In October 2018, I was invited to join a community of artists for a text-themed residency at Arteles in rural Finland. I left Minnesota, and after a long journey, arrived at the remote and idyllic retreat in the forest. Along with 13 other visual artists and writers, I had a month-long intensive experience called EnterText
I had a very productive month, and wrote about it here and here.
This past year has been dedicated to translating the sketches and media experiments I made in Finland into textile works. The transition to fabric has gone smoothly and surprised me with how easy it is to duplicate and develop the ideas from paper to cloth.
When I think of a conversation, it is linear, not rectangular as on a sheet of paper or book. Inspired by Tim Ingold’s In Defence of Hand Writing, I’ve written out three of the recordings on long fabric ribbons with a nod to prior technology, the analog tape-recordings of the last century. How the tape is seen as a dimensional form imbues the ideas of time unwinding and re-living an event in the past.
Ingold writes:
““it is because my hand knows words as continuous, flowing gestures and not as sequences of discrete letters. In a cursive script the line, as it unravels upon the page, issues directly from this gestural movement, with all the care, feeling and devotion that goes into it.””
“Handwriting and drawing, they report, re-awaken long-suppressed sensibilities and induce a greater sense of personal involvement, leading in turn to profound insight.”
“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with copying stuff out. As musicians and calligraphers have always known, whether practising a piece or writing out a text, copying is a form of meditation that can slowly but assuredly lead to deep understanding. It involves the practitioner's entire being: the hand that writes or plays the work, the mind that dwells on its meaning, and the memory that fixes it.”
For this reason, I’ve focused on writing out the words of the stories in my own long-hand, without breaking the line. Try talking with a gap between each word, it sounds robotic and ridiculous!
Another concept I’ve been working with is the idea of layering as the repetition of the story from its actual event, recorded into memory, then recollection from a cue, to the snippets drawn together and spoken, recorded, and then heard again and again. Each telling, recalling, listening, is another variation, and yet they all hang together, representing a moment in time.
In this process of transcription, I’m looking at the variables that make up the process. One such characteristic is the time it takes to say so many words. The number of words per minute varies throughout a conversation, and I’ve captured that in this work:
The Time It Takes, 2019. Each loop represents one minute-full of words.
One major theme that I keep returning to is the importance of these conversations to me, and to my mom, as her memory deteriorates. A phrase in the audio book, Where the Crawdads Sing reminded me that ‘her words need a place to go, and so I absorbed them through my skin.” In this age of shallow digital communication, the texture and nuances of spoken conversation are something that reach deeply into our being and tie us to those around us.
As you can see, the Lines that began in Finland have led me further and deeper into this work, and for that, I am extremely grateful to the founders, supporters, and staff of Arteles Creative Center!
