TelluHyd

This is about reverberations. 

Ten years later I am on the coast of North Carolina, close to my parents. I witness again the tension in turn. **She’s got a way of moving. She is a wave a falling, a fallin’ down.** Where the land meets the sea …_[ {~~ Rachel Carson studied this collision for years observing and preserving its life. She’d say, to understand the shoreline requires hosting one’s feet at the exchange, bare to “our dim ancestral beginnings,” feeling the cyclical pull & thrust.

xx _//*–_ -_ -_ I am struck. .|l. We are baited where we began. 

To embody the land, we exit the sea. I stand, my back to the dunes. Morning sea[side], my dog’s elated with sand between her toes and the smell of dead ocean debris. Except for the plastic, debris rots in the sun, sours in the salt. The melancholic routine, its fishy ._⌒_ I buoy out of water. Waves arrive, reveal, and stumble. I never wanted to move to the beach. You could say, I was still scared of drowning. I walk up smiling at the Edge of the Sea. Carson draws out, underlines, the unapparent violence of this ecosystem. It is after all, unforgiving. The churning without end, over and over and over again. It’s power. • .I think it sounds like birth. _⌒_ [ Image ] primordial emergence from fluid. .  . ~  ~

We

All

Come 

Out

Dripping

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I’m on an island for an artist residency. I am the uninspired painter. Two other [male] painters are en plein air. They are eager to wake, early to work, quick in the blowing cold terrain. They are producers, producing ||fresh||. I immediately hate the idea of copying what I see here. Not because of them. There is a history; I do not see myself in. I unleash simple painting strategies, like I unleash my dog; For her sense of freedom. For their safety I appear much younger, in angst. I’m annoyed. En plein air is stuck in a tradition, a form of landscape. When terms are frozen in meaning, even in art, it is a sign of trauma. You see it in people. En plein air has lost its body, to hobbyists, retirees who drive their car on park grass to unload their easel. To be outside is to exist, to experience. Seeing a painting limit the same view as a photo with a lens of self expression is not an experience. I’m no fish, but painting outside should be a passage. Without using unfamiliar muscles as your feet level inconsistently in the sand, facing the wicked seduction plunging your senses where industrious gusts hang on salt, or to be urged and teased by water threatening or careening away from land, one cannot understand the shore fully. This threshold between water and land, reckons our emergence, captivates our bodies. Energy is passed here. Growing up at the beach, as I did, you become overly familiar with its hit and run. Carson knew it was inadequate to translate a habitat through cataloging species separate from both each other and apart from their ecosystem. She wrote to give a sense of the connectivity and resilience demanded from life. The connectivity easily ignored, especially at the shore. Donna Haraway echoes–Carson’s aim–with the term sympoiesis, defined as “making-with;” because “nothing makes itself.” Sight can obscure our sense to acknowledge sympoiesis at play. Media abuses this fact everyday. It’s rather easy to flatten meaning–that way–makes me restless. Plein air painters don’t sell place. l___l They crop. 

Say I’m a snob. I find it boring and I am angry again being so close to home. I map the island’s topography, day and night. The winter off-season roads are mostly empty except the occasional golf carts, no cars even in summer. The night gleams; I remember stars twinkle. How rare. The light pollution is low enough, I can see that billionaire's satellites littering the sky. What trash. So much we miss in town. I’m disgruntled by the twinkle. I want the star to be stable. The fluctuation in light makes my eyes twitch. Every crescendo sparks dizzying worry–stars combust, swallowing their systems. I think about never-ending death. What I am now, might be inconsequential, might be finite. I see mortality before my lashes lift. Stars are a promise, not a gift. 

Here though, we walk through the bird sanctuary, grappling with the island’s connection to fracking and that placement of the speech’s casually offset colonial narrative. We joke about being eaten by alligators, with vigilance, I obsessively check for ticks, panning in and out. I recount the cafe’s painting, the indigenous collision with settlers on the shore, the unapparent violence of the image; the unapparent violence in arrival. 

In front of the country club they have sand bags the size of whales lining their wall. The weak boundary is being eaten by the ocean. It’s temporarity sinks behind the bags. The whale-bags should extend the beach, but the water has already claimed where I stand. It is artificial protection, a strand of illusion. The water here is queer. It triangulates. It appears to be competing, like when we feel we do not have enough space, enough value, enough of our needs met. I am certain the undertow is swift and deadly. I imagine the bermuda triangle.This is that point the sea will take you forever. Two currents don’t merge, they conflict, staying separate. The third is below the eye, drags you under quickly out of sight moving to sea. Could you recognize the danger?  Seagulls float above the choppy water. They are kingpins, cropping. They are scarecrows, dummies to lure you in. Yet another illusion, this one of safety.

When your visual memory is shit, you discover it outwardly, like when I paint. The longer you look at something you improvised, the more decisions you have to make of what to bring out. Two weeks in context. I try again to explain. I stand at the cusp. I follow the telluric hydro line. I look out at the horizon and my breathe shallows naturally. It’s gravitational. Orbs pull at each other, another forcing. I look up at the night sky attentively, my shoulders relax. This place where I am and also cannot be, is not a gentle rhythm. When I imagine the trance of the beach, my ears fill : full overpowering my senses. As it does not mirror me, I cannot mirror it. Or does it? My body is mostly water. In tandem I am lost in awe and zoned into that hint of color that caught my eye this morning. A wet seashell, the brilliance lost when it dries; the trouble with taking. I ramble. Mediating, we are passive  ]  [  It is active. I forge into a realm of ambiguity to make sense of this gesture. I want unexpected dialogue, off the tongue. When I moved through these offerings, glimpses; I am humbled when letting go. I released a translation of a place. My landscape is not referential, it is experiential. It synthesized my stay. I don’t try to be linear, I interpret space.

Charles and I speak about our old work. He stacks. I obfuscate. We are both unsettled here. We walk. Towards the light, dredging ruins the night peace, our eyes follow the spotlight. The regurgitation of sand, displaced. I imagine the coyote’s I hear, but we only ever see birds and deer, a couple of dead jellies. I learned last year that real predators are stealthy. They don’t hide in the wild. We go where we shouldn’t, accessing open roads: more big swamp trees, more dead ends, more ticks in the reeds, and more defiantly tacky fences, the kind the rich love. Charles who could have been a Clyde, like my Conwell. He tells me one can’t exist without the other, you need to be perceived to exist. I think about painting as an act of reflection. I think about losing yourself to someone else’s words. I think about my name becoming a means to an end. Then, I think about not being limited to seeing singularly. I think about the instability of a symbol. I think about not cropping, but expanding, beyond. I think about essence. Sung by Lucinda Williams, essence is the desire for what has gone. She lamants through a drawn out waiting. Before I was told of her drug consort, in naivety I heard her seeking a tactile and physical love; what elated her senses. I want essence to recollect more than a moment of seeing. I sought essence to engage sympoiesis. The landscape in textures, sounds, feeling, the changing weight of air. I think about not separating myself from where I am. Lucinda taught me a way to navigate my suffering, how to describe it. I am teaching my self to understand it and face it; to share and exchange myself more fully with my relationships and environments. How else can we not abandon ourselves? I drift. We walk, find a dead bird, seagull then another, another, and further yet another, but a pelican. We exhale out loud, muffled by another machine churning sand. This one is not on land, but on the water. Less mesmerizing in the day lit affect of death. We descent. \\. \\.

Out of the fifty postcards I work. I take fourteen. The paintings were exhibited in the NBIAR 2023 group show at the Wilma W. Daniels Gallery in Wilmington, NC. This writing is just a selection of a book; here it is another imprint. The paintings embody the collective entanglement of the island to me. They are the essence of the landscape.