By Kendra Koch | Sabrina Johnson | Heidi Reburn
“Even in May the only green you see are the moats of lawn surrounding the houses, the narrow strips of grass dividing one farm from another, and the roadside ditches... In the spring it has become a monotonous landscape, vast plowed fields relieved only by a dwindling number of farmsteads, increasingly lonesome islands of white wood and green grass marooned in a sea of black.”
- Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Our work focuses on the Iowa landscape and the revelation through manipulation. This work captures space and material affect through the exploration of the response of light, or lack thereof, and interaction with the material.
Embodied cognition emphasizes the formative role the environment plays in the cognitive process. According to Maurice Merleau Ponty, “The sensible thing is where the invisible is captured in the visible.” The suspended wires in space create a spatial grid, a reflection of the Iowa landscape, that beg for manipulation.
The inhabitation of the space heightens the senses due to the strong temperature shift from exterior to interior, the 17 . degree sub floor, vibrations from the manipulation of strings, and light phenomenon on the material interaction. The lack of light calls for an emptiness in the landscape, but through the interplay of light and wire, the space is brought to a fuller dimension.
“Typically, human beings do not make their experiences in the lifeworld an object of conscious awareness. Rather these experiences just happen, and people do not consider how they happen, whether they could happen differently, or of what larger experiential structures they might be a part.”
- David Seamon
A Way of Seeing People and Place
Sound and music can expose forgotten places and narratives, the installation presents a line work in space that acts as poignant soundtracks to past utopias. A wrestle with the flow of time - the raw material of both music and history
“It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.”
- Maurice Merleau Ponty