Thursday, July 5, 2012

Artist's Statement

Findings is a poem geocached on a series of offered objects. The work is distributed throughout a small section of Lake Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Each inscribed object is designed with its particular site in mind. The experience of finding is as important as the objects themselves. Together these objects comprise a poem, a public artwork, and an unbound book.


The work raises questions about human interactions with the environment. It asks us to consider our relationships with artifacts and nature, with the past and the future. The use of poetic language creates a dream-space that allows normal relationships and expectations to be displaced. Findings re-frames our relationships to familiar objects and opens the possibility for new ways of relating.





43 4' 1" N,  87 52' 11" W
43 3' 56" N, 87 52 10" W
43 3' 51" N, 87 52' 12" W
43 3' 55" N, 87 52' 16" W
43 4' 3" N, 87 52' 8" W
43 4' 9" N, 87 52' 8" W
43 3' 23", 87 52' 19" W

43 4' 1" N, 87 52' 11" W


What waits to spill from the earth's split lip.
The chaptered object. Apse or vug.
A ground where we are equally made strange.

43 3' 56" N, 87 52' 10" W


Sewnshut mouth of rock, the nub, the earth's closed eye.
Iris seeped to teeth of quartz. Will you pry it open. 
Witnessor be witnessed. Destruction remains to be seen.

43 3' 51" N, 87 52' 12" W


Would you protect an insect. Would you cup or crush.
Honey, crap, or apple.
In what way will you leave.

43 4' 9" N, 87 52' 8" W



Here where you are finding. These rootless artifacts.
That there is, far away, a train. Freighted, packed
with humans. Breathless, hovering. Close.

43 3' 23" N, 87 52' 19" W


How often we have forgotten to think of one another.
Tokens at the willow. In the spaces made for silence.
Where text becomes a verb.

43 4' 3" N, 87 52' 10" W


Listen past the subwoof. Tiny scratches, pitches. 
That this was made. By hands, machines. The raze of cutting light.
Sunstitched sound through branches. The trees, the fractional leaf.

43 3' 55" N, 87 52' 16" W


The text reads modor, hond, and earm. Burston binlocan, the bone-lock
burst. Fossil words still squirming. Gold in your mouth,
in the tongue's wet thresh. Under the gaping roof.

43 3' 56" N, 87 52' 13" W


Will you permit this syntax. To hover
at the point. Allowance, as of water.
Cached in the lion's pause.