finished artwork
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Title: Pack
Material:
waterside-found: styrofoam, trash-found: backpack frame, beachchair canvas, plastic buckle, free-pile found: fabric, roadside-found: strap
Size/Date:
6’4” x ” x 36” x 32” / 2019
What is it that makes people want to take part in treks, feats of endurance for activism and action spurring change through what seems ridiculous, unimaginable or impossible? I use Pack to explore what it is feels like to almost not be able to do something. Within this work is a maximum carrying capacity that allows me to embrace struggle, both physically and conceptually. Doing something that is not easy, taking a risk, willing to fall down, fall over, get up and keep trying. There is perseverance, strength through difficulty in this work, both physically and metaphorically. While struggling with Pack out in a landscape I am also struggling towards a lifestyle that is meaningful to me, struggling to maintain a sense of drive through political and environmental doom. It is a process tinged with sadness and loneliness, navigating in the margins of places, walking the wrack line loaded with trash and marine debris. Walking in places where land and water meet, where humans and nature rub together leaving a sometimes-messy residue.
Title: Kayak Catapult
Material:
beach-found: washed ashore sit-upon kayak, tent string, tent stake, plastic, marsh-found: door/hatch latch, rope, free-pile found: flexible flag rods and hardware, canvas fabric and straps, roadside-found: plastic floor moulding, trash-found: lifejacket, paddle, conduit, hardware, roofing tin, houseboards, plastic extinguisher mount, bicycle wheels, event tent metal tube, yard-sale found: survey tripods
Size/Date:
varies, kayak 13’ x 24” x 18” / 2019
13’-15’ long x 24” (75” in dry dock/on tripod) wide x 66” tall (80” tall in dry dock/on tripod)
Within Kayak Catapult exists my wish to launch communication over boundaries and across divides. Kayak Catapult is a working contraption, built to adapt, capable of rolling or floating, and engineered with a catapult component used to fling messages over walls, across rivers that divide, through barriers of communication. I use this sculpture to explore my feelings and modes of operation regarding circumstances that seem impossible, insurmountable. I carry with me a tinge of defeat, existing as awareness of dysfunction, unpredictability and uncertainness. I embrace the potential of misaligned trajectories, launches that fail, and the necessity of multiple attempts. Test-Rolls, Test-Floats, and Test-Flings become in part preparedness drills, training, tests of endurance and fortitude. Operating Kayak Catapult is cumbersome and a bit precarious; it pushes the limits of my physical strength, safety and comfort levels. I acknowledge the ridiculous essence within Kayak Catapult, a large, odd, low-tech contraption potentially ill-fitting to its task. At the same time there is a willingness to persist, to keep trying, pushing through what seems unimaginable and impossible, awkward or ridiculous. It is my hope that through perseverance there is momentum through difficulty.
While in the gallery Kayak Catapult is in dry dock; an altered survey tripod holds the boat stationary and elevated in a 3-point supported position. The angled legs of the tripod mimic the structure and function of the jack stands, poppets and boat blocks that hold watercraft in suspension while on land in the boat yard. In general a boat in dry dock seems to be held in an awkward, motionless and stalled position, suspended as an object and also halted in purpose. In a boat yard each boat, with exposed out-of-the-water hulls, is balanced and precariously blocked and shimmed into an odd static limbo on land while in for repairs or to wait out the off-season. I embrace the awkward, held in standstill, essence of dry dock as a concept, I am also interested conceptually in the information inherent within the nature of this tripod. The markings on the tripod point to its history as a survey tool establishing official land, airspace and water boundaries. Together these elements enhance Kayak Catapult’s use as an awkward tool in which to attempt to launch communication across boundaries. These attempts use momentum and perseverance to hold onto purpose, trying to push through what seems hopeless, insurmountable.