ephemeral

                                                          Photo by Jeff Derose

A writer once asked me why I prefer to make work that is ephemeral. This question swirls around my head while I work in the field as the wind picks up or when I arrive only to find that rain has taken down a certain section of the wall. I initially I answer, because life is ephemeral and I realize that this is way too easy of an answer. It is in the continuous tearing down and the building up of material, the additive and reductive elements so prevalent in traditional art, that I start to understand the nature of what it means to be ephemeral.

Making art that may not last takes the emphasis off of the final product and puts a highlight on process. It allows the invisible element of time to be visible in the most fundamental way. We witness, even experience, change. Perhaps my art mimicks what I see in the farms surrounding me in New England as they fall in disrepair.

Penelope

One of the benefits of working on a project this large is enjoying the people who come to visit while I am weaving. They sit with me in November’s parsimonious sun, the sounds of roosters crowing mixed in with their conversation. Some school children will visit during recess and make precious and insightful comments.

More common are the hours that I am by myself with my own thoughts for company. It is here in the rhythm of weaving raw wool that my mind wanders between the internal contemplation of solutions to world’s problems and the simple awe of geese migrating overhead.

Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes is when I receive a special visitor; Homer’s tragic character, and Odysseus’ faithful wife Penelope, will sit with me as I weave, quietly at first. But soon my mind fills with questions.What was Homer trying to say through you? You have diligence of process with no concern for the outcome. Where does your hope and that ever- elusive patience come from? As an artist who unweaves her work every night you must be tired. The very image of you is both filled with energy and entropy. The building up and the tearing down, all for the result you are so sure of.

I realize I am asking myself these questions. When I look across my work that the wind and rain are disassembling I am torn between reweaving the wool or allowing the environmental deconstruction. It challenges me. It both visually fills me with energy and tires me when I think of the ephemeral nature of my work.

Perhaps it is Penelope under the darkness of night unweaving my hard work of the day. Perhaps she is teaching me faithfulness of my art, faithfulness to process and then ultimately faithfulness to life, for this is my life’s work.

Walling In

…… Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

what I was walling in or walling out…..

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

 

This sculptural event will be up for one month at the Hartbrook School in Hadley, Massachusetts, during which time the community will be weaving wool into a wire substrate. Wind and rain will participate too, changing the character of the wall as the community is building it. The wire has been kept loose so that the wind creates a billowing and undulating affect as if the wall were alive. Eventually the fence will enclose sheep in their pasture and we will witness the sheep walled in a textural, familiar environs that they will blend in.

When the students at the school are introduced to something unexpected, like wool woven into chicken wire, the first question I inevitably hear is WHY?!  I love this question, because it is one I ask of myself, and also one I answer with other questions, such as what if?.... What will it look like if we build a pasture fence out of the very material that is gathered from the sheep?  What will the wind and rain do to it? Can the community build it too? And an idea blossoms into a material object that is textural, experiential and process oriented.

When I was in Wales I would walk over the land of the sheep farm where I was staying, and find tangled bits of wool in the landscape, clinging to wire, branches, crevices of rock walls; the residual history of the sheep in the landscape.  Here, in New England, there are fences and walls of every type of material, protecting, containing, and delineating property and borders. These two thoughts are the germination of the project, but as with all art, it is only the beginning.

The sensory experience of feeling lanolin on one’s hands and smelling wool is as much a part of this art piece as looking at the texture and watching the wind play with tendrils of loose wool. On the first day of participation in this project the participants curious questions fell away as the experiential process of the installation answered the all- important question of why?

Documentation of the sculptural event will be posted as the wall is built.