The idea of digging is making its way into my work. Digging for the meaning, digging in my heels, and digging back into history are all ways that I've recently begun an excavation of sorts. This recent video installation is about a search, but without a real feeling of completion, or knowing what it is that you are looking for while you're digging.
Dig Project Mobile Unit, 2011
This urge to dig in the sand is overwhelming to me. The sandy riverbeds from the recently receded Missouri River are miles long now, taking over paths and parks that we used to walk along, toppling trees and burying signage. This enough is an awesome sight to me, but the sheer familiarity of the fine silt in my fingers, the shells that turn up in its depth, and the dune formations from the prairie wind make me feel like I am back home on the Florida coast. This is the feeling that I cannot let go.
The video shows me setting up and demarcating an area that I have chosen to search - out of all the sand - and then setting to work. Digging methodically with a shovel at first, then furtively with my hands. There are scenes from different days, different holes. Sometimes I discover nothing, so the search continues.
The relationship between what we eat and how it makes us feel is sometimes hidden. “Gnawing” is a documentation of my attempt to eat healthier, using baby carrots as the symbol of a wholesome food. Taking small and measured bites, the video focuses on the mouth, making the action of eating seem incredibly physical and intimate. Each carrot is left with the marks of my bites, showing the intimacy of the action and the choice to eat only a little.
The viewer becomes a voyeur into the personal actions and decisions that people make every day regarding diet and food choice that is sometimes not fully weighed. While the video loops, the pile of carefully bitten and gnawed carrots becomes an object for contemplation and references my physical body, a nod to the idea that I want to effect an observable change by eating small, sensible bites of food.
Growing up in Florida, collecting shells was a pastime of mine. A marker of places visited, shells were abundant, varying, and spoke about the life forms and history of my native land. Once I moved west of the Mississippi, there were far fewer shells to find but many more rocks to discover. In both Texas and South Dakota, I have found that I pick up different interesting rocks along my travels, either to commemorate a place as a memento of a visit, to hold in my hand as a talisman, or to place on a shelf at home as an object of beauty. Rocks hold secrets much the same as shells – a creation of geologic time and compressed minerals that I can carry home in my pocket.
This particular piece (a work-in-progress) is a creation of maps within the rock forms, which serve to mimic the geographical places I have explored. As an installation, the rocks aim to relate the way we as humans collect and categorize things, including our distinct trait of recording and mapping.
I feel as though so many things capture my interest right now, that it's impossible to stay focused on one area of research. Perhaps the layering of these little thoughts or images truly is the answer to my struggles. This drawing would almost certainly be better if there was a little Eames chair tucked away in it somewhere.
Last Wednesday morning, I woke up early and couldn't go back to sleep. I decided to drive out to Spirit Mound to walk to the top again and try to make my own map of the area. As I was documenting a nice section of sage along the path, leaning in to smell its fresh scent, a moth flew out from the brush and landed right on my map.
I tried to shoo it off of my paper, but to no avail. It wandered around my drawn elevation lines of the mound, and then took a tiny crap on the section of rocks I'd previously labeled - bright orange moth poo, right on my hand-drawn map. I'd had the notion earlier to use this as a guide to recreate the map onto larger paper, but now that it had been so interestingly trail-blazed, I decided it was best to dirty it up a bit more. Aren't all good maps worn in by use?
