Eye of Water
How to go home
How do we return home when it only exists in memory? What memory does landscape hold? If we are ourselves part of the landscape, rather than separate from it, what does this mean for our study of home (aka: ecology)?
Embarking on a travel project through my natal New York state in July 2023, and spending time in my hometown of Syracuse for the first time on my own as an adult, these questions were steeping inside me. Maybe because I grew up without a stable sense of home or culture, I’ve become a person who’s particularly sensitive to my surrounding environment. Wherever I go, I watch and listen for signs of home and my relation to it.
I’m especially interested in approaching the everyday, mundane environments that we often take for granted. In my art and writing, I approach these places with reverance, respect, and awe. Whether it was during my aimless walks through Syracuse’s quiet streets, bike rides along the Onondaga Lake shore, or hours looking out bus windows onto Central New York’s rolling hills cast emerald green for the height of summer, this travel project was an exercise in feeling, knowing, and being with place.
I firmly believe that we all sense place deeply and in different ways. My preferred method is to situate myself, observe, and refract a sense in the form of poem and photo. Environmental understanding is embedded in our evolutionary code. Yet, the further we distance ourselves from our terrestrial, cyclical, animal humanity, I’m afraid we lose touch with the world around us.
Learn more about place-based practice, map-making, creative practice in the anthalogy Counter-Map: A Poetics of Place (Reflex Urbanism, 2022). Discover the book and read the introductory essay, complete with a counter-mapping activity guide. Add your name to the backlist order form and you’ll be conacted once the book is back in stock.
Tonight, I’m unveiling a project that I’ve been waiting eagerly to share: Eye of Water.
The fold-out zine collects fifteen poems and thirteen photos from my New York travels onto a single 11x17 sheet of paper. I’ve shared a few pieces in previous substack posts (The Ground is Full of Ghosts and Source Waters in Home Lands), and today I share a bit more about the zine — its itention, content and form.
Eye of Water’s poems and photos drift from Syracuse’s smelly summer lakeshores and humid unpeopled streets, to memories in my suburban neighbourhood and reverant musings that dig their way from sunbaked soil into stormy sky. The zine unfolds into a fragmented map of Central New York stitched together with more than one hundred digtial map images. Taken from multiple scales, and overlaid with varying transparencies and dislocations, the map reflects the unreasonable terrain where memory and experience meet.
Get yourself a copy of Eye of Water from my online store.
Local pick-up available in Toronto, New York & Mexico City as supplies last ; )
With this collection, I not only set out to reconnect with a landscape of personal signficance. I also wanted to create ‘environmental poetry’ and ‘landscape photography’ without speaking on behalf of landscape or imposing my image on its surface. Rather, I prefer to speak from within an environment — situated in my single body alongside a multiplitious whole. In this regard, I’m indebted to the resonant lineages of psychogeography, queer ecology, and indigenous studies.
I’m grateful for Danielle Goshay’s mentorship (funded by the C*n*d* Council) and Nancy Keefe Rhodes’s image-text workshop. Both of them helped me sift through my field recordings and encouraged me to hone my craft as photographer-poet. (Nancy will offer another image-text workshop for 8 weeks online starting 09 April, 2024! If you’re interested, message me and I’ll put you in touch).
I leave you here with a poem and a few photos from Eye of Water that I haven’t yet made it online. Let me know what you think in the comments <3
Threadbare cemetery of silence. We need more shovels. My soil steady and raw boiled over days and a bounty on my head. I’m willing a while to paper thin and fray my lonely seams. So what of a tell tale heart? Where to with the cattail and the willow? The will of the newt is orange and bloody as viewed under glass tires. Heat lightning cracks darkness in silence. At night I hide my raw edge for storm is promised and heaven fulfills casts torrential secrets down to this lovely piece of dirt. Once I heard to soil is to become nitrogenous humus rich, black, and full of worms roots, even germs. Erosion bares mycelial threads to the pounding death march of our sun. All place unravels. We hold onto any thing: Fume, feeling, sky; “billions and billions of stars, billions and billions of specks.” We hold onto every thing until muscle fibers give where emphatic action meets its verbal limit. We unravel. I clench my jaw. We unravel. I throw down my bloody spade. We unravel. I bite the dust.
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