EMPYREAN
“The sky, a perfect empty canvas, offers clouds nonetheless. They shift and drift and beg interpretation….” – Jeb Dickerson
The Backstory
This - began during COVID.
Honestly, I’d never paid all that much heed to the sky. It rarely appeared in my photographs. In fact, except for when capturing birds in flight, I mostly avoided it.
As everything shut down, I found myself out early in the morning, walking. Every day became just like another. Time and space and how we occupied it took on a different rhythm and rhyme. The many things I believed I’d never live without became secondary to what was here and now. While my external world became smaller and smaller, my internal one grew.
I stopped looking at the ground and turned my eyes upwards and towards the sky.
There she was.
Ever-present.
Spacious.
All-encompassing.
Inclusive.
She, this magnificent sky, remained my one constant. No matter what or where, she rose to meet and greet me. Most days, here in Vermont, she was rendered in the most exquisite shades of grey. On others, she was true blue.
But - for the clouds.
The clouds would shift and pivot and morph and change. The clouds would follow me. They’d chase me, their amorphous beauty often stopping me in my tracks. I was held captive by their magical spell.
And – I thought a lot about this global pandemic and how no one human being on this precious planet was spared. We had truly become all one. We were all walking under and sharing this same sky, sharing the same cloud formations that morphed and changed and gathered moisture and then released while traversing oceans. Connecting us.
Often, I wondered, how might it be to sit within those clouds? To flit and float and bounce from one to another? To meet them eye-to-eye? To walk thru them instead of looking up from this ground on which I walked?
Which is, perhaps, where this all began.
My process
While photographing the ever-present ever-changing expansiveness of it all, it occurred to me that there might be a way to make these 2-dimensional images into 3-D.
That there might be a way to render them so as to feel them instead of simply observing.
I began with a book structure. A simple 3-dimensional model in which I might incorporate my 2-dimensional work. The initial thought and concept was of a much smaller and more traditional form.
But then, it wasn’t enough. I began exploring a more non-traditional sculptural form in bookmaking. One in which the structure and the subject might relate and converse with one another.
I played and experimented making miniature maquettes. Sketch-like models of what I imagined might be enlarged to the extent that it might become something other. More human-scaled. An experience rather than an object.
I knew nothing about installation art. I’d always considered myself a 2-dimensional artist. And yet, I was thinking in 3-D.
My architectural training and background had come back to haunt me. This time, it was all very intriguing.
I was reminded of freshman studio 101, and all that we were taught and told there:
There are no longer walls, ceilings or floors in our vocabularies. We work only with space. As the architects of this space, it is entirely up to us how it is we might sculpt and create it.
The questions that had no answers:
How might we (humans) occupy this space? How might we shape it and use it? And perhaps more important – how does the space we all occupy shape and create us?
At some point during my process of exploration, and during a workshop with Stephanie Wolff, I came across this form; a simple square with symmetrical semi-circular wings.
The wings allowed me to create a structure made out of squares connected by thread. And as I printed… and cut… and sewed, the possibilities for what this might become became endless.
The process was repetitive, mindful and mindless.
Meditative.
It was about allowing myself to trust and flow without any sort of attachment to its outcome.
When I stopped to look, I found I’d created a quilt of the sky abstracted. Viewed from one side (the back), it was a seemingly random collection of ordered squares.
Viewed from the other (the front), the half-circles folded into one another becoming a never-ending pattern of repeated curved lines, that crossed and bisected one another at each square’s center.
At almost 6’ tall x 2’ wide, they’d become human-scale.
And – I wondered some more about what it might be to create multiples of these. Many colors of sky. Many different days. Many different feelings.
And, what if I might suspend them vertically and allow people to walk thru them. Perhaps – this will allow them to experience the sky in a way they hadn’t before.
Meeting those clouds eye-to-eye. Walking among them. Walking with them. Sitting with them. Touching them. Occupying that same space as them.
The clouds and sky, itself, are broken into fragments. Almost mosaic-like. Their shapes were symmetrical and not. They were definitely not what they’d been when I’d first experienced them. What had they become? What were they?
Of course – these were on longer clouds. Or not the clouds that we know and speak of. These were broken shards, parts and pieces. The sky abstracted. But…and yet…and still – the experience of walking thru them had to mean something? Didn’t it?
At the same time, due to its construction, this newly created form could bend and twist and fold itself into smaller squares. It could be anything.
This was not a building set in stone sitting on a foundation. This had no walls or roof or floor. What was it?
Hung on a tree on a windy day, and it became a kite. The sky kite set against the sky.
Hung horizontally and overhead, the experience of walking under these could be similar to what one has when walking beneath the ever-expansive sky. Or – could it? Would it?
And what if it undulated, like a magic carpet ride. What if we could imagine siting and floating and flying with those clouds?
And then…and then –
What if I turned these forms into themselves, making them into truly 3-dimensional columnar forms instead of this flatter, more 2-dimensional? Wasn’t that my initial intention all along? Opening them up, the semi-circles unfold. What had once had some hard rectilinear edges became soft and undulating without beginnings or ends.
The insides of each unfolded square revealing a new and different view of that same sky experienced again.
Each one of these pieces is 23 squares long x 8 squares wide – 184 squares in total. Time only allowed me to make two of these during this short semester. While working, I learned a lot. Not only about technique and skill and persistence and stick-to-itness, but also about the process and my connection to creating.
My father was a necktie-manufacturer, working with Italian silks and in the historic ‘shamte-business’. He and I spent hours in the evenings working on colorways for the next season’s fashion. My mother was a fiber artist. She quilted and created works of art in Japanese-like-kimonos. And just recently I learned that my biological grandmother who perished in the Holocaust, also worked with thread. She smocked and designed her own clothes. I’d uncovered unknown connections and life’s mysterious circles.
Never did I ever expect to find myself here. But – here I am. Sewing squares and creating quilt like forms out of my chosen metier; photos printed on paper.