The Ceaseless Horizon
......but now pain comes
where I least expect it:
in the hissing of bicycle tires on drizzled asphalt,
in the ambush of little infinities
as supple with longing as the word "horizon".
Derek Walcott
When looking out to sea with a fixed gaze, the horizon line appears to be a straight line and yet it is really a curve tracing an eternal cycle in time and space. It is the line where each day the sun and moon are born and die and where exiles vanish and immigrants appear. The horizon is endless; it has no beginning and end, but circles the globe eternally. The trajectory of the horizon doesn't have to follow one path, for example the Equator, like the alchemical image of the serpent biting its tail. The horizon can be pursued in any direction, but must always return to where it started before setting out again, just as a ball is wound from a skein of twine or wool. In this way a diagram of the horizon is the perfect symbol for the closed system, cyclical time or the eternal return.
The formal impulse behind this series of paintings was the intent to create a composition that would be confined to the cyclical but in a rectangular, not a circular, format. Each painting starts with a couple of pages of text, initially taken from a book and enlarged and transcribed to the canvas. The first page of text is complete, but the second is cut in half vertically and the first half cropped to the right side of the canvas, and the second half cropped to the left side.In this way the the page of text exits the right and enters the left. The reading of the two pages, therefore, doesn't progress, but constantly repeats. In some of the works a map is superimposed on the text and this also circles the text, endlessly cropping and repeating. In the process of working on the texts with transparent acrylics, markers and white out pens, words become highlighted or obliterated and images and narratives appear. In the evolution of the series, the unforeseen occurs. The horizon line which comes to dominate all the works doesn't appear until the third painting, The Wreck of the Iolaire.
A series is never totally planned, but evolves like a diary in response to events that occur in life and chance encounters with books and maps. The first two paintings in the series, When Night Falls, and Morse Code, take their pages of text from Cruising, by Peter Heaton, a sailing manual I acquired in a second-hand bookstore in England in the late 1990s. The dominant image in Morse Code, of a fish shaped island was added later when I was working on the next paintings.
In the spring of 2005, on my annual visit to the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, I made some copies of pages from a history of Lewis to continue the series with the theme of sea disasters at the island. At the time I noticed that the map of the islands of the Outer Hebrides resembled the skeleton of a fish with the Isle of Lewis representing the head, and Point, the area where my mother and brother were living, was the lower jaw of the of the fish's open mouth. This became the central image of Seawrack, which along with Seaspawn, dealt with fishing disasters on Lewis. The third Lewis painting uses the text of the island's greatest sea tragedy. In the early hours of 1 January, 1919, the Iolaire was sailing to Lewis with hundreds of soldiers aboard returning home after World War 1, when it was wrecked on the rocks while approaching Stornaway harbor. Over 200 men were drowned within sight of their homes, after four years at war.
In preparation for the 2006 Axe Street Arena Reunion Exhibition in Puerto Rico, I changed from using printed books to the more personal texts of the hand written letter and email. Errata non est Pulchra, Nos. 1 and 2, both use the pages of a letter written to me by one of our members, Elizam Escobar, in 1988. In this letter, Elizam had crossed out many of the words and changed these errata into images of fish. I took the image of the fish and continuing with the island-map-fish image of the earlier paintings, put a cut-away side in these fish that is the shape of the island of Puerto Rico, revealing their internal skeletons. Ing Room is a homage to Michael Piazza, another member of our group who was to have participated in the exhibition in Puerto Rico, but died suddenly three months before the opening. This text was from two emails, 2003 and 2004, in which we planned two of our joint collaborations: Reading Room 978, and the altered text book, Herse. This painting also introduced another idea I have used since, that the horizon line rises and falls like the surface of liquid in a tank or container.
The paintings - Beyond the Horizon of Justice, Beyond Beyond, Horizon of Justice, Tug o'War, and the double sided painting The Names of the Shipwreckers Are Writ Only on Water, are part of my contribution to a collective project, The Ruse of Law, with two other artists, Asa Chibas and Milutin Pavlovic. All the works in this collective exhibition make use of a stash of Georgia State law books salvaged from a dumpster in Savannah. The texts from some pages of these law books form the basis of these paintings.
A Wave of Pessimism, is a large 3 panel work. The text is arbitrarily taken from a navigation textbook, and each of the three panels contains a map and the silhouettes of a submerged collective group. The right panel has a map of the Northern England city, Bradford, and the collective is the Cafe Despard. The central panel has a map of Chicago, and the collective is Axe Street Arena. And the left panel has the four Somnambulists in a cut-away side motor boat, submerged in the Atlantic map between here (Savannah) and Africa. Appearing at the left and disappearing at the right is the head of a woman who is spitting out the word, 'pessimism'. This word is taken from Louis Aragon's "Paris Peasant", where he designed it as a visual poem that is both the image and sound of a wave ebbing on the shore. By pure chance, the line of this word-poem in the painting hits the precise point on the Chicago map, Logan Square, where Axe Street Arena was located, and the precise point in bradford, Manningham, where the Cafe Despard members lived.
Othergates, is the title of the series of three paintings, And yet, yet and .....; But no one knows how many....;
and ku-sa-pon-a-ke-se, using the texts of three stories by Mary Jo Marchnight. This collaboration resulted from our brief stay on the Georgia coastal island of Ossabaw, in 2008. The stories present imaginative but quite possible historical events on the island, and the imagery makes use of the map of Ossbaw and the script of the text is the author's handwriting on quadrille paper.
Collaboration with Mary Jo Marchnight and Martin Billheimer forms the impulse behind the paintings , collectively entitled, On the one hand builders and on the other hand breakers. This project is a slide lecture /performance on Marx's 'Capital vol.1' . My contribution is to revolve around the dialectics of construction and destruction, using the images of shipbuilding in the US and the breaking up of disused ships in Bangladesh. The Text in these paintings comes from Capital and, specifically, the appendix on productive and unproductive work. On the one hand, both ship building and breaking are productive, as they produce surplus value for the capitalist. On the other hand, these paintings, having no use value and no market value, and producing no surplus value, are unproductive work. As Marx put it, they have been made "as a silkworm produces silk", as the activation of my own nature.
Why does the word , horizon, have such overwhelmingly sad connotations? Perhaps because it is a line of departure, in which we somehow know that whoever disappears over that line is never going to return. It conjures up a sort of quiet mourning, like a wave that swells within and ebbs back into itself.
Bertha Husband, 2012
Savannah, Georgia
where I least expect it:
in the hissing of bicycle tires on drizzled asphalt,
in the ambush of little infinities
as supple with longing as the word "horizon".
Derek Walcott
When looking out to sea with a fixed gaze, the horizon line appears to be a straight line and yet it is really a curve tracing an eternal cycle in time and space. It is the line where each day the sun and moon are born and die and where exiles vanish and immigrants appear. The horizon is endless; it has no beginning and end, but circles the globe eternally. The trajectory of the horizon doesn't have to follow one path, for example the Equator, like the alchemical image of the serpent biting its tail. The horizon can be pursued in any direction, but must always return to where it started before setting out again, just as a ball is wound from a skein of twine or wool. In this way a diagram of the horizon is the perfect symbol for the closed system, cyclical time or the eternal return.
The formal impulse behind this series of paintings was the intent to create a composition that would be confined to the cyclical but in a rectangular, not a circular, format. Each painting starts with a couple of pages of text, initially taken from a book and enlarged and transcribed to the canvas. The first page of text is complete, but the second is cut in half vertically and the first half cropped to the right side of the canvas, and the second half cropped to the left side.In this way the the page of text exits the right and enters the left. The reading of the two pages, therefore, doesn't progress, but constantly repeats. In some of the works a map is superimposed on the text and this also circles the text, endlessly cropping and repeating. In the process of working on the texts with transparent acrylics, markers and white out pens, words become highlighted or obliterated and images and narratives appear. In the evolution of the series, the unforeseen occurs. The horizon line which comes to dominate all the works doesn't appear until the third painting, The Wreck of the Iolaire.
A series is never totally planned, but evolves like a diary in response to events that occur in life and chance encounters with books and maps. The first two paintings in the series, When Night Falls, and Morse Code, take their pages of text from Cruising, by Peter Heaton, a sailing manual I acquired in a second-hand bookstore in England in the late 1990s. The dominant image in Morse Code, of a fish shaped island was added later when I was working on the next paintings.
In the spring of 2005, on my annual visit to the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, I made some copies of pages from a history of Lewis to continue the series with the theme of sea disasters at the island. At the time I noticed that the map of the islands of the Outer Hebrides resembled the skeleton of a fish with the Isle of Lewis representing the head, and Point, the area where my mother and brother were living, was the lower jaw of the of the fish's open mouth. This became the central image of Seawrack, which along with Seaspawn, dealt with fishing disasters on Lewis. The third Lewis painting uses the text of the island's greatest sea tragedy. In the early hours of 1 January, 1919, the Iolaire was sailing to Lewis with hundreds of soldiers aboard returning home after World War 1, when it was wrecked on the rocks while approaching Stornaway harbor. Over 200 men were drowned within sight of their homes, after four years at war.
In preparation for the 2006 Axe Street Arena Reunion Exhibition in Puerto Rico, I changed from using printed books to the more personal texts of the hand written letter and email. Errata non est Pulchra, Nos. 1 and 2, both use the pages of a letter written to me by one of our members, Elizam Escobar, in 1988. In this letter, Elizam had crossed out many of the words and changed these errata into images of fish. I took the image of the fish and continuing with the island-map-fish image of the earlier paintings, put a cut-away side in these fish that is the shape of the island of Puerto Rico, revealing their internal skeletons. Ing Room is a homage to Michael Piazza, another member of our group who was to have participated in the exhibition in Puerto Rico, but died suddenly three months before the opening. This text was from two emails, 2003 and 2004, in which we planned two of our joint collaborations: Reading Room 978, and the altered text book, Herse. This painting also introduced another idea I have used since, that the horizon line rises and falls like the surface of liquid in a tank or container.
The paintings - Beyond the Horizon of Justice, Beyond Beyond, Horizon of Justice, Tug o'War, and the double sided painting The Names of the Shipwreckers Are Writ Only on Water, are part of my contribution to a collective project, The Ruse of Law, with two other artists, Asa Chibas and Milutin Pavlovic. All the works in this collective exhibition make use of a stash of Georgia State law books salvaged from a dumpster in Savannah. The texts from some pages of these law books form the basis of these paintings.
A Wave of Pessimism, is a large 3 panel work. The text is arbitrarily taken from a navigation textbook, and each of the three panels contains a map and the silhouettes of a submerged collective group. The right panel has a map of the Northern England city, Bradford, and the collective is the Cafe Despard. The central panel has a map of Chicago, and the collective is Axe Street Arena. And the left panel has the four Somnambulists in a cut-away side motor boat, submerged in the Atlantic map between here (Savannah) and Africa. Appearing at the left and disappearing at the right is the head of a woman who is spitting out the word, 'pessimism'. This word is taken from Louis Aragon's "Paris Peasant", where he designed it as a visual poem that is both the image and sound of a wave ebbing on the shore. By pure chance, the line of this word-poem in the painting hits the precise point on the Chicago map, Logan Square, where Axe Street Arena was located, and the precise point in bradford, Manningham, where the Cafe Despard members lived.
Othergates, is the title of the series of three paintings, And yet, yet and .....; But no one knows how many....;
and ku-sa-pon-a-ke-se, using the texts of three stories by Mary Jo Marchnight. This collaboration resulted from our brief stay on the Georgia coastal island of Ossabaw, in 2008. The stories present imaginative but quite possible historical events on the island, and the imagery makes use of the map of Ossbaw and the script of the text is the author's handwriting on quadrille paper.
Collaboration with Mary Jo Marchnight and Martin Billheimer forms the impulse behind the paintings , collectively entitled, On the one hand builders and on the other hand breakers. This project is a slide lecture /performance on Marx's 'Capital vol.1' . My contribution is to revolve around the dialectics of construction and destruction, using the images of shipbuilding in the US and the breaking up of disused ships in Bangladesh. The Text in these paintings comes from Capital and, specifically, the appendix on productive and unproductive work. On the one hand, both ship building and breaking are productive, as they produce surplus value for the capitalist. On the other hand, these paintings, having no use value and no market value, and producing no surplus value, are unproductive work. As Marx put it, they have been made "as a silkworm produces silk", as the activation of my own nature.
Why does the word , horizon, have such overwhelmingly sad connotations? Perhaps because it is a line of departure, in which we somehow know that whoever disappears over that line is never going to return. It conjures up a sort of quiet mourning, like a wave that swells within and ebbs back into itself.
Bertha Husband, 2012
Savannah, Georgia