Listen. Or; what does that mean to be here? What does that mean to the sandpipers who flit in fear as I lay tracks in sand. I stand still. Sandpipers, 2, 3, 4, 6, maybe more; continue on in my stillness like sheep drawing close to stone bodies or bodies laying in grassy fields. Marking, depressing long grasses with the weight of their selves.
So what will you do about it? How will you move through this space before the tide comes?
Traditional ways of knowing are not thought-centered. In fact, a prerequisite for this way of knowing is to fall completely out of thought.
Listen. Or; notice how the heart has the quality of being alive. Or Nan who says. “My eyes were in my feet”
Traditional listening is an active process of quieting the mind, listening without an agenda, attending to conscious exchange and unique truths.
Listen.
Or;
Trickle.
Drop. drop.
Whir.
walking through a place is about __becoming__ not __being __. we are in constant shift, flux, movement and in various states of transformation. I collect seaweed today with waves crashing hard beside me. restless last night storm waves. a steady ring in my right ear with their builds and collapses. must walk back soon, even out. Sometimes I catch a collection of swarming curves as three or four arcs press up against each other. are they too excited to wait their turn? or; like a rambunctious pup left to storm into a rolling pile of canine friends. I wonder if the wave knows there is no race, she will just become another wave soon enough.
Of course the wave knows. What the wave wants. and is and does and feels.
I ask to feel with it. In transitions, we can be receptive to what surrounds us, maybe. Or maybe, giggle with the waters excitement as two, maybe three, maybe four perfect crests collide.
I like the bundles of seaweed dragged outwards and inwards, wrapped round and around itself. The rockweed, kelp, knotted wrack, become salted moon mounds. Sea crescents or balls– take your pick. Sometimes the crescents sit gently around the bundled spheres. The two fitting together like pasta dough on the counter last night. Adam tells me his family cooks lobster on the dock with big pots of seawater. More salt goes in my pasta water. Maybe one day I will take water straight from the harbour. Dough-y loops are cut into smaller pieces and we twist them around chopsticks and dump them in. I would like to live here longer, twist about, ready to be picked up by the sea. I am not through yet.
We are walking together again. Sometimes chatting but mostly silent, meditating on the crunch of snow underfoot. I see a speckling of ochre, maybe iron, peeking through the white. I stop, unthinking yet methodical–– I know well enough now the habits of collectors. Mum crouches low to uncover the treasure, gently rubbing the snow off a large gauge rusted washer, before dropping it into her pocket. We walk on without paying too much heed to this subtle act of discovery and aside from the ritualistic placement of the washer beside all those items collected before (a rusted nail, steel rings and railroad spikes) the day, our years progress without too much thought of what these rusted objects mean. Nearly a decade after the magical walks with my mother, I find myself living in a small apartment beside the train tracks that cuts the city of Montreal in two distinct parts. The rumbling steel trembles glassware on the shelf and the chain link fence that surrounds the rail is cut and mended, slashed and repaired almost daily-– cutting across the tracks is one of the only pedestrian connectors between the two boroughs. Sneaking through the ever emerging holes in the fence, I access a thoroughfare where I take long walks, teetering along edges and collecting rust–– thinking about the wordless connection between mother and daughter with every washer and rail spike I find. Moving to Mi’kmaqi (Nova Scotia), I have managed with no real intention, to find a new home beside the tracks. __Twenty Eight__. The current count of spikes stored in various corners of my studio. Also the years I have been wandering this earth. My pilgrimages along tracks continue and as my collection grows, so too does a connection to home. In the same way the spike is driven into the wooden sleeper connecting track and rail, the collected iron stake connects to the possibilities of moments passed. In On Longing, Susan Stewart would call this an object of nostalgia. Nostalgia, she says, is a sadness that creates longing and is the repetition that mourns all inauthentic repetition: it harps on “the inability of the sign to ‘capture’ its signified, of narrative to be one with its object”. Railroad spikes: a connective tissue between the repetition of collecting and memories of my mother. In this space, nostalgia erupts and a sense of longing persists in the efforts of connecting the sign with the signified.
In Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison guides us through a series of investigations on alternatives to the narrative arc. How can we understand alternative ways of writing, hearing, seeing, living a story? Rhizomatic has become a term used in nonlinear literature but what about a walk or a wave? In general, walking focuses not on boundaries and grids that define ownership in land but on paths that are the connective thread running through the place organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning (Solnit 162). Rebecca Solnit’s books often follow this winding path— moving slowly, lingering, mapping territory to understand the details of place and narrative. A meander specifically, involves slowness and digressions that mean to make us pause and look around, contemplating the unusual or unseen. Meanders are a removal of linearity but are not without direction. Likewise, a wave might be a form of storytelling that is structured to resist chronology and hierarchy. A wave need not be a narrative arc, peak, and denouement. Alison asks: “Something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?” A wavelet might be an alternative. A narrative rippling or oscillation; little ups and downs and rhizomatic dispersions that might be more true to the human experience than the macho swell. The story advances, sometimes resolves and sometimes, goes backwards. In Rusted Coat Pockets works to combine the shape of a meander and wave to resolve entangled, rhizomatic stories.
wet/dry/wet
join/cut/join
decay/renew/decay
surge/subside/surge
iii. Collaborations
(Treading softly)
How do I begin to read weeds, seeds, rust, and rocks?
I use my hands.
How rust likes to permeate and I let it seep into the corners of the studio it wants to rest.
How tannins from goldenrod smell like grandmas too-strong pekoe and I swirl my memories through the dye bath
How slate dust falls to the floor and makes drawings over objects forgotten
How seaweed dries and flakes and tells me it does not want to be held
How sea water evaporates and crystalizes and teaches me to wait
ii. space
(On expanded painting and deconstruction)
A series of questions to consider space in the studio:
If I consider the entire wall of the studio space, might I find serendipity and interconnection?
Are these conversations the work itself?
Is the masking tape hanging on a loose nail the same as a rusted nail hammered crudely into the drawing?
Is the circle a repetition of a paper coffee filter moon?
Are wax and acorn beads threaded like spheres of energy across space celebrating materials the same way the wedding flags celebrate love?
Is making in a studio an act of enshrining new relics of assembled material?
How does my understanding of the pictorial merge with the sculptural?
Can the studio be a space to talk about place?
Is installation an effort to conflate both space and place?
What do barnacles have to do with Robert Smithson ?
What stories are left on paper when slate is washed with sea water?
Are patterns left behind a part of the thing or their own being?
My meandering unites thinking with doing. When I walk for long distances, several things may begin to happen.
(km 2): I notice a heightened sense of awareness: sounds, smells, textures.
(km 5): I might feel as though suddenly, my mind slips into my body. This is generally the moment I realize the two have been separated for far too long.
(km 11): My sense of time changes drastically. I do not know what this means yet. It is not here or there. Being in a state of (slow) movement, I hover between liminality and presence.
(km 18): I lose sense of body/mind separation. It feels something like a clunk, a breath, then a lightness.
(km 24): The circular motion of thoughts has run its course and now it is just: step. step. step.
Time scares the hell out of me.
I walk to slow it down.