Wrangells, I hear you.

What a dream it's been to be in McCarthy, Alaska, at the Wrangell Mountains Center. After four days of scouting around and listening, I broke out the microphones yesterday and was delighted by the sounds of this incredible place - The sublime splash of glacial moraine melting free, the almost imperceptible groans and creaks of shifting glaciers, and the gentle lapping and trickling of those stunning, impossibly blue meltwaterlakes. I’m soaking it all in, and here’s a sample.

Underwater Baseball

Overheard underwater in Quartermaster Harbor, Vashon Island, USA

CANA/ACA Soundscape Field Station Residency - Week 01

Perri Lynch Howard | Gordon Hempton | 02.17.2024

Investigations

We have been recording throughout the Apollo Beach Unit of Canaveral National Seashore during the hours of dawn, dusk, and at night. Sites include:
Eldora State House - Pier and Black Mangrove Boardwalk

Ambient/Binaural Recordings of grounds.

Hydrophone recordings of Mosquito Lagoon.

Eldora Hammock - Parking areas 6, 7, 8

Ambient/BInaural Recordings of loop trail.

Recording site for Falcon 9 rocket launch on 15 FEB 2024.
Castle Windy - Walking trail 

Ambient/BInaural Recordings at multiple locations between the access road and lagoon.
Beach 4

Ambient/BInaural Recordings of wave action and shoreline.

Hydrophone recording (buried in the sand).

Beach 5

Hydrophone recording of USSF-124 rocket launch on 14 FEB 2024.

Doris Leeper House

Ambient/Binaural Recordings of various locations on the grounds.

Observations

Anthropogenic sound is constant throughout hours of daylight and darkness, frequently exceeding the sound pressure levels of the natural ambience. Sounds include:

+ Nearshore recreational boat traffic in Mosquito Lagoon.
+ Low altitude single-engine air traffic from a nearby flight school and general aviation.
+ Ground transportation noise, particularly during optimum atmospheric conditions for sound propagation (calm, humid, warm), the same conditions important to wildlife communications.

Dawn recordings -

Dawn chorus is active, but limited to a few species of birds, mostly contact calls with a few songs. First bird calls ~ 6:45A.
Boat traffic commences at ~ 7A in the lagoon and lasts throughout the day, if boating conditions are favorable.

Overflights begin around 7A and last throughout the day, if flying conditions are favorable. 

Train whistles and locomotive sounds are present on an episodic basis.

Distant automobile traffic is constant, from major thoroughfares across the lagoon.
Dusk recordings - 

Little or no evening bird chorus.

Insect sounds (stridulations and striations) from ~7:30p onward, declining with cooler temperatures.

Night recordings -

Insects are predominant.

Occasional frogs.

High altitude commercial air traffic is nearly constant.

Interpretations

Being embedded in the park, at the Doris Leeper house, allows space and time for common moments and beautiful moments in the off-hours that we could not access otherwise.

Exploring the dynamics of public accessibility vs. preservation of the resource.

NOTE: Secretary of the Interior, Udall, said, "When preservation of the natural resource and public use conflict, preservation of the natural resources will endure (1964)." He also authored the book "Quiet Crisis." 

As artists, we're interested in two questions:

First - We are staying in the Doris Leeper House, a historical icon for both her art and advocacy - While she stayed here how did living in the house influence her art and the creation of Canaveral National Seashore? The answer lies in making ourselves available, sensorially, to the nature experience offered here.

Second - What role does the artist have in defending beauty? Does the artist have an intrinsic responsibility to the beauty of this place?

Some Kind of Nature

Frequencies: To Carry On Dreaming | 2023 | Mixed Media on Panel | 24”H x 36”W

The “Frequencies” series explores the passage of light, sound, and signal through landscapes on the front lines of climate change — a phenomenology of place. The sounds you hear were recorded from the west coast of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle during October, 2022, 77.8750° N, 20.9752° E . To access more of my sound installations and visual works, please visit www.perrilynchhoward.com or on instagram, @velocitymadegood.

HEAR THIS

Frequencies: Coastal Waters

FREQUENCIES: COASTAL WATERS
Sailing ship motoring through iceberg bits off the west coast of Svalbard. 
Lat. 76° 58’7.23”N, Long. 15°39’19”E

AUDIO SAMPLES CORRESPONDING TO THE PAINTINGS AT SEATTLE ART MUSEUM GALLERY

The Frequencies series investigates the passage of sound, light, and signal through the landscape. These works are material traces from my experience listening and attending to the world around us.

 The works shown here, with sound, are informed by landscapes that are subject to fire, freezing, drought, or flooding, and showing the effects of a changing climate. 

 The paintings are graphite and acrylic on panel. I sampled the field recordings from the Arctic to the Amazon and interpreted the sounds visually - A phenomenology of place.

-perri lynch howard

Frequencies: Groundswell - 2023

FREQUENCIES: GROUNDSWELL
Deep in the jungle of the Zabalo river watershed, Ecuador.
Lat. 0°22'46.56"S, Long. 75°46'7.84"W

Frequencies: Antipodes - 2023

FREQUENCIES: ANTIPODES
Diving in a submarine in Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, CA.
Lat. 36°36’32”N, Long. 121°53’20”W   

Frequencies: Terra Firma - 2022

FREQUENCIES: TERRA FIRMA
Deep winter at the PLAYA Institute, Summer Lake, OR.
Lat. 42° 58' 23’’N, Long. 120° 46' 35’W

Svalbard Speaks

Perri Lynch Howard is an artist forging new narratives from the front lines of climate change. 

Her recent artworks investigate the impact of marine noise pollution on whales and other mammals in the Arctic Circle. 

She will share images and sound from her expedition above the 78th parallel - sailing the coast of Svalbard on a barquentine tall ship, with an international group of artists, scientists, and journalists through The Arctic Circle Residency Program.

Perri will provide an early preview of works-in-progress inspired by the journey, and illustrate how we can harness the power of art to inspire new narratives in a changing climate.

Light's Flight

ON OUR WATCH

Sound Installation at Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Seattle, WA

PRESS RELEASE - CLICK HERE

Exhibition Dates: Friday, July 15 to Friday, August 12, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, July 15, 7-8:30pm
Youth and Family Workshop (accessible for visually impaired): July 23, 2-4p, 2022
To attend the reception, a workshop or to schedule a visit, email:
jsp@jackstraw.org or call 206-634-0919 / 4261 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105

Once vibrant fortresses protecting the harbors, ports, and cities of Puget Sound, Fort Worden, Fort Casey, and Fort Flagler are now on the front lines of climate change, but were never designed to face this sort of surge. How will the bluffs, bunkers, and batteries weather the storms? The winds? The tides? This artwork offers a contemporary perspective on these emplacements that share a military past, transitional present, and tenuous future in a changing climate.

During an artist residency in 2021 at Centrum located in Port Townsend, I conducted interviews and documented the three forts with photography, video and sound recordings. Through this process, I became fascinated with the sonic signature and deep resonance of the batteries, control towers and other emplacements. The Puget Sound Coast Artillery Museum provided access to the archives to the United States Coastal Defense System. I learned that there was no audio archive for these sites, and became inspired to combine sound and story to create a sense of place. The overlay of the recordings while standing in the visual presence of decaying embattlements leaves visitors with many emotions to reconcile. 

I hope that audiences will derive a sense of place from this installation, be inspired to visit the forts, and take a vested interest in the complex history and unknown future of these beloved destinations.

This exhibition has been generously supported by The Centrum Foundation, The McMillen Foundation, Willapa Bay AiR, The Coast Defense Study Group, The Jefferson County Historical Society, The Puget Sound Coast Artillery Museum, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Artist Trust, MadArt, and a Working Washington Grant.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the contributions of narrators, Sarah Berns, Grace Butler, Sarah Gilman, Joshua Porter, and Christopher Solomon. Heartfelt thanks to Craig Howard for countless edits. This work would not have been possible without guidance and support from Joel Maddox, Levi Fuller, and the production team at Jack Straw Cultural Center. Thank you for the opportunity to share “On Our Watch” with Seattle audiences.

Where were you when?

The comet, Neowise, as seen from the back porch.

In October, 2021, I had the opportunity to perform in a reader’s theatre production at The Merc Playhouse in Twisp, WA. The show was titled “Coronanthology: The Year We Held Our Breath,” directed by Phil Quevillion. The production featured original poetry, prose, essays, and songs written by community members in response to the pandemic. My piece is titled “Where Were You When?” It’s about how the comet, Neowise came rocketing into my life, during the darkest of times. The full text is below.

---

For many weeks now, I've been paging back through the suspended animation of 2020/21 and continue to orbit around one perplexing question:

 “After everything that happened, and all the things that didn’t, will we remember the comet?” 
Neowise. Remember? Neowise, the comet?

My brain continues to pry at this, and I feel a strange sense of obligation to honor Neowise as the miracle it was, or seemed to be. 

Or, by mid-July 2020, five months into the Covid-19 shutdown, were we just way too far gone for miracles?

It is remarkable how Covid-19 has inverted our sense of self, space, and safety. After 790-thousand years of humans building shelter, outside is suddenly safer than inside. There is no more “safety in numbers,” if the number is greater than one, and we have awkwardly learned the new dance of showing our love by backing away, not smushing together.

How will these inversions play out over time?

And, will we remember the comet?

I, for one, won't forget it. It was mid-July, so, even at 3AM it was still hot out. I crept out of our home on East County Road, taking in a deep breath of clean country air beneath the usual blanket of infinite stars. I turned to the North and there, above some darkly silhouetted low-lying foothills, was the rocketing stillness of a comet, hanging in the sky, blazing with whiteness, and an embarrassingly long tail. I had never seen one before, but somehow knew exactly what it was.

I stood there and watched it apparently stand still, captivated by tiny object of light, moving at 40 miles-per-second, but frozen in space and time to my naked, sleepy eye.

Neowise was right up there with the most beautiful things I'd ever seen and, because the world was asleep, it was mine, alone.

After a time, I wandered back inside and back to bed, feeling like I had an extraordinarily good secret.

The next morning, I walked down the driveway on neighborly business. 

“You won't believe what I saw last night,” said my neighbor. 

His eyes sparkled with a secret smile. I had a feeling for the answer but asked anyway, 

"What did you see?" 

"There was a comet!” He said. 

“In the Sky! Over Winthrop!" 

I did not want to squelch his exuberance but had to confess, 

"I saw it, too." 

"You did?!?" “How did you know what it was?” He asked. ”How did you know where to look?"

It was such an endearing surprise to discover that my neighbor had no idea that Neowise was rocketing toward the Methow, during these dark days, getting darker.  

Even in the deepest depths of Covid-19, Neowise managed to capture a few headlines. It was typically covered in the "science" section, quickly upstaged by the latest super-spreader data.

My neighbor didn't read about Neowise in the news. He knew nothing of its clearly-mapped trajectory, or the narrow window of opportunity we had to see it in the sky. He just got lucky. 

It was his comet, his sighting, his miracle alone.

After comparing impressions, we reveled in the moment of our shared cosmic secret. We laughed and shook our heads in amazement and nervously shuffled our boots in the dirt, six feet apart. 

We struggled to recall how long it had been since we had last seen each other. 

After endlessly long weeks of social distancing, my neighbor and I were reconnected by something that was 64-million miles away from both of us.

Where were you when Neowise passed through? Did you know it was coming? Did you happen to see it?

"Where were you when" is a question we use to connect with each other. 

Where were you when Mt. St. Helens erupted? When Kennedy was shot? Where were you when the astronauts walked on the moon? Where were you on 9/11? We ask this question to share a space and time with each other - to share a moment, even when we’re apart.

When a crisis unfolds, we remember where we stood more clearly than we recall exactly what happened or maybe even who we were with.  Our shock, anger, disbelief, and awe embeds itself in the cracks of the pavement, the phone to our ear, the steam rising from our coffee cup.

The impact of Covid-19 is global, and deeply pervasive, but the moment is long. We lived through 9/11, but we live in a pandemic.

Imagine, for a moment, that we are the comet, and Covid-19 is the sky. 

This post-vaccination spread continues to be the backdrop of our lives. It sometimes barges its way to center stage. It frames our movements and stops the action. Often, we forget our lines. Like Neowise, “the comet of us” moves very fast but it feels like we’re standing still.

And, whether we know it or not, we just shine on.

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Once Upon A Whale Song

A spectrogram of sounds from a Humpback Whale.

Plans are afoot for an exhibition next year at the world headquarters of Ocean Alliance in Gloucester, MA. We are joining forces to develop new artworks and narratives that convey the devastating impacts of human-generated noise pollution on whales and marine life in the world’s oceans. The goal of this exhibition is to paint a new picture of the world’s oceans - not as the watery backdrop of our human lives, but as precious habitat for whales, and the medium through which they communicate. 

Presenting art in the context of a marine research facility invites audiences of all ages to think critically and creatively when considering the possibilities for whale conservation, innovative research, and our responsibility to protect whale habitat. 

We are currently seeking funding for the exhibition. If you are interested in learning more or lending your support, click the image above for details, or receive the prospectus via email. Thank you!

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Songs and Stories from Rocky Neck

Lobster Traps, Marine Railway Yard

Here on Rocky Neck for two weeks now.  The work feels multi-directional, if not totally scattered. On one studio wall are the knots, to the right of the knots are the powdered graphite drawings. Over by the kitchen, the impulse purchase of three antique charts hang crookedly from a pair of silver bull clips.

The computer holds the weighty gigabites of sound and image from the Paint Factory, rocky shores, boatyards and beaches. 

The Paint Factory, Home of Ocean Alliance.

My daily routine is a cross-fade between these bodies of work, wondering if they will ever knit themselves together like the acres of nets spooled to the stern of the hauled-out trawler in the neighboring boatyard.

I have been reading some, and recording some, and exploring a lot. Water shapes everything here - the boats, the shore, the people. The salt-encrusted flow of a community in its 400th year of ranching the ocean.  I feel very welcome, very included in this place. 

Rocky Neck, especially, is loved by its residents. The artists seem relaxed and revered. Their studios are sequestered away on misshapen piers and in the former bedrooms of grand old homes. Tides and breezes flow under, around, and sometimes through these provisional spaces for making art.

The sonic signature is very strong. Nuns and bells and buoys pepper the waves in a quiet cacophony. Coves, harbors, and inlets relentlessly lap their waters against all surfaces, everywhere. Docks creak their throaty lament while boat captains belt out the disparaging notes of a well-rehearsed call-and-response, yelling not in anger, just to add emphasis.

Cape Ann is surrounded by water on all sides but is also, somehow, not an island. 

From Inner Harbor, the path to open ocean is a lazy slalom between lobster traps. From the marsh, it's a switchbacking maze of channels through muddy banks and tall grasses. Just when the back-and-forth begins to get tedious, the marsh spreads itself wide into the Annasquam and the Atlantic, birthing lobster boats and pleasure craft in equal measures.

I wonder how many miles of rigging are in this harbor. I have a mischievous desire to disassemble all of the working cordage and cables, and stretch it out, end to end, just to see how many laps it would run around the world.

I wonder where one goes to hear fish stories.

There is a pragmatic repurposing of fishing gear into outdoor furniture, driveway edging, and home decor.

There is not only an art colony, but also a writer's guild.

And there is rain, lots of rain. A deep soaking rain that brings fresh purity, and salty puddles.

Water above, water within, and water below.

Rocky Neck stands firmly on liquid ground.

It's Not A Circle, It's A Spiral

photo by Perri Howard

I'm standing on a salty shore of wet sand and lava rock, looking across a landscape that superficially presents as a beach, but reveals itself to be briny mudflat. Crystalline salt formations bedazzle the surface of a matte grey expanse. This is the northern extent of Great Salt Lake, where the water runs red, and salty waves lap against a pepper shore.

photo by Craig Howard

I begin to ride my bike in lazy circles, cruising over the crust, and sinking into the quickness of the mud, dismounting to walk my bike with slurpy steps, back to stable ground, only to sink again.

photo by Perri Howard

In the center of these circular impressions is a spiral, the Spiral Jetty. A monumental artwork of international fame, laying there in the mud, in the evening, plain as day.

Robert Smithson - Spiral Jetty - 1970 photo by Perri Howard

Lucy Lippard's Overlay was my introduction to this work. I was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at The Evergreen State College. My favorite artist was Georgia O’Keefe. I knew that sculpture existed as a medium, but real artists were painters. Rigid thoughts from such a young radical.

The cover of this book features an image of the sun, low on the horizon, framed by Nancy Holt's monumental earthwork, "Sun Tunnels." This installation is comprised of four gigantic concrete cylinders placed in the desert, but arranged by the heavens. On the solstice and equinox, the sun passes through the center of one pair of the four cylinders. A seemingly haphazard arrangement of fist-sized drill-holes frame additional celestial events. My artwork, at the time, was comprised of poorly-executed drawings and misspent paintings. Her art captured the sun. I knew I had to dig deeper.

Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt and Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson are two iconic examples from the Earth Art Movement of the 70s. These artists and their comrades were too confined by the gallery walls and 30-day rotation of art exhibitions in Manhattan. Their concepts demanded a different space and time, so they headed west, procuring land and installing artwork that was remote, site-specific, and of a monumental scale. These works were designed to interact with the changing conditions of the land, the weather, and the universe.

These artists weren’t painters, but I admired them and wanted to become one. I wanted to engage the land, to work large, to reach audiences that may, or may not, see my work as art - that may, or may not, ever see my work at all.

Nancy Holt - Sun Tunnels - 1973-1976 photo by Perri Howard

Soon after Spiral Jetty was built, water levels rose in Great Salt Lake and six-thousand tons of salty earth art went underwater. This submergence happened fairly quickly. It was not planned, but not prevented either. I hoped and dreamed to one day see this work for real, but how?

Spiral Jetty held its breath for thirty years.

In 2002, drought conditions caused the lake to recede and the artwork reemerged. Spiral Jetty was revealed intact, a little sandier, but still accessible, and still a spiral.

Robert Smithson - Spiral Jetty - 1970 photo by Craig Howard

After a night of broken sleep in the loosely-defined Spiral Jetty parking lot, I ventured out along the rough black basalt rocks, circling in space, but moving toward the center.

Robert Smithson - Spiral Jetty - 1970 photo by Perri Howard

I thought about recent challenges in my work, the scarcity of time with any sort of audience and long silences between. Spiral Jetty went underwater, but it never went away. It endured, holding on to rock-fulls of air until it was time to rise to the surface and breathe again.

I wonder what is submerged in me, what is hidden but still endures, and what could be rising to the surface, ready to breathe.

A Place to Land

OUTLOOK - 2017

I don't remember when I first saw him. If I were pressed to put a date on it, it was in the autumn of 2008 and I was in Connecticut on an artist residency. He just floated into the painting unannounced, drifting laterally, from the left edge, slowly sinking down towards the bottom of the picture plane.

My temporary studio was in an old farmhouse and I was in the good company of artists, writers, and musicians from across the globe. I don't remember what I proposed to do in Connecticut, but the initial idea never materialized. This is not unusual during residencies, and generally forgiven by the host. Plans and intentions are often dropped at the threshold of new imaginings.

I walked into the studio, slid open the expansive double doors to the creek-side forest, and sat down at the drafting table. A hummingbird flew in, stopping to hover just beyond the tip of my nose. It was too close to focus, so I closed my eyes and listened to the hum, while the apparent wind of the wingbeats ruffled my eyebrows. Then it was gone.

This event triggered thoughts about flight, about my new colleagues from distant lands, about people in the air. The vulnerabilities and freedoms associated with leaving the earth.

Children jumping, tight rope walkers, astronauts, women falling, aerialists, pilots, and one lone person with a parachute.

It was as if the newspapers and magazines were suddenly filled with images of people falling, jumping, and floating, page after page. I clipped out the pictures, taped them to the light table and traced each one. There were people in the sky, and it was my job to draw them.

Airlift - 2008

The "people in the sky" series didn't last long. What goes up must come down, I guess. Most of my subjects ended up crumpled in a waste bin in Connecticut, but one did made the trip out West. Tucked in my sketchbook between two gridded pages was a graphite drawing of a paratrooper, seemingly suspended, with no horizon or ground plane for context. I gendered the paratrooper a "he," judging from the size of the boots.

The image is a simple silhouette, but not without details. A close look can discern a sort of pith helmet, big, baggy pants tucked in at the ankle, and a pack on the back of the figure, with strings radiating skyward, to a billowing, inflated, bunch of fabric above.

Whispering Pines - 2014

For eleven years, this paratrooper floated through my paintings. Sometimes, the placement was intentional, but mostly, he just seemed to come of out of nowhere. I would be pushing paint around, working out some details of landscape and realize there was a blank spot in the composition. Enter, the paratrooper. I would trace the original newspaper clipping, flip it over, add glue, and paste him into the landscape. Dozens of times over.

Mexicali - 2016

Though many asked why I was drawing this figure, I really had no answer and I, myself, didn't need one. There was just something I liked about the idea that a paratrooper, or anyone, really, could float through my painting. As if the painting itself were a roadside attraction or scene in a movie, and you could just drift on by.

The only thing unusual was how long the paratrooper stuck around. He floated through, maybe, twenty different paintings, over a twelve-year period of time. The paintings sold well. Different iterations of the paratrooper are now suspended over side boards, couches, mantles, and desks in homes and offices across America. It must be hard to steer a parachute. When a work sold, I imagined that each transaction helped him to reach a new destination.

Double Creek - 2018

In 2016, my husband, Craig, and I moved to the Methow Valley. We were finally calling "home" a place we had both loved for years. The house purchase happened quickly. We met a pilot at a concert and he and Craig started talking airplanes. Craig mentioned that we were looking for a house, and our new pilot friend said "I've got the place for you." It felt really impulsive, but we just trusted our guts and went with it, buying a house and ten acres from some friends of the pilot, over a cup of tea.

We moved in on Craig's birthday, sleeping on the floor in what would be the living room. I woke up early and stepped outside in the soft morning light and crisp mountain air. I looked to the west. I blinked and looked again. For reasons I could not imagine, the sky was filled with people in parachutes. Maybe six or so, slowly floating down to earth. I could hear their conversations, as they drifted and descended. Helmets on, big boots, packs on their backs, and a circle of billowing fabric over each individual, just like the ones I'd been drawing for years.

My parachutist was real, and not only that, he had friends! Tears streamed down my cheeks. I liked the house and the land and the views, but had no idea that our new place was across the street from the North Cascades Smokejumper Base. It was pure fortune that we moved in during the month of May, when the rookies arrive and practice their delicate and dangerous business of parachuting into forest fires.

My mind raced. Did the right side of my brain somehow predict this? Was it fate? Was marrying my husband and moving to the Methow Valley the culmination of a journey that began in Connecticut, twelve years ago? I didn't need to know the answer, but somehow, this painting had become real and I was standing in the middle of it, barefoot in the morning, with parachutists circling over my head and mountains in the background.

The Montello Diaries: Texture & Timbre

Sunset from the porch of the Montello Foundation w/Rudder.

For three solitary weeks in October, I explored the texture and timbre of the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah - walking fencelines, dropping hydrophones in livestock troughs, listening to Junipers, and burying geophones in the Bonneville Flats. This three-week envelope of time was wrapped around a two-week residency, off the grid, at the Montello Foundation. Due to high winds, fast cars, and prolonged, deafening silences, the recording process was often more interesting than the outcome. Still, there is a body of work that came out of this time, and it will want to meet the world, eventually. Drive and Walking Fencelines are some early glimpses, in the Sound Art section of the webpage.

The Bonneville Flats

It doesn’t always register to the ear, but every place has a unique sonic signature built out of bird song, traffic, natural ambience and manmade elements. To listen to a place is to know it deeply. Knowing a place deeply is the first step toward understanding and protecting it. The Great Basin is as fragile as it is unrelenting. I wanted to listen to it, and learn from it.

Recording with hydrophones in the Wild Horse Well

Reckless winds, the momentary flapping of a raven’s wings, a morning cattle drive, and the occasional rip of a low-flying jet - this is the sonic signature of Montello in autumn.

It's not the wind that was loud, but the surfaces it encountered. I became sensitive to the manic friction of sagebrush, the edgy syncopation of doors and windows, the sighing stretch of the stove pipe, warming against the chill.

Sound moves laterally across the basin and vertically to dip into water - the low thrum of the propane pump at the Wild Horse Well, the surface disturbance of water, the soft trickle 18-inches down, and throaty murmurs from the silty bottom of the trough.

I brought these field experiences back to the studio to explore the intersection of sight, sound, and silence through a series of paintings called “Frequencies.” This has become a new direction for my visual work. The paintings are not yet something, but not quite nothing.

Frequencies: Reflector | Mixed Media on Panel | 11”H x 14”W | 2020

The day before the end of the residency , 400-head of cattle were driven along the south fence line by six cowboys and a thirty-pound dog. This was a monumental disturbance on the heels of such solitude.

After two weeks of listening and seeing how Montello looks, the last two days afforded a glimpse into how this place works - hardscrabble ranch land.

Cattle drive at the Winecup Gamble Ranch, Montello NV

In Northeast Nevada, the days are long and deep. The sunsets are absolutely breathtaking. There is so much freedom to wander and muse. You can do whatever you wish in the privacy of a great expanse, but there is scarcity on every level, and, because we're in the Great Basin, it all drains inward.

Heartfelt thanks to the Montello Foundation, for providing the space and time to investigate this remarkable landscape. Here, too, one may find a sense of place.

The Triangle of Fire: Watching and Waiting

I began planning my escape when Covid-19 arrived. And, I have successfully broken loose, in small, analog instruments of time, on three occasions, for 72 hours or less, masked and sanitized and self-sufficient. 

While away, I plan the next escape. These are not major excursions, just 3.5 hour tactical moves that offer relief from the heat and a significant change of scene. I crave the salt air and the marine layer. To be in it, or better, above it. 

Mid-pandemic, safe at home in the Methow Valley, I had the unjustifiable need to put myself in the path of something beautiful and let it change me. I wanted to escape the heat, to get a change of scene, to be invigorated by the salt water, but it's never quite that simple.

The Harbor Defenses of Puget Sound - aka the "The Triangle of Fire" - was built to protect Seattle and Bremerton during WW| and WW||. Almost immediately upon completion, these heavy artillery, land-based installments were rendered obsolete by the invention of battleships and airborne combat. Once the pinnacle of military technology, the “Triangle of Fire” and all associated emplacements have since been put out to pasture as bucolic state parks.

We fortify ourselves. It’s what we do. We name our guns after men, and jets after birds, and ships after women, heavily armed, ready to strike, and waiting for the worst thing imaginable that, in this case, never materialized. These installments defended our harbors, and now stand to harbor our defenses.

I am drawn to these places because they show us our dark side. The "Triangle of Fire" is a war zone that never detonated. These are monuments to the unknown, in expectation of an enemy we were poised to receive for an achingly long time, but never arrived. I am drawn to the poignant edges between land and sea, sea and sky, defender and intruder, the past and the future.

I sit on a high bluff, squarely in the center of a Pacific Northwest summer. Cladded out in a wool hat and down parka, with gun emplacements buried beneath my seat. “Excuse me, are you meditating?” A young girl stops to ask. I scan the Strait of Juan de Fuca with no clear train of thought, just a desire to reconcile our military past, transitional present, and ongoing desire to balance human wants with environmental needs.

There was a full complement of soldiers here. They watched, they waited, they were secret and silent. They were trained to be invisible and yet, they had a marching band, and a bandmaster, and blimps. Blimps and marching bands are not easily hidden.  Did they ever play the reveille? Or fly the dirigible? Or was everyone sworn to be silently concealed? How does a band practice in silence? I want to frame the questions, explore the narratives, then taper my voice.

There is a texture and timbre to this place. The gulls cry in a constant circle. Beach grass saws against itself, like so many stringed instruments, while the channel marker chimes against an outgoing tide. I hear the soft sounds, near and far, punctuated by the deep rip of fighter jets rehearsing overhead. We have yet to decommission our fears.

Minor breezes blow apart the early morning marine layers. Even the densest fog is remarkably permeable.

This architecture of war, this illusion of safety. The over-engineered protection of cities, the over-reaction to our perceived vulnerabilities. 

Tell me they didn't love it there, the soldiers, staring out to sea for hours on end.

I wonder if they ever saw the green flash. Did the corporeal spot a whale? Did the complement wake one morning to a fata morgana, hovering above the placid surface of the Strait?

There is a story here, but i don't know how to tell it. I am drawn to places like this because of what they reveal about human nature, the human need to explore, and our relentless pursuit to establish, maintain, and defend a sense of place. 

Oh, how we wait, and watch, and can't let go.

Complications of Cordage

A knot, by definition, is an intentional complication in cordage that is either useful or decorative. 

Knots are sorted into categories of hitches, bends, splices, and stoppers.

A knot is a tangled mass of something, like hair.

Knotty, matted, snarled, raveled, twisted, entwined, coiled, unkempt, uncombed, tousled;

A knot is a bump, as in a knot of wood.

A gnarl, knurl, node, lump, knob, swelling, growth, gall, protuberance, bump; 

A knot is an unpleasant feeling of tightness or tension in a part of the body.

"Her stomach was in knots as she unlocked the door.”

A knot is a tightly packed group of people.

A cluster, huddle, bunch, throng, swarm, flock, gang, assemblage, mob, pack.

A knot is a unit of speed especially of ships, aircraft or winds.

A knot is a measure of incremental depth, marked by a series of knots tied at specific lengths along a rope.

You can’t call yourself a sailor if you can’t tie knots. This was the first lesson of junior sailing, just before I started racing, frightened of everything and proficient at nothing.  It became suddenly very clear that knots were the real sets of keys to the boats, knots unlocked the water, knots were the ignition. Knots were the unspoken language of those who went to sea, and I wanted to speak that language so badly. 

I was eight years old and couldn't tie a bowline. I tried to keep it hid. My cover was blown when the 12-year-old skipper sent me forward to tie the sheet to the clew of the jib. It was just me with my back to the crew, alone at middeck with a twisted ravel of cordage in my lap.  I started moving the rope around itself, praying that the bowline would somehow emerge from my desperate tangles, but it was not to be.  After minutes, that felt like hours, one of the senior instructors (he was 14 or so), came forward to help. With a laugh and a snort, he tied the sheet to the jib and never let me forget it. Everybody laughed.

From then on, my fear of not being able to tie knots made them all the more impossible to tie.  I would wrap a mooring line around a cleat, the bowman would walk up behind me, with a dramatic exhale, roll his eyes, and retie it.
Because, it’s not just how to tie knots, it’s when. The cleat hitch to attach a halyard, two half-hitches to secure a fender to the rail, the soft shackle to secure a flapping sail, and, the nemesis bowline for the grommet in the clew.
Eventually, I found the discipline to sit down and learn the knots necessary for sailing, then climbing, and flying (yes, there are knots in flying, too) but my stomach still constricts every time I tie a bowline.

A knot, by definition, is an intentional complication in cordage. My personal history with knots may be complicated, but beyond the tangles, snarls, and bowlines gone wrong, there is an elegance and simplicity to each and every one. Between the sharp end and the bitter end, clarity can be found, and that, to me, is something worth investigating.

In South India, nothing was ordinary

In South India, nothing was ordinary.

The crushing delight of sights sound and smells. Latent little threats, real and imagined, routinely destabilized my self-determined trajectories. Everything was an adventure, whether I was up for it or not.These adventures were laced with quickening. "How do I survive in India on a motorbike?" I asked the watchman at the ashram. “When you being each day, just imagine yourself safely home, that evening, madam,” he replied. I turned the key, gunned the engine, and poured myself into the mad weave of cows, carts, auto rickshaws, goats, and busses.

Quickening. It sounds like an acceleration, a making fast or becoming faster, but moments of quickening usually invoke the opposite, bringing the plans in motion, course of events, or progress towards a destination to an abrupt halt.  These moments are not scripted or even sought, they find us, they hold us, and they slam the door behind them when they go.

Quickening grips like a pure pulse of love, then slips back into the haze of the ordinary - a muse, appearing and disappearing as an apparition of time. Should we write it down, sketch it out, or just keep moving?

“We navigate by stories,” writes Rebecca Solnit.  Stories hold us in place or set things in motion. The dramas, large, small, or almost imperceptible, that careen us onward from one thought to another, from one place to another, from one person to another.

If a story is a landscape, a quickening is the cliff. It is deeply gravitational and you don't see it coming - a moment so poignant and direct, it becomes fixed and set in a suspended state. It's when we say everything changed, life would never be the same, and time stood still, but only for the briefest interlude, a single breath, the blink of an eye, the flap of a wing.

In India, everything changed, everyday, day after day, for months. These quickenings became lodged deep within, and I never unpacked them, but I did write them down, in just the briefest form. And now? Does each become a painting, a poem, a soundscape? Or are these quickenings fully crafted as memories, requiring no absolute form? How do you make something that already is?

Standing in the pouring rain, watching the sugar fields burn

Playing tennis in three different languages

Standing on the beach, watching the monsoon come ashore

Mobbed by children in Kanyakumari

The trees whispering secrets in goa

The frog in my morning coffee

The pit viper sleeping under my shoulder bag.

Thunder, lightning, and temple music

Cochin’s synagogue full of chandeliers

The world’s smallest bhagavad gita as 24k gold necklace 

Rain coming, madam, boat not working

The sparrow hawk that flew through the kitchen

Cremation on the outskirts of Edaiyanchavadi

Reading Shantaram on the train to Madurai

A store called “Aroma Sports”

Another store called “Magical Plywood”

Weddings upon weddings at the Sri Meenakshi Temple

Dogs barking, cows walking, goats running

A box sewn shut with muslin

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The map is not the territory

The map is not the territory.

I love maps because they make me feel omniscient. With a map widespread, I can look directly at Texas and catch Rhode Island out of the corner of my eye.

Maps are designed to be folded. Collapse the Badlands and Minneapolis becomes an outlying suburb of Spokane. I have a friend who grew up in the crease between Boise and Pendleton.

As a six year old, maps held great potential. If I folded the Eastern Seaboard of the United States three times, I could bring my family all back together again. Marblehead, Boston, and Rumson, New Jersey; their major and minor city stars aligned in a perfect constellation. Star upon star upon star, I could hold us all in one tiny hand, or wished it to could be so.

I folded and unfolded maps endlessly, examining my home state of Massachusetts, which was green on blue. Five folds to the left there were other states that were brown and white. I craved and feared these places. Colorado, Montana, Utah. Straight up country. At this young age, my arms were not yet long enough to hold the map completely unfurled, Seattle in my left hand and Boston in my right. Even if I really stretched out, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri landed in my lap, the Gulf of Mexico, a crumpled heap on the floor. At this time in early life, maps were big, really big, much larger than the world I lived in.

Over time that changed, as it does for all of us. As a college student, I woke up one day intending to visit the Hoh Rainforest from my campus in Olympia, for a day trip. Looking at the map, it's just right there, how long could the drive possibly take? It took hours to get back, in the night, afraid on dark roads, running out of fuel and wondering if I would ever see my college, or my family again.

On another undergraduate morning, a friend and I discovered that the Grateful Dead were playing in Oakland, that evening. We hopped in the Volvo and made it to Redding, California before realizing that the show would be long since over before we arrived in the Bay Area. It was as if suddenly everything around me was farther away than I thought. With some sadness, I was forced to accept that the world had become larger than the map. And, thus it remains.

But the map is not the territory, and we, as a society, struggle to reconcile the two. When asking a gas station attendant for some directions to a nearby hotel in the rural west, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I know where that hotel is but I can't tell you how to get there. You'll see a large building on the left, half-way out of town but that's not the one you are looking for." Via negativa: the attempt to arrive at something by defining what it is not.

I would call it Abstract Expressionist information,” says the artist, Paula Scher, "All maps lie, all maps distort. even Google Maps."

This slippage, between understanding where we've been, where we are, and where we're going has become a guiding story for my artwork and it regularly shows up in the paintings. The visual works feature a strong geometry. To me, these lines in the work are not boundaries or delineation, but the subtle crease of a map unfolded, creating just the slightest dissonance between the territory on one side and the other.

My work is a charting or mapping of sites and situations through drawing, painting, sculpture, and sound. The map is not the territory, but the two shape each other in meaningful ways, and the rest is ours to navigate.

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“Weatherbound” opens at SAM Gallery Taste space

“Weatherbound” has just opened at the SAM Gallery Taste space. This series is a small part of a larger body of new works that began in New Brunswick, Canada, during the Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts and continues to evolve and expand in my home studio here at Twispworks. Multiple sources of inspiration conspired to inform these paintings. First, the opportunity to bear witness to the tidal drama in the Bay of Fundy, tides so extreme that they completely rewrite the relationship between land and water on a daily basis. Perfectly passable roads are routinely rendered useless, submerged under 17′ of water, only to be back in business again six hours later. This is a normal, cyclical occurrence, and no cause for alarm, unless you’re caught without a tide chart on Minister’s Island, then you bundle up and wait.

The tide runs as powerful rivers through the bays, inlets, and along the coast. There is no such thing as a slack tide. It’s a massive, whitewater fluctuation of time and space like nothing I’ve seen before. The incoming tide begins by swallowing tiny pebbles, then gulps down the wrack line and quickly devours the shore, only to disgorge the entire topography, shifted but unharmed, on the outgoing tide.

Second source of inspiration — the film, “Maiden.” This heart-stopping documentary chronicles the all-female voyage of Tracy Edwards and crew during the Whitbred Round the World Race in 1989. I graduated high school with the class of ‘89 in the tiny sailing mecca of Marblehead, Massachusetts. These women racing Maiden were my heroes then, and now. “The ocean is always trying to kill you, it never takes a break,” begins the off-screen narration, as a wild, broiling mass of salt water engulfs the screen. The ocean as a mountain, too steep to climb, much less navigate.

Third source – the contours of my own experience living between mountains and oceans and drawing solace and inspiration from both, frequently laced with a little bit of terror. At the SAM Gallery opening in Seattle, there was one prevailing question asked repeatedly of the paintings. “Is that a mountain, or the ocean?” My goal was to work the surfaces of the paintings aggressively, but to stop working before the subject matter became mountain or ocean. I was going for mountain and ocean, because the dangers are similar and the compulsion to endeavor is the same.

The ocean is unexpectedly buoyant, and deadly. The mountains are places of peril, and beauty. Both are difficult to navigate. It takes real work, but the rewards are so very deep.

If you are kicking around Seattle, please stop in and check out the show.  Thanks for reading.

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