Earth Texts

Artist’s Statement

Earth Texts comprises a series of thirty-five wooden relief sculptures (carved, burned and painted with encaustic) that create visual metaphors of the book form as well as autobiographical explorations. Playing off concepts like frame narratives, in medias res, and earth digest, these pieces operate in one sense as visual puns and connect ideas of language to both earth and body.

Through interplay of forms each piece seeks to explore what we know or how we behave.  Books embody text, and the “text” connects internal and external landscapes in a search for answers to human dilemmas. The plywood represents nature destroyed; construction of the art piece from the recycled plywood represents nature re-empowered or its pattern newly disclosed. The tactile paint surface, created through layers of encaustic (wax and pigment), serves as “skin,” unveiling greater complexity beneath.

Frame Narratives plays with the idea of a story in which another story is enclosed or embedded, a “tale within the tale.” The largest and outermost frame of the open book is carved and painted with textures and colors similar to lichens growing on the bark of ash trees.  The embedded frames allude to sun-filled skies, recall black granite, signify art/culture (gilded frame), and place dry animal vertebra in a seemingly wet and reflective surface. The innermost frame, a thick layer of flesh-like beeswax poured on top a grass-green colored base, surrounds a section of the gallery wall. From behind this frame emerges another tale: a tail of human hair tied together with an animal bone. Each story links animal/vegetable/mineral and nature with culture, creating a meta-fictional landscape filled with reminders of death. In Media Res, Latin for “into the middle of things,” describes a narrative that begins somewhere in the middle of a story, typically at some crucial point in the action. Two pages, extending out from the middle of the book, retell my journey through Yellowstone Park and describe topography reminiscent of the park’s largest hot spring. Shaped through contrasting thermal fields the hot spring becomes a metaphor for forces that bring about change in our lives. Human interaction like our relationship with nature can be harmonious and unifying or antagonistic and cataclysmic. Layers of marks both reveal and conceal the natural grain of the wood, comparing the meaning and permanence of nature’s marks with those of human marks. The mouth of Sticks & Stones gaps open on the face of a scared and sutured landscape where stick-pencil teeth devour sticks, stones, and animal bones. Effective communication is often elusive: the best intentions can end in unwanted consequences. Similarly our interactions with nature, at worst, can produce deadly results. Our stories often parallel processes or “stories” in nature. Like books these pieces request a reading, and the layers of text allow layers of interpretation.

Earth Texts travels in boxes designed for shipping by common carrier. The exhibition fills up to 300 running feet of gallery wall space. Gallery directors interested in hosting the exhibit need pay only for shipping and insurance. For additional information, contact Kristy Deetz.