The Center Can Not Hold

There was never a center to hold.

So often, centering our limited perceptions and constructing taxonomic time around our own existence . . . eventually, we join the inert. The temporarily inert. The sometimes distinct, the less distinct, the indistinct – endowed somehow with endless memory, extending beyond us. Once the earth is swallowed by a star, or a fragment of impossibly heavy space, left in the [non]eternity of a lightless sun . . . Though likely such a drama won’t be necessary, as we simply [re]find our place within the context of which we are part as, “We are almost all as old as the Earth. Recent and rigorous, our time-counters bring back nature, in the sense where life was born billions of years ago. We are all immersed in the same alluvium” (Serres, Michel. The Incandescent. London: Bloomberry, 2018). But the alluvium is ever changing, and even the eternal sun will darken eventually, and there are many universes beyond our own. There is no one fixed point. No actual center. And we are part of it.

What relief.

The material articulations are at once place-based – rooted in the Sanpete Valley, seeking to connect to and understand the current and recent characters and happenings of the low-slung basin – and distinctly [universally/inescapably] human, connected to a specificity that is ever-changing. Relying on physicality as the driver – a non-conceptual point of departure that trusts the memory of hands and body and impulse to react in relationship to material. As memory extends beyond cognition, leaning into cellular and evolutionary memory to collect, organize, polish, press, compose, cut, recompose, dissect, encase, expand, and imprint. The resulting studies are and exacting accumulation of time (compressed, irreversible and opaque), a dissection of the past, an expansion of time, and an articulation of fleeting moments in found objects (bones, tules, seeds, petals, wire, ink, roots, burned trees, buildings, nests, limestone, etc.) and paper (cast, molded, pressed, etc.). A trembling momentary existence, that is not its final form.

What relief.