| e g hundreds & thousands artist's statement |
Diana Lynn Thompson Home Gallery Recent projects 2000-2002 1994 -99 Exhibition List CV Links Contact |
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| hundreds & thousands / poetry in the landscape / writing on leaves / art on leaves / words on leaves / words and landscape/
numbering every leaf on a tree / Katsura, Ginkgo, willow, vine maple, japanese maple / every leaf held and touched and turned and numbered / 38,000 leaves numbered over the summer of 2000 / surrey art gallery bc canada |
| For the purpose of this project, I am looking at beauty. By beauty I don't mean "pretty," I mean the sublime; what Rilke describes as "terror we are still just able to bear." Beauty as a grand synthesis, as the moment in science, art, philosophy or mathematics when things fall into place, where culture and nature join.
Writing poetic lines on leaves pursues that moment. It creates a physical bond between the articulate and the inarticulate, undoing separation. The hand, the body, the tangibility of the written word, becomes primary. But placed into such ephemera, physicality dissolves, becomes mutable, theoretical, spirit, air. Numbering all the leaves on a tree also conflates boundaries, creating a place for beauty to exist. By quantifying the unquantifiable I am playing the fool, turning logic on its head. I am using scientific method -- precise calculation, a provable point, an experiment that can be weighed, counted, analysed and repeated -- but I am taking it to the extreme. And by going beyond the point of reason, I am able to turn it around: science becomes more than empirically describing and deciphering the world, it becomes intimate and poetic; in spite of itself, it becomes filled with awe. |
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