bark and fungus, improvisation and bones
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| Okay, I guess they don't look that much like anemic zebras. |
One of the visual artists invited me to come see her studio
this afternoon, since I’ll be leaving before she gives the official tour. She’s
been enjoying the birch bark too. She does a lot of site-specific work with
found objects. Those are the kind of terms—site-specific, found objects—that
lose meaning quickly when you overuse them. In this case it means her work is
her studio and her studio is her work. She’s staying in Alexander, an old stone
building that looks like a chapel. Initially, she said, all its fussy parts
threw her off: the big bulletin boards, the arched doorways, the twin bed with
the green blanket.
Then she hung empty wooden frames—stretchers without canvas—and
started filling them with little things she brought from her home in Mexico
City and found here. Rocks, chunks of asphalt, a fungus blossom. Birch
branches. She connected the holes in the bulletin board with wire and made
constellations. She drew one line drawing of a rock each day and date-stamped
it. Each rock is lined up proudly next to its portrait along the forest-facing
window.
“The bed is starting to call to me,” she said, a little
worried. She wasn’t sleepy; it wanted her to make something out it. “It’s just
right there, so long and….”
Her work is very improvisational. It’s a different way of
life. Say you drive into Keene with her and have to be back by two. There’s a
very good chance you might miss your Skype date, because look, there’s a yarn
shop and she’s always wanted to learn to knit.
But when you see the sensual interplay between textures in
her studio—the photos of paint splatters, the stone rubbings, the big flakes of
lead she collected from the crumbling roof of a nearby studio—you kind of want
to see what she could do with a ball of yarn.
All of this could add up to a scrapheap, but the beauty of
it is the organization. She likes to think of her work as a “cabinet of
curiosities,” and it’s as much about the cabinet as the curiosities. It told
her that walking into her studio felt like walking into a map. (Not
coincidentally, she’s been tracing pieces of bark on the wall, and the result
looks like an archipelago.) You feel intrigued and calmed at the same time.
I asked her if she had a plan. It sounded sort of wonderful
to just wake up every day and go trolling for funky-looking sticks. Also a
little scary.
“I came here to work on paintings, but my canvas hasn’t
arrived in the mail yet, so I do this,” she said. “For now, I see what happens.
But after a while, not having a plan, I begin to feel very anxious. So then
maybe it’s good to have a plan. I don’t get too lost. But I’ve been doing this
for many years. I know that even when you’re lost, you find things there too.”
Okay, so it wasn’t so different from writing a novel after
all: You improvise until you can’t stand not having a plan. Then you build some
frames to hang your improvisations on. Sometimes you have to dismantle the
frames and start over.
“Even we have frames,” she pointed out. “Our bones.”
I left her studio feeling inspired to write or draw or hang
a chip of slate from a binder clip on my wall, just like her. I’m so glad
MacDowell is interdisciplinary. Sometimes I learn more from hearing how other
artists approach their work than writers—there are just enough differences and
similarities. I miss the rest of my life, at least the people and cats, but I’m
also going to miss its absence, and all the things that have filled in the space.
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