In my work I see this phenomenological dialogue beginning to take form between the natural world, habitual engagement, and conscious experience. This fall I have begun a series of stop motion animations that chronical the creation of a living sculpture made from harvested goldenrod stalks. As the stalks accumulate, staged on an old bench outside, the light changes with every passing still image. The world we live in, the breathing blades of grass, the rapid transition of sunlight to shadow, these elements are “inalienable’ from the piece.
I treat this project like a repetitive action or experiment; each stalk is placed atop of the one before until the bench is full. I release the shutter and place the stalk within the camera delay. This creates a habitual rhythm within these stills, the ground was trod and there is urgency to my performative role. The memory of this practice locates my presence, though intentional invisible throughout this animation. Here is a still where I failed to extract myself:
This project began as a celebration and harvest of the iconic beautiful plant, Goldenrod. A native plant to New England, goldenrod has this lifetime of connotations; its bloom is the indicator of this seasonal shift, its bright fuzzy yellow covers fields like heather and acts as host to many different insects, butterflies and bees. In this animation, I place down blankets of naturally dyed wool, from my previous work, on an old bench beneath an apple tree. They act as comforters, vessels of collection. They hold and hug the stalks of goldenrod as they accumulate and tower on the bench. In the pinocle moment of this short collection of moving images, the blankets fold around the stalks of goldenrod, like a bouquet or a present; displaying this multitude of objects as one new recognizable thing.
In bringing artwork into being, I often wonder and try to understand why I want to place myself, my work in this outdoor world. I see the space around my childhood house as an extension of home. The land, that’s use has been fought over and whittled down, is so much alive with a whole metropolis of nature and animal kingdoms. I see it as both a part of my home and also outside of it. Like a surrounding infrastructure that predates everything I can conceive of but still responds to my everyday interactions.
Merleau-Ponty explains, “The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-exisiting being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing, truth into being.”[1]
And so I try to see the world around in this manner, in awe of world, in engagement with my wonder while in the world. This laying down of being allows a space for all things and for delineations to overlap and unfold inside out. Merleau-Ponty goes on, “One may well ask how this creation is possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The answer is that the only pre-existent Logo is the world itself, and that the philosophy which bring it into visible existence does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it.”[2]
A phenomenological understanding of the world is where I find myself and my art practice, as an extension of the unfinished world.
My practice and work seek to highlight moments of suggested connection between the temporal landscape, the landscape of body and the internal landscape of the mind and to drift between these ideas in fluidity. A natural conclusion or success for my practice would be to see my work integrated back into the world at large and regenerated in some way.
Ponty states “I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me).”[3]
[1] M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: Preface xxiii.
[2] M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: Preface xxiii
[3] M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: Preface ix.
