IDEOGRAMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

tree stone air

 

Recent Works by James Hatley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“All things with which we deal preach to us.  What is a farm but a mute gospel?”  Emerson, On Nature

 
Artist’s Statement:

 

These works allude to ideograms of all sorts, as well as to phonetic letters, particularly those of the Hebrew alphabet.  In the Hebrew tradition, as in the Islamic, calligraphy took up the void left by a prohibition against drawing figures of embodied entities and so of courting idolatry.  Alphabetic letters give voice to and so reveal the world in a way that challenges representational logic.  Referred to as “black fire” by some Midrashic commentators, the Hebrew letters were seen as burning with transcendence, as evoking G-d’s voice.  They become part of the story of “The Name’s” multiple emanations in Kabalistic lore.  In the Chinese and Japanese traditions, the ideogram in its very lines expressed something of the essence of that for which it stood.  Here a more pictorial element intervened to tie sign to embodied thing.  In so doing, the ideogram shared in the life of the world it evoked.  Similar forces, I hope, are at work in the pieces here in this room.

 

These pieces are in part inspired by Paul Klee’s paintings and drawings, especially his drawings.  Klee often played with how the line itself constituted an expressive medium, regardless of whatever figure it might then become part of.  He also cultivated the magical quality of the line—how it could suggest many realities and yet remain, like an alphabetical letter, abstract and oddly uncommitted to any particular use or reading of its gesture.  In nature, tree limbs grow as lines whose logic or expressiveness stems from the particular species involved, as well as the particular surroundings in which the tree happens to find itself growing.  In harvesting and taking home tree limbs, I play with the notion I am harvesting lines that can then help me, if I am attentive to their particular style of articulation, to form them into a sculptural assemblage.  

 

These pieces are also inspired by the environmental art of Andrew Goldsworthy.  Goldsworthy makes ephemeral artworks in the outdoors from media such as fallen leaves, sticks, briar thorns, icicles, piled stones and the like.  Like Goldsworthy, I am interested in hearing the possibilities technologically-unprocessed, earthly materials might offer to whatever vision I might bring to and derive from our interchange.   Unlike Goldsworthy, I am interested in bringing these materials back into my home, where I might work on them with minimal help from tools such as electric drills, sandpaper and hand saws.  In doing so, I am attempting to find a way to let technological implements be open to earthly inspirations.  A good amount of the building of these pieces occurred on my front and side porches.  A porch is a space where the householder welcomes nature to come near and prepares her or himself to set foot out into it.  I hope these pieces reflect that spirit of adventure.

 

Collecting the materials for these pieces becomes part of their making.  Simply choosing this stick or stone rather than all the others calls for deliberation and attentiveness by the chooser.  What is the choice to express?  Why this stone, when a thousand others are lying nearby?  Once various sticks and stones are brought home, they are left lying around—inside and outside—until they suggest what should be done with them.  Yet more deliberation and more choices.  These pieces are about how earthly things call for the artist’s touch, and how the artist’s touch revisions and so renews the significance of earthly things.

 

As in the Zen aesthetic, everyday and ordinary things are set off from their normal surroundings in the works of this exhibition.  In this manner, attention is called to the uniqueness of ordinary things.  Ordinary things can call us to and instruct us in a mindfulness that is without closure.  In them we might find, in the words of John Daido Loori Roshi: “complicity, mystery, spontaneity and suchness.”

 

 

The Works

“Clubfoot”  B (Gimmel)

This piece began one afternoon, as I uprooted a dead cedar in a friend’s garden.  As I hacked the fallen trunk into pieces, one of them reminded me of King Lear’s words to Tom o’Bedlam:  “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.” Blossom Harris, the constant gardener of the Philosophy House’s environs, gave me what now serves as the figure’s clubfoot—a gall[1] from a pine tree—as a gift.  Adding it to the already uncanny figure of a man (trees are full of intimations, twisted and graceful, of the human form) suggested the figure of Oedipus—a man with a “swollen foot.”  The briars above came from my garden, as did the darker branch of a creeping vine—Virginia creeper, I believe. 

 

The tall white branch above ending in a sort of trident was harvested from willows growing along the Blackfoot River in Montana. After picking it out and cutting it off, I sat down and was soon lost in the process of gingerly peeling off the limb’s outer flesh.  My fingers had become wet with the willow’s sticky sap and my ears were immersed in the runs and eddies calling out from the flowing water. Suddenly there was another sound, human steps and thrashing in the shrubs bordering along the river bank.  Looking up, I gazed into the dark eyes of a scruffy, bearded man, his face unwrinkled but haggard.  He held an ax in his right hand and had propped his son, about four years old, on his shoulders.  We exchanged stories.  His family, it turned out, had traveled across the country in a dilapidated station wagon.  They had sold practically everything they owned in Wisconsin and set out for a new life.  They thought Montana might offer that to them.  For the time being they were camped in a copse of pine trees bordering the highway.  He was traveling into the Poverello Center in Missoula the following day to see if any work or an affordable rental had turned up. 

 

The cane or third leg propping up “Clubfoot” is formed from the fallen branch of a service berry bush found in the Hellgate Canyon of the Clark Fork River in Montana.  This area borders on the Kim Williams Trail.  Kim Williams, a now-deceased public radio commentator and local newspaper columnist, did much to inspire my love for and knowledge of wild and indigenous plants during the seventies.

“Tripod: Elaborate Shin” Y(Shin)

 

The three legs of the tripod are holly branches rescued from a morning of trimming trees around my garden.  The ‘shin’ (the penultimate letter in the Hebrew alphabet, shaped like three-pronged fork) comes from a tree limb I picked up while hiking Ravine Trail in Missoula, Montana.  Another tree limb (heavily weathered and still attached to a fragment of its trunk) came from Crazy Canyon up Pattee Creek in Missoula, Montana.

 

 

 

 

“Tripod: Shin Stone” Y(Shin)

Branches composing two of the three legs of the tripod were found under an osprey’s nest perched high above on the summit of an electrical transmission tower near the Wicomico River.  The third leg is formed of mountain laurel from along a trail in the Maryland Appalachians. 

 

The ‘shin’ above, as well as the reinforcement struts for the tripod, comes from branches I gathered on the Blackfoot River in Montana during the weekend of July 4th, 2005.  A party ensued one evening with long, animated conversations on the stony banks of the river.  At the time, I talked with a friend of a friend, a fly fisherman, who had recently recovered from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a disease spread through tick bites.  Ironically, just a few weeks before the opening of this show, I found out I have been suffering from a chronic version of the same disease for over a year.

 

The stone anchoring the tripod was found in the shadow of a cliff over which a small creek flowed near the summit of Lewis and Clark Pass on the continental divide in Montana.  The Kootenai and Salish peoples traced out a hunting trail over this pass during millennia as they traveled each summer from the mountain valleys of their home range to the Great Plains teeming with immense herds of bison.  The trail was used in this manner into the early twentieth century, when a rancher built a barn across it.  The upper reaches of the trail are now in the Lewis and Clark National Forest on the Alice Creek drainage of the Blackfoot River.  There has been some pressure in the last decade to build a large pit mine for extracting gold and copper a dozen miles downstream.

 

“Branches Holding Air”  Y(Shin)

The branches came from dead mountain laurels, harvested while I was hiking with Bill Horne along the Appalachian Trail in Maryland.  The stone, a chunk of granite, also comes from this area.  The Appalachians are an ancient mountain chain, once as high as the Andes.  Weathered and beaten down by time, today they are like the worn molars of an old moose.  But also they are ghostly giants, haunted by the aeons of life that have flourished on their shanks and then disappeared, making way for yet more generations.

 

‘Shins’ with four instead of three forks are considered heavenly rather than earthly elaborations.

 

 

 

“Single Branch” ע(Ayin)

The stick is from a feral apple tree marking the site of an abandoned farm up Spring Gulch on Rattlesnake Creek near Missoula, Montana.  The stone comes from a road sidecut in West Virginia.

 

“Branches Flowing over Black Stone”

 

The branches came from dead or fallen trees on Ravine Trail, located near Grant Creek, which flows into the Clark Fork River near Missoula.  The stone came from Thane Creek in the Highwood Mountains near the camping spot my family frequented during my childhood.  I had not visited this site for over three decades.  As I walked about, I remembered as a child how robins would nest in the forks of a particular copse of stunted willow trees near an open meadow.  Sure enough, they were still at home there. I found a nest, just at eye level, with four blue eggs incubating in the same scraggly tree I remember from thirty years ago.

 

The Highwood Mountains were formed by batholiths, giant blisters of magma that swelled under the earth crust, eventually to be exposed by erosion of the strata overlying them.“

Running Alef”  @ (Alef)

The main body of the ‘alef’ (the first letter of the Hebrew ‘alef-bet’) is formed by a holly branch I harvested from my garden in Salisbury.  The darker colored bow of wood steadying the ‘alef’, a fallen, already rotting birch limb, came from Crazy Canyon up the Pattee Creek drainage in Missoula.   The vines are from my back yard and the root capping the piece also came from Crazy Canyon.   The red stone comes from the high plains of Montana—on a moraine left by the retreating icecap over 10,000 years ago.  The stone shows weathering typical of glaciation.  It was originally covered by white calcium deposits that were removed by soaking the stone in vinegar.

 

 

 

“Thane Creek”

E(Vav)  Q (Samech) Y(Shin)

The stone came from the family camping spot mentioned above.  The branches or ‘vavs’ include one from a service berry bush, another from a currant bush and two more from willow bushes,  from various locations across the mountains of Montana.  The grape vine forming the ‘samech’ (in the shape of a circle) is from my backyard in Salisbury.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“On the Eastern Front”

 

The slab of sandstone was brought home from a rock outcropping exposed along a highway running near the Dearborn River on the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains.  The pits drilled into it are filled with various colors of powdered stone gathered along the same outcropping and mixed with linseed oil and tung oil.  The smoother stones were gathered in rivers and creeks on the western slopes of the Rockies.


[1] “Galls are irregular plant growths which are stimulated by the reaction between plant hormones and powerful growth regulating chemicals produced by some insects or mites.” http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Entomology/entfacts/trees/ef403.htm