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

2) melbourne, australia.

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.

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

The first time I saw snow, I was on the train going through Saskatchewan. The train lumbered past miles of paddocks, flat fields of stubble, and shallow pools of water. It was a beautiful clear day outside, big blue sky. The sun is so bright in the prairies. It flashed off every tiny puddle of water hidden in the scruffy grass, showing which path the tractor had taken, or where the cows had walked on soft ground. Our movement through the landscape revealed all these drawings in light that appeared for a second then fell away into the past.

The first snow i saw was just scattered lightly on the ground at first, just sort of gathered behind tussocks of grass. And you know, I actually thought it was salt. Honestly. I don’t know why, just that that was the only thing that came to mind immediately. And there was more of it, and it got thicker and in wider patches, and I thought “now why would they fuck up their fields like this?” Yeah, it was strange, but it actually took me quite some time to get it. It was only later when we passed some pools of water and I realised that each of the branches and fence posts and grasses sticking out had a little ring of ice around them, just at the point where they pierced the surface of the water. It was freezing outside. It kind of spun my head around to realise all of this. And the snow on the ground got thicker and and the ponds started to be frozen over and I couldn’t believe I was seeing this.

I also saw the most beautiful thing, a forest of small skeletal trees or bushes, all bare with very fine branches. The branches were completely coated with ice. The sun shone brightly from behind the trees and lit up the ice, like a forest of glass, which glittered and changed as the train moved past.

I had a day before I was due in Calgary, so on Saturday I took a bus out to the mountains and stayed there for a night. The next morning I got up early and went for a walk. It was so incredible. There was no one else around. I was heading up this trail, and nobody had been there yet that day, so there was a perfect blanket of snow on the ground, with animal tracks that had started to fill in but that was it. What an amazing feeling to walk across this. There is a moment I remember clearly where the sun shone directly through where the trees parted for the trail, and illuminated the snow crystals on the ground. As I walked, these glittering particles would jump out at me, reflecting colours of the rainbow like little prisms. It felt like walking through a dream, everything soft and vivid and solitary.

While I was walking up the trail, snow started falling out of the sky – just sparsely at first, but then more and more, in big pieces. I caught one in my hand and for the first time I saw a snowflake – just like the ones I’d made in paper as a kid – clear and delicate and perfect for a second before it melted and vanished. This just blew my mind! I guess we all know what snowflakes are supposed to look like, but I kind of assumed you needed a microscope, or a magnifying glass at least. I didn’t realise they were so big you could see them, and see that they are for real! There were some bigger clumps falling out of the sky, and when they landed in my hand they burst, scattering little snowflakes everywhere, each one of them unique and amazing. I could not believe how special, sublime and precious all of this was.

There are some things that you cannot truly accept until you are faced with them. So now I understand…now I believe in snowflakes.

I remember the first night it started snowing in Calgary, I was staying with some lovely students from ACAD, Heidi and Greg, who live on the 23rd floor of an apartment building downtown. It was quite late at night when the snow started. I kept going back out on to the balcony every so often to see how it was all going. It just looked like rain in my hand, and it looked like a cloud of flashing light under the streetlamp far below. It took hours for all those tiny particles to collect on the black bitumen below enough to show up, and to cling to each other and not melt into the road. It was so incremental, but there was enough of it, and it happened.

The next morning, the falling snow was so tiny, it had more of a 3-dimensional form, not quite like a flake but more like jacks, almost. When I walked out to catch the train that night, they had become flakes. I could see it just from the way the light reflected off them as they fell, it was really different. Under the streetlights, they reflected fleetingly colours like green and purple, even from the ground as I walked over it. And the river kept trying to freeze over. It looked amazing. It was a constantly changing thing, slowing, solidifying, then shaking off the torpor and melting into hundreds of little icebergs. In the evenings when it froze all this mist rose off it, just like everything else downtown – all of the smokey buildings in Calgary releasing the steam from their heating systems.

On the days when the sun comes out, the light on the snow is so beautiful in the afternoons – a strange thick orange light, and the shadows it casts are blue. I’m in love with snow. I love its gentle purity when it has fallen and no-one’s walked across it yet – the rounded edges where it’s piled up creating forms that no human could make, that are only created by the slow accumulation of millions of falling particles landing and clinging to each other. I love the tracks through it too, all those great lines and drawings, records of movement and short-term history. And I love the layering that happens when tracks get snowed over, then drawn again, then covered. When the black bitumen shows through the snow, in the shape of footprints or tyre tracks, it just takes a gentle snowfall to turn all these grey, like a half-tone. Then you get fresh tracks which are black, and this process keeps on happening until you have all these gradients telling a story on the ground – a story that fades out of existence on one end whilst continually being created on the other.

Of course, I’m obsessed with the idea of a palimpsest, in any shape or form. And I like to think about our actions and rhythms being like a big drawing in space.

Rick told me that when his grandmother first came to North America from Brazil and saw it snowing for the first time, she started to cry. The other thing that made her cry was seeing for the first time people in their cars making way for an ambulance to go past.

(jeanette winterson, ‘The Passion’)

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.

this is how we got to the tree museum, most days.

on this particular morning, i really needed solitude. i sat out in this canoe in the middle of the lake for about an hour. it was one of those amazing days where the water is like a mirror.

i have some more photos from the residency at this beautiful place, i’ll put em up here shortly…

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.

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.

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.