PLACE AS BIOGRAPHY
Cedartown, Georgia — the first summer of my life and several thereafter on Cave Spring Street where my grandmother, aunts, and cousins lived. Learning the scent of tomato vines, cows, and human sweat. Finding periwinkles in the clear water of Cave Spring and catching fireflies in the evenings. Always bare footed with skinned toes. Polk County, the Jim Crow South, where my mother conducted field study with Black mothers on child rearing. Sensing things about boundaries kept and crossed
New York City — Apt 4E where the windows rattled and horses from the Claremont stable passed on the street below, sometimes riderless running wild eyed through traffic. Nighttime steam billowing from the torn up avenue glowing red, green and yellow in the streetlights. Nighttime my parents arguing and the aftermath of my father's piano playing never more beautiful than after their worst fights and my room where I made a jungle of houseplants on the window sill and watched the buildings on the east side burn orange in the setting sun. Where I saw my uncle for the last time at the kitchen table before he took his life. Central Park where I went barefoot, went sledding and roller skating. Where I rode my bike to school swerving around creeps masturbating by the paths. Then up and down the avenues of Manhattan Island, preparing myself to leave this hard place as soon as I could
Under my mother's desk — when I was very young, my mother showed me the Lascaux caves. She was a cultural anthropologist and had been in the caves after WWII. While she was grading exams above me, I became lost in one of her books — a large, soft yellowing catalog with many photos and drawings documenting the cave art. I remember how the book smelled, the strange combination of recognition and infatuation; the glassine sheets between the pages; my mother's stocking-ed legs in my cave beneath her desk; her voice answering every question this child had about the caves, the animals, and time
Mexico — 1967, my first foreign travel, mesmerized by what I'd never seen or felt — the shape of those clouds, the weight of heat, the coolness of tile on bare feet, the colossal scale of Mayan temples alive with iguanas and stories carved in stone, the briney Gulf water, the sparkling colored light in the glass shops and the shop keeper who gave me 3 amethyst crystals in a turquoise velveteen pouch and a pair of wooden castanets, a taberna with red walls and the taste of sangria in my mouth
Truro, Massachusetts — the smell of sun on my skin, curled in the meadow watching the sky through a scrim of grass blades. Always unshod, the feeling of crushed shell, hot macadam, smooth pine needles, the different sands of the bay and ocean shores, the cold of evening sand, the warm sand that rimmed the beach fire. Only the dunes, marshes, and wrack lines, tracking time by light, tides, and hunger.
Biabou, St. Vincent, West Indies— 1972, my first semester of high school, accompanying my anthropologist mother on her field study. Attending formal school briefly then tending goats, learning to carry water on my head, roast ground nuts, make cassava flour, and be the liason for mother that only a daughter could. Where I fell in love for the first time with a boy from the next village. We lived with such privilege amidst intense poverty. An immersion that left me unable to comprehend my homeland and my place in it upon returning.
Warwick, New York — knowing Luther Barrett: farmer, farrier, a wise man of few words, rooting my growing interest in the back to the land movement of the early 70's, the preservation of vanishing rural lifeways and the wisdom imparted by living close to animals and the earth
Beginning in Istanbul, Turkey — instead of going to my college graduation in 1984, and heading south along the coast, riding the night bus to Ephesus and beyond. Crossing the Aegean to Chania, Crete. A flight from Athens to London then on to Wales and finding St. David's. Overland across England to the Scottish Highlands by train and on up to Orkney Island. West to Glasgow and over to Northern Ireland coming into Larne, hitch hiking north to Bally Gally and beyond for the last weeks of this solo sojourn. Mostly given a place to stay and the warmth and kinship of others, giving in return garden work or other labor, child care or simple friendship and traveler's tales, staying for days or weeks immersed in place and relationship before moving on
South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe — in the bush with a group of naturalists near the end of the second millennium, considering several endangered species, the loss of wilderness, and the troubled interface between nature and culture... this was the lens through which I tracked my failing second marriage. The carmine bee eaters and the marula blossoms in the Okavango Delta, the tall endless sky at Umfolozi, the massive acacias at Hwange became my measure
Florence, Italy — the juxtaposition of the international contemporary art scene with the oldness of place and people. Staying at Podere La Casellina, Sylvia and Michelangelo's agriturismo with babies, cats, and friends around the kitchen hearth in December
Ireland — exploring the west coast from the Bearra Pennisula of Co. Cork northward to Donegal in September. Learning the colors of the place — silver, green, ochre, wine — and the texture of the rain and the ancient stones
Tuscany, Italy — returning four years later in 2009 for an exhibition and the grape harvest at Michelangelo and Sylvia's again, crushing the grapes by foot, and exploring the hill towns
Swift Run Farm, Albemarle County, Virginia, unceded ancestral land of the Mannahoc people — a sanctuary of fields and woods sloping to the river in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It became my family's place in the late 1970's and the place where I finally set roots and grew my language as an artist for two decades. It was the place of an intimacy made extraordinary, caring for my mother and father through their deaths 13 months apart. When the loss of my family to death and the other endings that death brings had taken all it could, my tethers to the home and studio I had made dissolved in 2017 and I entered a passage of placelessness
The Pleiades, High Falls, New York, unceded ancestral land of the Lenape people sloping to the river in the foothills of the Shawangunk Ridge — the same spine of stone as the Blue Ridge. Uncovering what lay beneath this briar blanketed land strewn with deadfall, rotting deer stands and barbed wire fences. Debriding the scars that farming had left. Making home and studio again and a vow for the return of habitat and the flourishment of sanctuary, within me and around me
