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.

Wednesday, April 4

UTM 16 411948E 4768695N

Internalizing the Land: Backyard and Identity Formation



This project began while photographing the remains of my childhood tree house. It has been twenty years ago now since my father and I built the trapezoidal platform in the apple tree at the edge of the forest. I was eleven and remember feeling a little old as a girl getting her first tree house while simultaneously developing crushes on boys in my class. I stood there now in front of this tree on a wet Wisconsin November afternoon with only the traces of a tree house left. I would have to refer to photos to see what actually remained as my memory has a tendency to fill in the structure that I knew so well. I do remember soggy bits of 2x4 adhered to the tree trunk where the ladder was. A few bricks were piled near the base of the tree. Was that my doing? I don’t remember when the house was abandoned, or when it was dismantled. These photographs of a non-descript tree on a grey day hung in my studio and kept pulling my attention back. There was something there in the ruins at the base of that tree - something had taken place for me in that location. I began to investigate just what was so important to me about that very ordinary piece of midwestern terrain.

I can picture almost every square meter of the area where the tree house sat. This place appears as no-place in particular, yet I knew the curves of the hill in the back, and became familiar with nearly every tree. The specific interaction of a few trees registered as landmarks, and spaces created by partially felled trees became places to burrow and make “home” for the day.

I’m carrying this piece of land somewhere between my intestines and throat. I feel I am made from that swath of forest between the mowed backyard and the gravel quarry lake over the hill. This wooded territory remained undefined and overlooked as it was between destinations. This between-place began to pique my interest and it became my territory the exact borders of which I never knew, yet I always felt when I was nearing the end of my territory due to a lack of familiarity. Although I don’t know how much time I actually spent there, in my memory it is the site of the formation of my connection to the land, to place, and to myself.
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