around me and how i go about trying to locate myself somewhere in it - with my naive methods of observation, my hand-made devices, my subjective experience of time. i know that sounds kind of obvious…i mean what else could you do? it’s a way of trying to make sense. it’s just about impossible. i am trying to hold one small piece, for one moment, because this is all i can do, and maybe all that i want.

back up

 afterLandscape  @ The Tree Museum

 2010 Annual Exhibition  -Site Specific Installations by

 Bev Hogg and Trish Roan ( Australia ), Penelope Stewart and Jeannie Thib ( Canada )

 Opening  Reception   Sunday September 5, 2010   Noon to 5pm.
 

Penelope Stewart-Cloche 

last week (or something like that)

 

8th september 2010 (montreal)

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15th september 2010 (new york city)

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17th september 2010 (toronto)

.

okay, so i thought i would keep this going while i was away, but i haven’t been doing a very good job. i have been in canada since the end of july, and did a residency and group exhibition at the tree museum in muskoka, ontario. today, i am in toronto, but i will be moving around a bit and doing volunteer work until i get to calgary, alberta, where i will be spending a month at the alberta college of art and design (ACAD).

recently i caught up with the lovely wendy and andrew in montreal, edison and jane bruce in new york, and spent a week helping out mat redsell at his off-grid sustainable home in port burwell, ontario.

things are good. i hope you are good too.

at southern cross station

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/tree-museum.html

a hundred windows