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EFFIGY MOUNDS / MARS ROVER
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2023
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Watercolor, India Ink and Gouache
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I read a lot. I read a lot of global fiction and I believe that the novel is perhaps the highest art form. And I am a bit jealous of novelists. They can do things and think in ways that visual artists are not trained for. They can make us travel great geographic distances. They can move us through time, going back and forth from Pre-history to the future with just words. They can layer metaphors to create synergies that seem like chemical reactions of thought and feeling.
For nearly twenty years I have been trying to imagine pathways into that way of thinking. And it feels Quixotic. The layering of metaphors was easy in my installation projects. More difficult was inhabiting time and geographic distance.
I'm continuing this experiment with this Effigy Mounds / Mars Rover project. The Late Woodland period Effigy Mounds are perched on the high bluffs of the Mississippi river in Northeast Iowa. This is in the geologically distinct Driftless Area and the mounds date back to between 850 - 1,400 years ago. The bear and bird shaped mounds create sensuous curvilinear forms in an upland Oak-Hickory woodland and are among the early examples of land art in North America.
I'm a big fan of space exploration. Humans need an expansive, visionary frontier to explore or our spirits will wither. Some time back, I stumbled upon the Mars Rover Opportunity Traverse Maps. The traverse maps chart Opportunity's path over the Martian surface. At the first glance, the network of yellow and red lines looked to me like futuristic pictographs.
In a feeble way, merging the Effigy Mounds and the Traverse Maps lets me begin to crack that literary sense of conceptual time and geographic distance.
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