“We are only about three hundred generations from ten thousand years ago” -Annie Dillard
‘Flowing To You’ exhibited at the Silk Purse Arts Centre in August 2021 as part of ‘For The Time Being,’ an Open Book Art Collective Show. The poem read in this video was adapted with permission from the New Zealand poet Kristin Jack, who wrote the original poem ‘Flowing To You.’
Where Are We Going?
(We Move Between Two Darkness’s)
Installation, mixed media l 4” x 33”
“The earth is all that lasts” a line from a 1974 Nancy Wood poem, kept coming to me while I created this piece. The earth is a storyteller. Her recordings of the past can be found in the layers of rocks, trees and dirt. We humans have only been around for a blink of an eye when it comes to the lifespan of the earth and yet we have set so much change in motion in the last century. What story are we leaving behind? We are always reaching, climbing, building, searching for more, but where exactly are we trying to go? By prioritizing capitalism or the short term ‘more’, we humans hurt ourselves and our fellow plant and animal earthmates, but the earth itself, she will go on, as she always has, until one day approximately 7.5 billion years in the future when she is absorbed by the sun.
Endless Numbered Days
Installation, wax, paper, string
72” x 12”
“These times are ordinary time, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?…Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn.” Annie Dillard
I am one of approximately 7.8 billion people alive on earth at this moment in time. This piece contains 12,5765 markings, capturing the number of planetary rotations I have experienced outside my mother’s womb until the beginning of this show. Zoom in a little closer and you will see that I am made up of 20,000 instructions called genes and that snippets of my unique DNA sequence can be found throughout this piece. Look deeper and you might notice the 2-20 million microbial genes found inside of me and the names of some of these bacteria that have been found living in my gut based on sequencing the RNA from my stool sample. Who exactly is this ‘I’ that write of?
katrinagrabner.com 