“The boxes, or frames, are obviously boundaries between mediums and the pieces are meant to demonstrate to what extent each medium penetrates those boundaries and influences the other.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
These pieces emerged from a project I proposed to The Banff Centre last year to build a series of sculpture-poems, diptychs, their juxtaposition exploring the interaction of the numinous and physical.
For many years I have written poetry while earning a living as a stonemason/sculptor. I was always intrigued that language, essentially time-based, disposed itself spatially as well – in hieroglyphs, runes, ideograms, sign language, characters. Then, of course, I began to see the poetry in stonework.
The masonry coursing resembled lines, the stones words with harmonic spaces between them – a sort of text that could be lyrical, whimsical or staid, fixed yet dynamic. In stonework I found a tactile, breathing language and it overflowed generously into my poetry.
The shape and essence of the stones dictated their position and influence, the overall composition of a wall or terrace. So, crucially, my poetry grew more concrete, less conceptual – form liberating form – the words emerged from a physical-mental participation. I no longer could isolate the two forms.
There are prescribed boundaries, though, between utilitarian and aesthetic values, between a chimney and a poem, the commercial and artistic, as I often was reminded when I expected to get paid for a stone job I thought completed. Or are there, really? To investigate these boundaries I provided boxes, which I think of as epistemological frames, markers of categories of medium, suggesting that to venture into either zone one must shift to another kind of thinking. Does one unconsciously think like a bear in bear country?
Or, is the dimension of art undivided; do all mediums overflow into one another, draw from and enrich one another?
These pieces represent the investigation of those questions, with no concern for finding answers. The boxes, or frames, are obviously boundaries between mediums and the pieces are meant to demonstrate to what extent each medium penetrates those boundaries and influences the other.
To what extent, if at all, do they interact and change, individually and as a unit? A paradox, but they can be thought of as ‘stills’ of a flowing partnership. A way I’ve always thought of a poem. How can it possibly be fixed? You could think of the stones and poems as shamans, each trespassing into the others’ sacred realm, returning with vital information.
The pieces of poetic text with wire letters in a scrim of beeswax are an attempt to directly encompass and juxtapose the tactile and ethereal. The effect of combining these opposing qualities is almost that of weather arising from a fusion of elements. Concept merges with physical to generate a vibrant process, testing dimension.
It’s as if each medium, in contact with the other, extends beyond its normal boundaries and probes negative and positive space, presence and absence, decay and regeneration. Underneath pulses as existential inquiry concerning utterance, its referent and form.
