Feral Friends,
A few weeks ago after yoga by the pond, we made paper maché bowls with our friend Sarah Rowe as part of her Water Ledger project. Sticky with paste, petroleum jelly and goo, I wondered if this mess was a retting of tangles for the weaving of a world, for the resorbing of a primeval web, for the spinning of hyphal fibers and limnic glumps slipped into the soul-soak while hoping they stick to the mold.
A quiet cove in our favorite pond explodes with the green fires of summer — feeding the births of new earths with every dawn and igniting our own acts of sticky creativity. (Photos by Jack Phillips, Southern Loess Hills, Iowa.)
Perhaps the act of cupping that mud — by recreating the dome of the sky, the womb that exponentially expands an endless membrane woven and strung of astral webs and cytoplasmic constellations, of primal currents, viscous fecundities and floes and the watery abyss below— with shredded bits and glue and with human desire loosed by a good wetting, was the binding of something entirely new with the gloopy creativity of the cosmos.
Make a new world on a summer afternoon. Use plenty of goo.
— Jack Phillips
Water Ledger, an Exhibit by Sarah Rowe at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Courtesy of Sarah Rowe.