Twisted
1994, Edition of 7
2 color c-prints from one negative, hand cut and assembled
Land Speaking - Abstracting Realism
In 1993, what life presented spiraled me downward into the darkest, saddest, and most reflective year of my life. I was incapable of doing any work with the land, with my Still Dance. The Still Dances ask a lot of both myself (as performer, director) and those that collaborate with me to produce them. I was not strong enough emotionally, nor socially to perform. I was immobilized. I would sit for hours on end in one place with out moving. The place I sat most often was a round patch of thyme, woven in the grasses in my backyard. My eyes were transfixed on this herb, but I was staring inward. Being transfixed visually while reflecting within opened a door.
I was called back out to the land, this time not to perform with it but rather to take a closer look. I started to photograph "place" very close up. Then back in my studio I would take two of the same photographs and place them side by side. This reflection of "back on itself" entranced me. The process of taking the photographs and putting them together became a medicine, a gift. I was driven by an ecstatic energy that lifted me up from underground and propelled me into work.
I wanted to see everything reflected. Thus a new body of work evolved. I call this work Land Speaking - Abstracting Realism. The combining of two photographs grew into many. In these collages I'd carefully cut and reassemble the parts of many c-prints developed from a single negative. This allows the collage fragments to kaleidoscope into each other, so the composition is repeatedly lost and then found again as the views shift the gaze between the abstract patterns and the details.
After a couple of years of exploring this work I integrated the two bodies of work, Still Dance and Land Speaking," bringing the body back into the land, and back into the photograph. Once I was performing again, that was that.
Those years of work with Land Speaking opened my eyes to another way of perceiving the land. I was profoundly moved by the incredible coherence and order in nature, and overwhelmed and inspired by the patterns that surround us above, below, and to all sides. We are engulfed in patterns.
Eeo Stubblefield
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