When We Were Birds

With poet Ginny Hoyle

Fixtures by Christopher Hecker

2011 Exhibition at Walker Fine Art, Denver, CO

Poems are poured into, around and through a grouping of sculptural book forms. This is book as icon, book as reliquary for the stories and songs that comprise our lives.

Collaged paintings and prints take you deep into the spirit and substance of the book forms, as if a 4-inch tourist were strolling through the pages. Luminous images celebrate details of the work—surfaces painted, drawn, inked, printed and overprinted. Poems rise from and melt back into the images. The collected poems are presented in books mounted on the back wall, an edition of 10 signed and numbered (hand-built) artist books with full color images from the installation, printed on archival watercolor paper and embedded in steel forms by Christopher Hecker, who also created tables for the sculpted volumes. Denver artist Efrain Cruz was the installation’s photographer.

When we were birds, the sky went on forever and the earth flew up to meet us in a haze of startled light. Then I was a child with wings, and the air a living thing as every flying child knows.

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Q

WHEN WE WERE BIRDS

When we were birds, the sky went on forever

and the earth flew up to meet us in a haze

of startled light. Then I was a child with wings,

and the air a living thing as every flying child knows.

Once I was rooted in the loam of Eden.

Once I rocked the cradle of a peaceful world.

Then I was a woman who swept and baked and sang.

There was reaping, there was chopping,

there was soup on the stove.

Then I was a woman in a house on fire.

And it taught me this: out of great pain,

the heart breaks open—fearless, spilling light.

Slowly, my practice changed.

I kissed the hem of each new day

and breathed, as gently as you press a pear

to see if it is ripe, as slowly as you separate

your hand from the back of a sleeping child.

And I praised this life, a late-March garden

where new growth stands on the bones of the old.

Then I was a woman rising on a column

of song and the air a living thing

as every singing woman knows.

So much to forgive, so much to regret.

So much to lose, so much to love

before the light fades.

About The Books

The sculpted books are fragments of my work, rebuilt as sculptural codex volumes, binding experiences learning who I am. There is something freeing about tearing up things you have carefully preserved and making something altogether new from the pieces. The prints and paintings, and the bird books are wholly new, too, alive with light, and in many cases, vibrant color after years of a more somber palette.

Abandon (verb) 1. To leave someone behind. Perhaps a love you have outgrown and have grown strong enough, at last, to leave. How clear that seems in hindsight, how perilous at the time.

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Abandon

Abandon (verb) 1. To leave someone behind. Perhaps a love you have outgrown and have grown strong enough, at last, to leave. How clear that seems in hindsight, how perilous at the time.

Abandon (verb) 2. To leave a place because of danger—more emotional than physical, but danger all the same. And then to land in Rome. Its rain-streaked streets gleaming in lamplight. Brutal beauty. Bedlam with exquisite taste. What it’s like is to hear and not to understand, to be and not belong…

Abandon (verb) 3. To renounce something. To reject beliefs that have not served you well, to break old patterns without a clear plan. A feeling of falling. A sense of being a little unhinged, your life upside down. Freedom. Exhaustion. Terror. Hope.

Abandon (verb) 4. To give up control of something. The fluency you took for granted, maybe, in your native tongue. All these Italians speaking Italian! Even the babies—they must be so smart. And all the voices of the world down through the centuries bouncing off these ancient walls. Que bella!

Abandon (verb) 5. To halt something in progress—just stop it in its tracks. Perhaps the life you’ve always known, the easy familiarity of the culture you’ve been breathing all these years. The electric tension in that pause. What now?

Abandon (verb) 6. To give in, to strong emotion. To weep and laugh, to shout, to unlock the gates and let it all go. To pour all that into your work, your art, your awakened life. To open the wooden shutters and let in the sun.

Abandon (noun) 1. This is you becoming now. There may be an exuberant lack of restraint. Because this is the art of surrender, the pleasure of giving in, of throwing yourself into the river of life over and over. This is an incurable condition marked by feelings of relief, a growing capacity for love, and quiet moments of pure joy. A clear sense of coming home.

~Ginny Hoyle

Abandon, vol 2, 2011

Sculptural table: 49 ½” x 30” x 30”, steel, Christopher Hecker
Codex: 25” high x 18 wide” x 10” deep (flat); folds out to 42”

One-of-a-kind sculptural book comprised of original paintings, drawings, mixed-media works, photographs, and poetry, cut, folded, and stitched onto linen tapes; hard covers with antique wood type.

Half Crazy, 2011

Sculptural Table: 53 ½” x 26” x 26”, steel, Christopher Hecker

Codex: English volumes: 11” high x 4.5” wide x 24” long; French volumes: 7” high x 5” wide x 28” long

Two book set; altered early 20th Century French Dictionnaire of Conversation, pertaining to the usage of women and young persons; and dictionaries: Webster’s New 20th Century Dictionary of the English Language (1942); Dictionaries (English and French); photographs taken in Rome.

Spellbound, volume 7

Sculptural table: 57 ½” x 27” x 26”, steel, Christopher Hecker

Codex: 4″ high x 6” wide x 9” long (closed/flat), 460 pages; opens to fan 16” length.

One-of-a-kind sculptural book comprised of photographs and poetry, cut, folded and stitched onto linen tapes; hard covers with antique wood type; photos were taken in Rome during three separate artist residencies (3 months each) and processed “provina colore.”