Zurlindas: Volumes
2024: Things That Hold Things: collaboration with Mara Züst for her printed works and Michiko Hanawa for her moving bibliothek
foraged wood, indigo, soap stone
I go into the woods to find treasure. Sometimes there are branches that have fallen after a storm or entire trees uprooted, leaving cavities that reveal the pooling of sediment. It is all commonplace but blurs into otherworldliness at the edges when I stop to stare hard enough and to look and try to also see. I go into the woods and come out again dragging branches or rolling logs that are too heavy to carry.
Have you ever repeated a common word, something like “salt” again and again until it becomes strange to you? You repeat this word until you have forgotten it then you learn it and feel it take form, new and delicate in your mouth, lilting out and coming to rest in the hollow of your ear. This going into the woods is similar. These are tame woods, with paths. Yet in between these traveled spaces that have been compressed with the weight and movement of bodies there are things that are still wild and grasping for sunlight. Things that are rife with growth and decay.
So, I go into the tame woods to find wild things that were going unnoticed. I use an axe and knives to uncover the strata of a part of a fallen tree. If I am paying attention, and I ought to be, knives are sharp and an axe is heavy, then sometimes I am lucky and I find the form of some particular common word and can relearn it new and wild in my mouth and let it fall gently out into the world.
