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From this end of the world

I remember being young and beautiful enough that young men would introduce themselves and ask where I was from.
When I answered, “Anniston, AL”,
I can still remember one answer, “that’s the end of the world”.

Another story from my past though many years later was a night in Bilbao, Spain with a group of architects talking about forming a group.
One said “What we need is a ‘has been’ “.
Being the oldest, I spoke up saying,  ”Oh I can be that!”
“No, no you can’t because you’ve never been”.

So here I am
from the end of the world
I have never been
And it is 2012…

East Coast

From my window I can see Mt Cheaha, the highest point in Alabama. One hundred miles down the road is another beautiful spot, Little River Canyon. Hiking and biking trails are scattered and bike races are one of our more popular events. As an artist I have always loved maps and making connections between things. I am beginning a map of this end of the world.

Lowest point to the highest point in Alabama. Little River Canyon to Mt. Cheaha

Since reading Douglas Hofstader’s book Goder, Esher and Bach in the early 80’s I have been interested Isomorphic mapping:

“when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where ‘corresponding’ means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures.”

Using this method I will link the flocking patterns of bird migrations, hiking and biking trails, creeksand streams, ancient Indian effigies, sacred places, events, time lines, caves, underground waters, camping sites, bed and breakfasts and eating stops along the way. Using Alice in Wonderland by way of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Through the Looking Glass and Gilles Deleuze’, The Logic of Sense, I will make connections  to dark matter and dark energy. I was told by one of my mentors that I was not even interested in trying unless it was impossible.

Process

Looking at something so hard that it  explodes

Re/membering, seeing the spaces between,

Hearing echoes of Piranesi, painting, and then finding the remembered prison.

Chalk dust imprisons the fragments,

Nothing but echoes remain.

It is a way of exploring space as a dimension of time. Accepting that place is a dimension of time while questioning what a dimension really is? What are the patterns of connections?

One day connects to another by darkness, by unremembered dreams,
by very fine lines, twisted and knotted, by movement—by turning.
The end of a line reaches out to touch another
but it never does.
The brush that I feel against my skin is made by the space between.
Sometimes it is an other’s breath, sometime it is the pain of a stabbing knife.
An almost remembered thought—of falling, of passages, doorways, entrances, exits.
The sound of the wind in the trees—echoes of  katydids,  sound of inner wings—
spaces filled with patterns of energy.

All seems to be found in the search for vanishingly small mutating patterns…

My immediate environment is an “expanding” field documenting the ”mo(ve)ment”: the moment of movement from idea to form.

photographs made with an olympus CF typeP10S

medical camera made to photograph the inside of the body

reclaiming the site:

In 1993 a steel sculpture, a tool for three dimensional mapping, was built in the cirque ,the steep hollow next to the studio. It was intended to be a probe and a collector that would interact with the environment.

an artist’s book, THE CIRQUE, an interactive map, was written as an initiation.

In 1994 Hurricane Opal traced its path through the cirque felling 40 trees: 7 falling directly on the sculpture.

(More of an interaction than was intended).

TRANSIENT PLANES

the site reclaimed

http://www.patriciaboinestpotter.com/transientplanes.htm

“Time has no meaning, space and place have no meaning on this journey. All times can be inhabited, all places visited… The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or place, bur it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door which disappears at once.”                                                                                                                              Jeanette Winterson

Mapping the Sky

I find myself looking back into notebooks written 20 years ago that are still relevant to me today.

“All things are created by taking that which has no speed—thought—and expanding it into that which does—light—and then slowing the light down until you create this and that and all that is around you.”

Ramtha

Mapping the Earth