Rewind: Diana Lynn Thompson
Various beaches in Vancouver, Victoria and Saltspring Island
Doing something that takes a long time has much more potency when it washes away," said Diana Lynn Thompson. She was four hours into creating an intricate mosaic of blue mussel shells at Jericho Beach in Vancouver, laying them down in the coarse-grained sand, weaving them like an iridescent skirt around three low rocks. Four hours into that day's project of environmental art, watched over by swimmers, joggers, bicyclists, kayakers, sunbathers, dog-walkers, baby-minders, picnickers, day-camp kids and common-garden flâneurs, she had another six hours of concerted work ahead of her. The sun streamed down, seagulls keened into the salt air and grey-green water lapped at the shore, spilling clamshells, seaweed, barnacles, and the carcasses of tiny crabs onto the midday beach. Some passersby merely stared. Others stopped to talk to Thompson, to ask her what she was doing and why. Why make this labour-intensive work when it was obvious it would be destroyed by the next high tide?
Thompson explained her project—explaining her project was part of her project—alluding to the generosity of the beach, the way the waves would continuously replenish her natural materials. She talked about persistence and perseverance in the face of fleeting existence, about the value of process above product, about an aspiration for art beyond its exhibition and sale. She talked about making art that treads lightly, that does no harm. And she talked, too, about coming to terms with loss, suggesting a transcendent undoing of our compulsion to grasp and to hoard. "The more you put into it, the more it means when it's gone," she said.
In "Gesture," Thompson's series of ephemeral installations on the public beaches of Vancouver, Victoria and Saltspring Island, undertaken four days a week, every week, between April and October, there were subtle evocations of Tibetan sand mandalas and Zen gardens. To each of the site-responsive works that she created—small nests of wave-washed stones, large abstractions composed of shells or raked sand, dense mosaics or grids or undulating lines, again composed of shells—Thompson brought a Buddhist attentiveness to the moment. Whether modest or ambitious in scale, each was placed so that it would be washed away by the next high tide. Fluxus-style happenings also suggested themselves, not only because of the performance and anti-object aspects of "Gesture" but also because of Thompson's playful engagement with the everyday. Throughout, there was a subtle exhortation to her audience to be attentive, too, to forge an awareness of and a connection with their environment.
Around the making of her ephemeral installations, Thompson engaged in other activities of equal conceptual weight. She cleared garbage from each of her chosen sites, consulted tide charts and then gathered her natural materials. (The quantities and sizes of the shells of blue mussels or mud clams or varnish clams or cockles told Thompson, a former park naturalist, about the state of each beach.) She maintained a journal, scrupulously recording each work and its attendant natural and human encounters; she published short, poetic, anonymous descriptions in the classified sections of local newspapers; and she took snapshots of each completed work and posted them without explanation or attribution on public bulletin boards.
Although the lyricism and evanescence of "Gesture" evoked Andy Goldsworthy, Thompson rejected the analogy. She thought Goldsworthy's practice was "all about seeing the gorgeous photograph" and preferred to name other influences, including Richard Long, Nils-Udo and Herman de vries. Her unstudied, mechanically processed, anonymous snapshots were, again, a way of subverting the hoarding impulse, the impulse to have and to hold a precious art object. Instead, they attested to that difficult element of loss. "Gesture" was both a celebration of the bounty of life and a memento mori, a reminder that every relationship and every undertaking must end in either separation or death.
Winter 2003
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