I feel compelled to stop next to a blue agave plant and touch its smooth sturdy leaves covered in a fine white film. Each leaf shows the imprint of its closest neighbor – a record of how the plant grew before it opened. Why is it so difficult to resist touching some plants? What exactly is it that I think I will gain from that additional thread of experience? In part, I am motivated as a sculptor/object-maker/tactile visual artist to constantly add to my understanding of how materials behave. Yet there is another level of the urge to touch things that requires an initial pause, a gathering of all one’s sensory attention. These are objects that carry significant meaning because of scarcity, rarity, age, historical significance, or contact with a famed person or place.
In these cases, touch helps to make things real. This urge to touch historical objects is a drive to commune with the past, as if affirming the reality of history, and passing of time. One man said of touching the Liberty Bell that it felt that he was grounding himself electrically, closing a circuit by making contact with the abstract notion of freedom. The urge to touch plants I pass by in the park has an element of this as well, this desire to commune with the place we came from and are going, and so make the present more real.
The urge to touch is a universally human urge that gets us out of our heads, and into the world. Intellectually understanding a concept offers only one kind of knowledge. However, some things are inadequately held in ideas and words. When presented with an object imbued with meaning, it does indeed serve us to touch. Touch can help save us from intellectual errors by fracturing everything we thought we understood. It is unpredictable what we are going to feel. This bodily contact can surprise us; pull the rug out from under our intellectual understanding, and conceptual structures.
One day when I was ten, my mom came home from work with a brain in a bucket. My dad had brought it home from the lab at work for her to study. It was a rare opportunity to examine a real human brain. She was excited and solemn all at once. I was there when she placed it atop a black garbage bag on the basement floor by the drain. My parents were careful to explain that this was a real brain that used to be in a real person, and this was what made them who they were. They emphasized that this was a privilege and we must respect this person's remains. I participated, examining the pieces sliced into cross section. Those few minutes were very quiet. The quality of the air changed. Or maybe the way sound traveled in the air that changed. Or maybe I was getting faint.
Taped to the wall above my desk is a promotional postcard from Poetry Magazine. A quote from the editor, Christian Wiman, reads: “Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry [or art] for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. “
It feels increasingly challenging to fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them. Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western civilization promotes ‘institutions of dislocation [I would add disconnection] in every dimension of both social and cultural existence’, and this has led to an ‘aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth’(198-9). In attempts to negotiate this confusion, I am exploring ways of knowing, documenting, sensitizing, and measuring to enrich my understanding of the space between myself and what we have come to accept as ‘the natural.’
To “more fully inhabit” seems to necessitate firsthand experience and a heightened sensory awareness of surroundings. This idea of full inhabitation is something I am exploring in my work. I would like to consider, speculate, and reflect on larger issues using my particular relationship to the natural world as a point at which to begin. I am grounding my investigations in two sites, which comprise one place for me. One site is my backyard from ages three to eighteen, and resides in my memory. The other site is a few blocks away from my current San Francisco apartment and is also functioning as a surrogate for that initial stomping ground, and the site for my project field research.
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