Field Notes

Thoughts occur between contexts – the reclamation of the Icelandic forest and environmental consciousness; a man-made forest on an island in the North Atlantic scant of trees. I find familiarity here, at once sheltered and curious. A newfound sense of freedom discovered in Heiðmörk. Freedom as an immanent idea, an individual manifest destiny. I walk among the native birch, Norwegian spruce, Alaskan pine and think of identity. Body and mind in active examination. I observe the cyclical nature of all living beings mimicked in the concentric growth rings from the trees that surround me. Time and memory situate my being.  
 
His adventures will be a deciphering of the world… Each exploit must be a proof: it consists not in a real triumph – which is why victory is not really important – but in an attempt to transform reality into a sign. Into a sign that the signs of language really are in conformity with things themselves. 
 
Michel Foucault, Don Quixote, The Order of Things, 1976
 
Nature keeps me close to the elemental; in its nuance I locate a sense of belonging. In this cultural moment of techno-science ambiguity, what is real in the liquid states of actual and virtual reality? Wood and stone are material informants embedded with atomic energy, microcosms of temporality that reveal the truths of our being. Arboreal: of, or of the nature of, trees; tree-dwelling. A forest is an environmental architecture emblematic of our interdependency, and, equally, our discontinuity with the natural world. Trees are ecological vessels, shelters of signification indicative of the relationship between caretaker and beneficiary. 
 
Dualities divide and unite the nexus between social-political systems and the human condition. My work allows for an emotional distance necessary to process – to decipher tensions of the material world that obscure reality. Sculptural interpretations explore necessary counterbalances as a metaphor for gravity and verticality. I learn dignity from the phenomenal order of nature, in the grain of wood and marbling of stone. Empathy for all beings reveals truth and beauty. There is no center, there is only centering.
 
 

 

 
 
 
Útskriftarhátíð 2019
X