#interdisciplinary art

And I look now at all those poems and things I wrote afterwards in order to better understand what happened and explain that to my friends - since our yearly presentation is approaching I must name that moment and explain how my nervous system - my psyche and everything afterwards had such a curious turn up to that moment. That was the end of the questions I kept asking around Epistemología Caribeña at that moment: Are all presences at night beating in one rhythm? Where does the secret I whisper to the tropics go? That whole search was about asking questions and sitting with them until the answer came. Letting things be with no purpose - letting things boil until the point of transcendence - I cannot exactly trim that down to a single thing. But the answer might have come out of my experience - being man, blood - being air - touching the infinity placed somewhere deep within - touching the stardust that still sits somewhere deep within. No exact answer to latch on but sitting with the possibilities and letting that in itself live on my psyche.

The things I wrote right that day:

hombre es hombre aire es aire

y son uno

y son dos

me contengo siendo ambos

desde el hombre que soy hoy

And a lot came afterwards too. I think of Kenshō and think of my further work on the page and outside of it - trying to share the little joys of the mundane. Think of a Veve appearing in the psyche. Think of my own painting - shadow self: the map is not the land. And that night I wrote about "the damn heat", the environmental stress I was under. And even if the heat played part into the sweat in my body as I opened my heart chakra and felt the blood all through my veins I accepted it and it helped pushing me towards learning. Epistemología Caribeña circles back - moves in waves. And through waves I think of recurrence and think of knowing coming back over and over crashing the shore. The sea holding the unknown and sharing bit by bit its wisdom.

Back then I wrote in broken syntax:

shadow self my own shadow looking back? the mysteries of the blood? scattered thinking my shadow looking back in the mirror eyes so black eyes so mine i could barely be contained

And there's residue of that that lingers a little bit on my body. There too is hunger. I open up the gates and breathe a little stillness, live into my present and let the wind blow and the unfoldings of 'round here pass by. It all passes by. Wind keeps blowing, trees are green. Skies are blue. Music plays and I listen.

self-portrait as a book

found objects, wire, fabric, yarn, thread, embroidery floss, paper

It’s a sad, hard fact that circulating music by means of physical objects is becoming the exception and not the rule. So, if you’re going to do it, might as well do it right and make it special. Future Audio Graphics makes LPs that bind interdisciplinary collaborations within gatefold LPs. Each combines a text by one artist, images by another and a record of sounds by a third. Ironically on Sculpture Gardens the efforts of writer François Bonnet (aka Kassel Jaeger), sculptor Virginia Overton and sound artist Anne Guthrie cohere into a consideration of impermanence.

This week we are featuring second year interdisciplinary artist Emma Allain. Emma represents the expanded media department at NSCAD and has a studio at Fountain campus in N500. She works conceptually with a range of media, including book arts, sound art, assemblage, and sculpture. Check out her work online: eallain.com

Emma’s thesis show, Not just the distance but what it contains, opens April 8, 2019 at the Anna Leonowens Gallery. See you there!

Photos by Séamus Gallagher

Emma’s Work

I'm working on a number of things right now in advance of my thesis exhibition in April. One is a series of postcards that I'm sending to a false address, the approximate location of some land my grandfather owned and passed down to my dad. The postcards will make it to the post office in my grandparents' small town but will ultimately be returned without ever reaching the land. Another thing I'm doing is learning how to make silicone molds using a method Alex Linfield taught me. I've been casting some pieces of a tree that was chopped down outside of Eyelevel Gallery and artist-run centre on Cornwallis St, using plaster and resin mixed with wood chip from the same tree.

Emma’s Studio

I have this hand-made boat from Newport, Quebec on the Gaspé Coast – near my grandparents’ home town – made by a local artisan named Hector Legresley. I visited last summer for the first time in over 20 years and stopped at the side of the road to buy one of these boats. While I was fumbling with my limited French I realized that the other customer there was my dad's cousin Jean-Marie. We talked about my grandfather, his uncle. The dolphin on the boat’s deck was a birthday gift from the other MFAs last year, he grows in water and gets very slimy so I try to keep him dry.