My family recently took a trip to the Dungeness Spit on the Olympic Penninsula. We had traveled there in December and the house and location were so nice that we returned for another weekend with some friends. I love the dynamism of our coastline here and the contrast between the damp chilliness and winter light of the outdoors with the cozy warmth of the indoors. I always enjoy going new places and seeing new things, but there’s also a rich satisfaction in revisiting a beloved place in different seasons.
It was interesting to repeat the same walks I took a few months ago and observe that I noticed different things. In December, I had applied to the Bellevue Arts Museum’s Wood Biennial and was waiting to hear if I was accepted. (I wasn’t.) What caught my eye then was the forms of the driftwood, the way it was shaped and smoothed by the wind and waves into powerful, yet feminine forms. I was particularly intrigued by the way the hand of man was evident, the natural shapes bound with remnants of metal and rope. I published pictures from that trip in a blog post called Looking Forward, Looking Back.
On this trip, however, even though I traveled through the same landscape what caught my eye was different. I was drawn to those places where one world was contained inside another: a cluster of barnacles growing inside an empty clam shell, a tree growing up inside a boat abandoned on dry land, a view of the distant horizon through a hole in a driftwood log. Stones that were captured by the roots of a growing tree, long felled before it washed up on this shore, and yet still held strongly by the weathered wood. I’ve been working on a series of seedpods, each one filled with a world of translucent seeds, and that work was affecting the way I saw my environment.
I’m always somewhat aware that what I’m working on filters into the rest of my life and affects how I view the world. But traveling over the same paths at different times woke me up to just how much my interior thoughtscape affects my perception of the exterior landscape. As I walked along, I recognized the places I had been before, but I wasn’t pulled to observe and document them in the same intense way I had just a few months before.
I spent this past, rainy weekend doing an inventory of my art and then creating a spreadsheet of all the 3-d work I’ve made since 2008. I’ve put off this kind of administrative work for years. Not taking the time to get organized had added a lot of hours and frustration every time I had put in an application or proposal for an exhibition. Now all the information is in one place on my computer. It really wasn’t as onerous a task as I thought it would be and was actually kind of satisfying. It’s just another way that one world of complexity is be held inside another, only not nearly as pretty.
