Calling
2019

In Norway, in 2018, composer Cheryl Leonard and I lived at an artist residency in Ålvik, a tiny town on the edge of Hardangarfjord.  It was June and dusk was at 11pm and dawn was at 4am.   The nights were never completely dark. Throughout the night gulls and terns hollered – the calls were different pitches, piercing, sometimes mournful, sometimes vehement, in rhythms, in clusters, and carried toward and away on the volatile winds. The birds also called during the day, but at night it was memorable (we don’t often hear birdcalls at night) and evocative (it was quiet, it was dark, and dreams were coming and going through the calls.)

I began drawing the birdcalls – drawing the sounds.  Back in San Francisco, inspired by Cheryl, who developed sets of marks from the glaciation scars in rocks, I began to develop my own set of marks – from the bird calls.  I selected and created horizontal lines of letter-like or character-like marks, a language of bird calls. This is the latest version in my years-long experiment with proto-language marks coming from different sources – none of them verbal languages.

All animals have ways of communicating, and there are examples of animals learning English to communicate with humans, but there aren’t that many examples of humans learning the language of another animal in order to understand that animal. I’ve read scientific studies ‘discovering’ that animals experience emotion, and the tone of the articles is one of amazement, as if it were extraordinary news. Of course animals feel.  Of course they communicate with each other. There is now research revealing that trees communicate with each other, and yes, this is extraordinary news to us, and – of course trees communicate.  All living beings are communicating – we just haven’t been listening.

This fascination with language is one of my callings, if you will; I am curious about the correlation between drawing and writing, and different ways to convey meaning. The meaning in this work is open and layered, rather than specific.  When birds communicate with each other, we hear them, but we don’t know what they are saying.  Nonetheless we can feel ourselves responding as fellow creatures – we can feel communicated with, we can feel ourselves be called.

Note:  This whole series is SOLD