P A P E R
Study for The Edge of Something Endless, 2010
When Ola told me he was flying in from Stockholm, I had a favor to ask…
To bring paper.
As much of it would fit in his suitcase.
From April 6-11, 2009, I made a solo voyage to Stockholm, Sweden with no itinerary, no knowledge of the language, and no connections to the people or the place. The purpose of the trip was to write. Taking with me little more than an armful of clothing, my writing log, and my favorite pen, I dropped myself into this corner of the world. It was only much later that I realized that I spent the vast majority of these six days mute; I was an observer, a listener. Words didn’t fall from my mouth, but scattered under my right hand as I quickly tried to record the forgettable. By April 11th, I had a collection of pages spilling over: sequences of observations, fragments and run-ons, a feverish translation of experiences into volumes of paper.
Something under the sea is sighing thin shallow gasps – the most heartbreakingly true sky I have ever seen. The trains howl under our bodies and our footsteps are all thunder claps and mouths shut over teeth over tongue – but the moment we move toward it and turn our faces in its direction, the mechanics of the jaw falter and we suddenly find it hard. To make any. Sound at all. For moments measured only in time needed for the boat lights to come into focus, we lose track of our fingers, of the space under your lip, because there is only sky in the water. And it’s so close, the edge of something endless.
Subtle pressure changes marked my moments in this place. Hollow museums, taxidermic animals traced with dust. Voices echoing in a language that my mouth couldn’t make or make sense of. I listened for the sharpness of a tongue or the way the sounds react to gravity and I wrote about it. And I spent a lot of time on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Standing on the highest bridge as the sun set one afternoon, I threw a plum pit into the space beyond me and watched its collapse into some inky black depth of water below. My paper sculptures explore perceptions of distance downward, mass, the motion of one body’s absorption of another, collapse, and the way kinetics fragment and scatter under the surface.
In collaboration with a Swedish photographer, Ola Myrin, who I formed a warm connection with while wandering down a deteriorated Stockholm street, I was able to obtain large amounts of fibers from Sweden. I form the paper for my pieces by recycling and reconstructing sheets of Swedish music, old love letters, bills, phonebook pages, advertisements, envelopes – all originally held by hands in a place very far from here. I use sea water from my home shore in Maine to break these fibers down to pulp and reconstruct them. The saltwater of the Atlantic Ocean holds traces of other worlds — the possibility of becoming tangled in the Baltic before stretching outward toward our coasts.
The Edge of Something Endless, 2010
The depth of the Baltic Sea is an impossibility I could spend every moment trying to make sense of. While I have spent years moving away from and back towards these shores, my fingertips are still weighted by a phantom pull toward that black water, to feel for movement under the surface, to sink and to make sense.