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Maine Audubon listed the Carolina Wren as the Backyard Bird of the Month in March 2023, but this is the first year I’ve heard one singing here in Lincolnville. Like other migratory passerines, their northern range is increasing. The wren was belting out a teakettle-teakettle song this afternoon that reminded me of my trips to South Carolina where the Carolina Wren is the State Bird; and to Austin, Texas, where I mistook it for a Common Yellowthroat; and, how it feels to be new to a place.
I was new to Maine once, a migrant from parts south, and Maine was new to me. Armed with a copy of Delorme’s Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, I mapped out multiple day and overnight trips up the coast into Hancock and Washington Counties. For two summers, I solo hiked Schoodic Mountain and Schoodic Head, Cobscook Bay and Crockett’s Cove, Great Wass Preserve at Beals, and Quoddy Head State Park in Lubec. Closer to home base, I climbed Mount Battie and went down to Owls Head, Martinsville, and Tenant’s Harbor. I checked out the reversing falls over in Blue Hill, where the tide stops, turns, and churns up the fresh water coming down from a river. Or is it the river that churns up the reversing tide? I marveled at the suspension bridge over Eggemoggin Reach and the banded rocks at Pemaquid Point. I was looking for space, hoping to find where I belonged.
Close to the water at Tenant’s Harbor, I discovered rocks with writing in them, instructions for what I might find Downeast. At Schoodic Mountain, the two hour ascent is steep, across open ledge and through wooded areas. When I finally stood on the bald top of the mountain, close to the radio tower, I was in a meditative state. I watched a small yellow spider prospecting on my boot. I thought how everything I saw around me was written in a code, and if I could crack that code, I would understand how the universe was put together. Next I wished that somehow I could be transported back to my apartment in Belfast, without having to undergo the mundanity of the drive home.
I was still tripping back and forth from Kentucky when I began fastening twelve foot rolls of paper to my studio wall, “hiking” back and forth along the paper as I drew rock shapes and transcribed notes from my Maine journals. Some of those long drawings became installation pieces.
I liked making installations where people could walk through and share in my experience of Maine’s landscapes. The airport drawings transformed again, as I tore some of them down into two-inch strips, and used others to make paintings that responded to new sites.
It took me a while to connect the dots about what was going on in my head. You may be quicker than I was and have already guessed that the idea of reading the landscape has something to do with the sound vibrations that are the origin story of the universe. Because I am a visually oriented person rather than one who processes things via sounds, I had landed on the idea of the written word as a way to generate imagery.
In the act of writing by hand, familiarity breeds not contempt but a double entendre of content. While I was installing Reading the Landscape, I took a break and walked over to Farmington’s local bookstore, where I found Volume III of the Books of the KRȘŅA Trilogy. An idea for another installation was born. I began a meditative ritual in which I copied page after page of the Krishna stories, content with content that was, again, new to me and so always led me on to the next sentence and chapter.
“As the caretaker of an elephant tried to control the animal by striking it with his trident, so Dantavakra tried to control Krishna simply by speaking strong words. After finishing his vituperation, he struck Krishna on the head with his club and made a roaring sound like a lion. Although struck strongly by the club of Dantavakra, Krishna did not move an inch nor did he feel any pain. Taking his Kaumodaki club and moving very skillfully, . . .”
I layered those stories onto 100 birch plywood tablets. Each tablet was covered with torn strips from the Farmington show, then a layer of pencilled story, a smearing over of the text with acrylic gel, more strips, more writing, more gel. The result is a text that often is no longer legible, just as the text of the landscape does not reveal itself.
The 100 panels needed to be mounted, so I bought a router and some maple boards, and made 100 stands, for an installation called Bog, exhibited at Galerie Hertz in Louisville. The high point of that exhibition came at the opening reception, when a small boy got loose from his mother and cut a swath through the installation that sent many of the stands and panels crashing to the floor. Children can inform our perception of an installation like no one else, but I remember best the reviewer who wrote:
“The gallery is in an old commercial building, so you must either search out the piece or simply stumble upon it. And when you do find it, you cannot even study it closely; the signs present an impenetrable cluster, like anxious supplicants humbled by the scarred, dusty walls that tower over them. Thus does this intriguing little exhibition fall upon our imaginations with a resounding thud.”
The wheel turned one more time, and this part of my story ended when Bog became Bog Dig, a wall-mounted piece acquired by the Farnsworth Art Museum through a generous gift from Dr. Andrew Gay. It was exhibited there from 2000-2002 as part of Maine in America.
The story of the landscape as code is one I’ve told many times, because it led to work in which the written word was central to the visual imagery of my installations. Find more text and images of Reading the Landscape installations on my website.
Maine is a world of wonders:
The view of Schoodic Mountain with more images and a nice description of the hike are on Eric Sturgeon’s blog.
There are eight reversing falls in Maine. Find them here.
Here’s the direct link to the complete review of Bog by Bruce Nixon.
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