alexandria, i'm waiting
Alexandria, I’m Waiting.
Fall of 2007, I was living in Paris. I bought the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell at the Shakespeare & Company. While reading the book, I felt Egypt leak into my Paris experience which was persistently, a shadowy and sad one. I lived in a few very different places in a short period of time and I began to think a lot about the idea of place. What a place brings out in a person and what a person brings out in a place. About how much of a place, especially one like Paris, exists in the mind as an idea and how it changes when you find yourself actually immersed in it.
I lived in Iceland for one month, Quebec for two months and Paris for five. I changed my practice in each place depending on the tools and materials available and tried my best to let something of the place seep into or speak through me. Paris was the most difficult as it is so brimming with rich artistic heritage that one feels the size of a pinhole there.
In Iceland, I was impressed by the abundance of literature and the closeness of their myths. Much of the land is named after heros and stories from the Sagas. I made a a few sets of collages from books I found there. One series combines old pictures of Icelandic landscapes with old medical drawings. The idea that the people and the land are so tightly woven together. Two other series dealt with the idea of elves, which is another rich vein to tap in Iceland.
In Quebec, I lived in a small town on the St. Lawrence River famous in the region for its tradition of woodcarving. So, there I worked a little with wood. The river itself is full of whales and so I tried to embody the voice of the whale in wood. I turned wood, using a waveform of a whale’s voice to guide the shape. I also worked with snowshoes. I scraped and stripped them down to their core and then tied them as if in a knot.