Sarah Walko
Project Text
Sarah Walko
Malado Baldwin
The central components of our collaborative project are an artists’ book and a wall-mounted scroll piece, which is both a drawing of a very long house and a sculpture extending from it. The longhouse, perhaps the earliest permanent structure found all over the world, was inhabited by cultures as geographically diverse as the Native Americans of North America, the Neolithic (and Medieval) peoples of Western Europe, and the Indonesian, Austronesian and Vietnamese peoples. The longhouse was a single-roomed building longer than it was wide, which held entire clans and extended families under one roof. The Haida peoples viewed the universe as a large house whose frame was the skeleton of a collective ancestor, while the Maori would, upon meeting a new tribe, sleep in their longhouse and dream together as one.
The structures themselves vary by climate and local materials... from sod-covered buildings in the Nordic landscape, to bent-birch with bark covering of the Iroquois, the symmetrical, grass-roofed buildings perched on stilts of Vietnam, to the intricate carvings and details of the Potatch longhouses of the Pacific Northwest . Historically, the houses represent the transition from nomadic and collapsible living quarters, to a structure that remains in one place- however growing and extending as the community does. Our house is a very, very long house, which combines multiple structural styles in one building, and continues as if infinitely to contain all our peoples.
The Longhouse Project takes the idea of a communal living space as a metaphor for a larger society inhabiting a shared planet. Joseph Campbell wrote that the future myths would not be metaphors about the individual or group/society... but instead the larger society as a planetary family. Our house will expand onto the walls surrounding, through links (wire/string) to wall-mounted canvas and works on paper, text, and objects- signifying the vastness of our shared community. We are creating stories for a new age, acknowledging common visions, shared goals, through this metaphor of shared space. Through the macro/micro relationships of the larger scroll-painting and small book drawings, to the tiny sculptures, text and assemblages, the Longhouse Project is both a calling to look closer and see larger.
The Longhouse project had two recent installations. The first was at 3rd Ward Gallery in Brooklyn within The Last Supper Festival, and the second was built for the set of El Cadaver Exquisto the film.
THE WASSAIC PROJECT:
Let it out and let it in
(This field) (Somewhere you might find me) (Or where I might find you) (Before the invention of the earth sciences) (When it was just the enchanted earth) (+ a hurricane, a cuckoo, a wolf, and that which makes no sound at all) (This field)
(Where one sound rose above all noises of busy life) (where water wheels were used as recordings) (where life was never without the patter) (where a lake became a brook, and two or three mills all seemed to run after each other) (tintinnabulation) (loud cries and the beating of copper drums)
(This field)
(when the first streets were planked) (when a subtle keynote was offered by the sound of light) (These are only hints and guesses) (Hints followed by guesses)
(For we live now, almost directly on the swift flowing river) (It foams over shallow ledges, at no great distance from the avenue) (No great distance at all) (There's a dream that I see) (Can you hear it? )
T.S. Eliot
I
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water, the distant rote in the granite teeth and the wailing warning from the approaching headland are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner rounded homewards, and the seagull and under the oppression of the silent fog the tolling bell measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried ground swell, a time older than the time of chronometers, older than time counted by anxious worried women lying awake, calculating the future trying to unweave, unwind, unravel and piece together the past and the future between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, the future futureless, before the morning watch when time stops and time is never ending and the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
III
That the future is a faded song, Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened. And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
V
The moment in and out of time, the distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall,
or music heard
so deeply
That it is not heard at all
but you are the music
While the music lasts.
An external symbol can mysteriously help the
co-ordination of brain and body. Ritual focuses by framing; it
enlivens the memory and links the present with the relevant past. In
all of this it aids perception. Or rather, it changes perception
because it changes the selection principals. So it is not enough to
say that ritual helps us to experience more vividly what we would have
experienced anyway. It is not merely like a visual aid which
illustrates the verbal instructions for opening cans and cases. It if
were just a kind of dramatic map or diagram of what is known it would
always follow experience. But in fact ritual does not play this
secondary role. It can come first in formulating experience. It can
permit knowledge of what would otherwise not be known at all. It does
not merely externalize experience, bringing it out into the light of
day, but it modifies experience in so expressing it.
-Mary Douglas
We arrived in Johnstown with some tools and a couple of odds and ends and the vision to create work with all found materials. We spent a few days roaming around from yard sales to dumpsters to thrift shops and came up with materials which we could work with and which could work together. The idea was to create a theatrical setting composed of reused repurposed materials, which would represent a meeting place of sorts. One in which a meeting had happened or was to happen or both, an environment where a story had taken place or a meeting of minds, a place where there had been or will be a ritual.
We were influenced by the aesthetic of Johnstown as shown in the images as well as the stories and history of the city.
Medium:
Aluminum and steel table skirt, re-used discarded marble window sills,
pine table legs,
re-purposed 1950’s chair frames, shingles from a house built in 1912,
twine, dowel rods, parts of a music stand, feathers, and many other
tiny parts.