House of Rivers, House of Clay
2007 Exhibition at Museum of Outdoor Art, Englewood, CO
With poet Ginny Hoyle
Sculpted books are grouped into four related “houses” that address the elements of water, fire, earth, and air.
The installation reflects a sense of coming home, embracing the experiences that shape our lives. This work has an organic, botanical character, the leaves of books fluttering, climbing, trailing, words and ideas seeping into the air of the exhibit space.
The full manuscript of 34 poems is presented in a traditional hardbound volume near the center of the exhibit, facing the Garden, a stand of long-stemmed wood and paper flowers inscribed with haiku, senryu, short poems, and observations.
House of Rivers
2007
acrylic, charcoal, paper, sumi ink, museum board, linen thread
Judy Anderson: “The installation for House of Rivers is clean, a presence that stands right at the water’s edge, undulating, with a limited palette of color and form.”
Ginny Hoyle: “House of Rivers represents what is given—innocence, childhood, love, the natural world. Poems in this section describe the Atlantic coast where I grew up, and prepare the reader for House of Fire.”
You come home to your first home,
green and reedy, furnished
with redwing blackbirds.
A house you share with the Great Blue Heron,
stick nest hidden deep in the canopy.
House of Rivers
You come home to your first home,
green and reedy, furnished with redwing blackbirds.
A house you share with the Great Blue Heron,
stick nest hidden deep in the canopy.
House of deep morning where two rivers slip
through your fingers
flooding empty rooms with loss.
Home at last unsettled one, to make peace with all that formed you—
A dappled childhood, shadow and light that gave you quiet eyes.
Here you rest in the mind’s half-closed eye
flat as a reed on the outbound tide,
a body dissolved in rapt attention watching
fiddler crabs scavenge the mudflats
until the powdery light of dusk
settles in the cattails and a light
in the kitchen window calls
the children home.
House of Fire
2007
acrylic, ash, bolts, butterfly pins, Hoflund-Schmidt type specimens, antique Italian journals, leather, letterpress furniture, linen thread, museum board, paper, ribbon
Judy Anderson: “In the installation, House of Fire takes the leaf forms from House of Rivers, but explodes them from the ground in one organic form, building a metaphor that compares page and leaf. The physical act of burning the pages was cathartic for me.”
Ginny Hoyle: “The second group of poems, House of Fire, represents what is endured—pain and transformation, confronting what forms us.
Out of great pain,
out of great love,
the heart breaks open fearless,
spilling light.
House of Fire
I lived in a house of fire, drawn
to its white-hot heart, flaming tongues raging.
Fiery sofas. Fiery beds. Plates, cups,
shoes, books hurled, burning.
I lingered in that house of flame, dazzled by heat
bending light into shimmer, loving the stunt
of narrow escape, the searing illusion
of searing truth, everything, perhaps at stake.
Too long, too long in the hot house
until at last it taught me this:
Out of great pain, out of great love, the heart breaks
open—fearless, spilling light.
House of Clay
2007
altered books, acrylic, antique Italian journals, charcoal, Italian posters, monotype, paper, rod iron, rose petals, Sumi ink, Venetian plaster, acrylic, linen thread, wood type
Judy Anderson: “Echoing the idea of what is made from what is given, the Clay section is comprised of altered books with a sense of history, like threads of meaning stretched over time. And the lead poem, House of Clay, is inscribed on the spines of stacked books, strewn like rocks in a riverbed.” Judy: “these books create a library, celebrating the earth, stories unending.”
Ginny Hoyle: “House of Clay represents what is made from what is given. These poems carry a sense of weather, a sense of human struggle in a world burdened with war and environmental degradation.”
As for me, I will choose this mud-walled home, speckled with stubble of stick and straw, daubed with pine pitch.
House of humble clay, this planet Earth, formed by fire, cured by the heat of a star, chiseled by rivers, by rivers of air,
six million years of human hunger, love and war.
House of Clay
As for me, I will choose this mud-walled home, speckled
with stubble of stick and straw, daubed with pine pitch.
House of humble clay, this planet Earth, formed by fire, cured
by the heat of a star, chiseled by rivers, by rivers of air,
six million years of human hunger, love
and war. House of forest, prairie, canyon, sky.
Of tawny savannahs roamed by the last wild herds,
zebra surging over Serengeti Plains.
House of terraced field, coral reef, desert sand, raging river
and dry well. Of polar waters’ waning ice, granite peaks
ringed by indefinite clouds. O house of sweet wet clay,
riddled with fine roots, malleable in human hands.
Our small shared house of flowering earth
For six—no, seven billion mouths. Our one clay cup.
House of Air
2007
archival board, butterfly pins, charcoal, linen thread, rice paper, ink, acrylic
Judy Anderson: “House of Air is composed of fluttering rice-paper books floating in a dark blue sky. The title poem is hand written in chalk on a deep blue ground—ephemeral, like a still life of clouds that change and fade at the first breath of wind.”
Ginny Hoyle: “House of Air represents what sustains us—the beauty of the world, the opportunity to breathe in the experience of each new day. These poems and others are influenced by the teachings of Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön.”
This much I know.
Each moment falls away fast like the last glimpse of a dream on waking
before who you are, where you live comes rushing back.
Underneath this disappearing dream
a soft collision.
Yes I Do
Garden
2007
acrylic, altered books, hardware, paper, wood
Dozens of haiku flowers embody the essence of the short poem (haiku, senryu, observations, abbreviated free writes) transcribed through floral imagery, creating a garden in the center of the installation.
Earth has turned on us
sensate rage of a lover spurned
the waters rise
spring arrives
with familiar excuses
offering flowers
reading the moon
by the light of a book
till you come home
dozing on the couch—
on my belly, a book on fitness
doing pushups
House of Rivers, House of Clay Gallery
