For the first ten years of life, I lived with my family on my grandfather’s farm in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the decades after we moved from his homeplace in 1964, I have headed north again and again for vacations, family weddings and funerals, and spiritual solace.
The assemblages, linocut prints, and sculptures in this exhibit explore this enduring desire. As my titles suggest, these pieces embody aesthetic dimensions of places fixed in my memory—majestic eastern white pines, quiet small towns, found objects, old granaries and mills, lookout towers.
There is a backstory to this emerging aesthetic. In his articulation of the Gothic Style, British art critic John Ruskin considered the rustic timbers, stones, and iron of the North—and the artisans who skillfully shaped them—foundational. Decades later in his afterword to Pilgrim’s Regress, C. S. Lewis described the sensation of sehnsucht that, since his youth, had been ever-present to him: “That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead . . . the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”
Ruskin’s Gothic sensibility and Lewis’s melancholy have been central to my recent thought and practice such that, amid the labor and pleasure of making and writing, I have found myself drawn further north.
FURTHER NORTH
February 18 – May 15
Chapel Art Gallery
First Congregational Church
1609 University Ave, Madison, WI
Join me for a reception on Sunday, March 22, 2-5 PM
At 3 PM, Madlen Breckbill and Micah Behr will premiere a new work for viola and piano composed by Micah and perform selections from Jean Sibelius’s “The Trees.”
Photo by Michael R Anderson