What matters in my art
Art in the way that I make it engages matter with a sense of its livingness in a certain place at a particular time, discovered in the relation between its immediacy and my eye/mind. It’s an event on the spot as distinguished from long planned or conceptualized projects. I began as a potter, and for many years worked clay, earth—matter—as I saw it first with my hands and body. Some years later through photography, it’s as though the matter went into the surround, requiring other senses—visual, of course, but also an other sense, centered more fully in the body itself, as I’m often moving in a place when the action happens.
Technique and technology are never foregrounded—I use them as I need them. What matters—what makes particular matter show itself in the moment—is the sense of direct transfer of energy from the thing over to me. I could say from the source to me, enlarging the sense of source to include, say, a vibrant landscape or a piece of something discarded or unrecognized but newly communicative. The communique is the event at hand. It lets me feel like an explorer of the wilds in everyday life.
Landscape becomes a field of transformation resonant with interior space. The thing or the space or the surround becomes the alchemical vase. Looking into it is like looking into its eyes and being seen in my seeing. I listen to the surround with my eyes, as opposed to looking at it; it’s more like looking with it, working with its permission to be.
I am excited by witnessing the world coming out of its hiding places. We meet in the open for the time of a lens click. Actual presence stepping up intensity. It’s the extra rare ordinary, a coming together of the highs and the lows of living space. I get to see the subtle body of the landscape, for which it is vital to feel invited—not to intrude. Even vast space like the sky can offer an intimacy. Its ineffability catches me. Then I think I might grasp the meaning of the gristly roots of ideas that are in action.[1]
[1] Ezra Pound in Guide to Kulchur (1938) quoting the great ethnologist Leo Frobenius.