Reciprocity

RECIPROCITY 2022 – 2024
A collection of ephemera on 52 5″ reclaimed plywood shelves

“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”
~Robin Wall Kimmemer, Braiding Sweetgrass

In 2019 I created an installation titled All the Minutes of All the Days that consisted of twenty-eight half circle wooden shelves, each showcasing an element from nature. There were animal bones, seed pods, branches, bird feathers (and wings), all surrounded by large-scale bio ink drawings and branches propped up and laid askew. In the centre of the back wall was displayed a stop motion film of two pheasant wings appearing to move around each other in dance-like formation. As a darkened room, it was distinguished from the rest of the exhibition, conjuring a sort of magic that I often feel while exploring in nature.

Fast-forward several years later, living in a different country, I felt that similar elements would weave quite nicely with the theme of In the Garden of Exquisite Unknown. I cut fifty-two half circles from reclaimed plywood with the local library’s laser cutter and continued collecting pieces of interest from my surroundings. Numbers and the poetics of place play important roles in my work, often denoting time passing. Thus both these pieces bring together the construct of time: twenty-eight days, and fifty-two weeks.

Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmemer’s 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass, with its deeply sensitive discourse on living on and in union with the land, this gesture of display and the reciprocity of observation attempts to entice viewers to look closely, to see as unique and valued each piece that sits stoically on display. To ponder them as gifts and to think quietly of the ways that we can appreciate and show respect for their preciousness and beauty as part of a greater, inclusive whole.

Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid