elemental

Part autobiography, part auto-biology, elemental focuses on aspects of identity in relation to the elements Earth, Fire, Air and Water. In each, the viewer is invited to dig through layers that are sometimes easily accessible and sometimes not.

earth

~…am I gazing at the faces of my grandchildren and great-greats? Will they ever think of me, or will I exist in their minds only as a name on a family tree that if anything evokes images in school history books?…

Earth provides exterior, or outward appearance and interior views of a body (corpus) and bearer. It features stories about outward appearance of the physical body and those garnered through the senses, and experiences.

air

Air considers (intelligence/thought) and memory (identity). The text is an interweaving of three “stories" throughout the work - the background (large text) features the idea of creating the book. The background "idea" coalesces in the center of the book moves from background to foreground and takes flight in the tulle "cloud.” The second story, about air as breath and wind, winds itself around the other two sweeping in and out as wind throughout the book The third story is a series of vignettes featuring memories touching on freedom, wind, breath, and flight. Click the link below to listen to a recording of Air.

water

~…my eyes weren’t open yet, so there was nothing to see. This realm consisted solely of sound and touch. Persistent gurgling sounds, sometimes loud, most times fainter, were accompanied by a constant drum. There were the occasional short sharp sounds, but the best were the melodic ones. Much later, I would learn to differentiate between sounds of song and of survival. I was not yet aware that I would bear the mark of dolor. This safe place nurtured me. I would move along an edge to stretch and if I ventured too far, it would hold me back. Boundaries protected me. I learned many things, though the names could not be spoken. Some would call it a primitive existence, but it reached back to many, many ancestors…

Water moves from solid to liquid to gas and exists on, in, and over the earth in these three states. In religion and mythology, water symbolism relates to creation, passages, wisdom, and purification. It not only has the potential to heal and to quench, but also to devastate. “Water” features texts about passages, purification, and wisdom that are abstract, symbolic, and realistic.

 fire

~…My dad was fighting in a war, which I believed shared the same sky in the direction of the lady’s house where my mom and aunt occasionally went to get us the best hamburgers on the planet. Sometimes I would look to the sky and ask God to send my dad back home. At school, my classmates sometimes made fun of my choice of words or the way I spoke. For the most part, that didn’t bother me, though it served as a reminder that I was an outsider. There were other troubles at school, like the time the nurse came to check us for worms. She also would check us for lice, which I understood to be little bugs that crawled around in your hair and bit your scalp like tiny mosquitoes. I heard that if you had worms, they’d give you some medicine that made you throw up. I was terrified of throwing up and equally terrified of having worms or lice. Fortunately, I didn’t have either, and was therefore spared the treatments. The worst thing, though, was the violence that I witnessed every week both inside and outside the school building…

Fire – orange to red, to blue, to white – is both intimate and universal. Fire catches and holds on to matter, consuming it until it is transformed into something else, an essence. Fire is mesmerizing, in turn lulling and igniting fervor. In religion and mythology, it is the element that represents awareness and consciousness. Fire is the last of the Elemental series, featuring text that unfolds to reveal at its center, a paper rock.