from the Records of Being Held series
Underlog I & II / double-sided
48 x 97 in each side
Paint made from pigments foraged by the artist on unceded Kalapuya lands: riverbank green earths (possibly celadonaite, glaucontie), chlorite from a friend’s driveway, former basalt gravel pit green earths, kaolinite & yellow ochre from an abandoned aluminum mine, red earth from a roadcut; egg shell chalk; blackberry ink, rust water, pokeberry ink from a neighbor’s yard waste pile, walnut ink from gutter walnuts, oak gall ink from fallen winter galls, and charcoal made with carbonized blackberry vines; choke cherry gum and glair binders; reclaimed contractor-discarded plywood panel made from local trees.
Plywood panel offered for sale through form & concept gallery. Pigments for rent only, to be washed off and returned to the land at a time agreed upon at time of purchase of this work, with pigment “rental” monies going to the Kommema Cultural Protection Association to support Cha Tumenma, a land reclamation project.
These are records of the deepest part of the rainy woods in winter, a landscape of pendulant mossy forms that occupy the space between recognition and unknowing — for me, a reflection of physical and psychic navigation of what is dimly perceived and difficult to grasp. The forms are presences, both comforting and disconcerting.
Under the log is the middle piece in this series: strange, personal, and ineffable, reflective of the pleasures of traveling into the unknown and feeling both lost and, at the same time, protectively concealed and held, hidden from sight and incubating insight.
Photo by Byron Flesher, courtesy of form & concept gallery.