Flippity, Flappity, Tube, Tube, Stack: A Conversation in the Moment
This work explores the interconnectedness of my studio practice over a thirty-year period and harnesses the mathematical concept of quantum entanglement as a lens through which to consider ideas forming and reforming over time. According to Space.com Quantum entanglement is “a bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon that explains how two subatomic particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space.” The first thing I thought about when invited to produce an installation of my work at Please Don’t Mow, was the capacity we have to hold an idea over time. To me, this concept of quantum entanglement felt in some way analogous to the ways in which certain ideas and ways of looking persist across the decades of a life.
The first time I ever had writing published, I wrote about an outdoor installation I made (Leonardo, Volume 27, Issue 2, 1994) when I was 20. I’ve worked outside with the intention of rethinking and reshaping space many times with an ongoing interest in our relationship with to the environment. FYI-I was an organic dairy farmer for almost twenty years, and nothing could challenge your notion of environmental impact more than that type of process and lifestyle choice, let me tell you.
Importantly, Please Don’t Mow got me thinking again about the planet and how we look and listen to it. I never had the intention of making work like the famous land artists I studied in my youth Richard Long and Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim. Though, Robert Smithson is the artist who taught me about writing the most and the artist who got me interested in ceramics as a material through the immediacy of his Yucatan mirror displacements. I don’t personally respond to the way the land artists often attempted to change the land to suit their needs or their egos, but that statement is something I had to grow into.
This show “Flippity, Flappity, tube, tube, stack: A conversation in the moment,” is an exhibit comprised of three sculptural ideas the site made me think or rethink about.
These works come together in the site as instances which celebrate the opportunity to make work in response to a site which is a hybrid of the found, the fostered, the neglected and the cultivated. They are vibrant interruptions to the landscape, inviting reflection on the many ways an idea can appear at once, while being tethered to the same starting point. Comprised of material interactions and disintegrations, they are at once a continuation and a departure from the preoccupations of decades of my life.