Pond

BFA Thesis Installation at the Gunwald Gallery of Art

In ink, a pond is where I go to breathe. I flip my notebook upside down and backwards, and adjust my pen to fit loosely in my hand.

I begin in the middle of the page and let my hand move widdershins, feeling the tightness of the line as it forms a rigid bank. As I remember to breathe, the bank loosens and the reeds begin to sway. When I feel a presence, a welling (unnameable, or otherwise), I mark those points on the map. I move my hand this way until I meet myself again at the beginning, and the pond is frozen in time. 

In the frozen pond, a portal opens. Griefs and ideas pour out, revealing themselves in the reeds as reflection, swimmer, glimmer of intangible light, as will-o’-the-wisps, myths, memories, treasures and deaths. 

~

Here, in mud, the pond is reimagined as substantial. The loose marks of my breath and hand are made tangible in drying earth, drawing out the portal’s formation. Here, in mud, the clay pond slowly dries and grows fissures, but rehydrates, always burgeoning. 

Pond, in mud, is a quiet dragging out, an uncanny space between the swamps of the Carolinas where I found ponds, and the caves of Indiana where I find them now.