Liminal Spaces for Dreams and Dirt

By Cat Hulshoff

White Sands National Monument

October 30, 2017

The topography moves with the wind, always changing, erasing footprints and drawings in the sand. Walking up and down the dunes, my head swims, as my body is heaved up and around the hills that swell like ocean water. It’s hard not to feel it breathing under your feet, trying to walk, sinking every step. Animal tracks in the dunes are irresistible and I follow every new set I find, only to end, every single time, at some type of plant or vegetative patch. All prints lead to seeds. Even the seeds begin to leave tracks, so I begin to trace tracks of my own, like a dotted line, I perforate the sand, only to watch it soften and then disappear altogether in the wind. Fair enough, I think. I do not belong here anyway. This space articulates well that space where dreams occur. The kind where you know your dreaming so you can control it, yet the setting, this sea of white and blue, is out of my control. It presses itself in and around me, stretching out forever. It feels like purgatory.

Spiral Eddies

By Catherine Hulshoff

Gila Wilderness, NM

October 27, 2017

How to build a “Spiral Eddy”:

Step 1: Find a river. Forget traditional notions of language.

Step 2: Find a space or section that speaks to you, or is at least easy to get in and out of.

Step 3: Walk up and down this section of river until you feel well acquainted. This works best with bare legs so that you can feel the push and pull high and low or under currents as it rushes passed your body. Note the river bed- the changes from silt and mud, to sand, to rocks.

Step 4: Build for yourself, in your head or on paper, a library of Semasiographic indicators that you are reading from the river. Watch how the water moves over or around stones, or how currents push against the riverbank. Note how the river indicates to you the slope of the ground underneath, the pull of fast paced water in deeper areas and the trickle of water that bubbles around smaller river rocks in shallow areas.

Step 5: Choose your favorite. This can be a current, a slope in the riverbed, or a shallow canal of river rocks near the shoreline.

Step 6: Once you have found your “shape”, using rocks from nearby or underfoot, pull that shape up from the river, building it and embodying it with the rocks. The number of rocks needed to successfully raise the indicator from the water may vary.

Step 7: Grab rocks and start piling and shaping however the river tells you to do so. You will know when you are done as the current and shape you found initially will not change, but only become more pronounced. It will feel right.

Step 8: Step back and watch, listen, and read the river.

Step 9: Return a year later and check on it. Repeat as necessary.

Tending to “Place” in an Unusual Way

By Catherine Hulshoff

Patagonia, AZ

October 16, 2017

A non-profit collective known as Borderlands Restoration of southern Arizona is pursuing experimental theories of collective conservation and adaptive environmental husbandry with a relentless fervor. The assorted collaboration of folks at BR are working in the flood plains of southern Arizona to prevent further erosion of soil within arroyos, or washes, so that vegetation may hold fast.  As humans began to over develop the desert and divert water to unnaturally irrigated landscapes, soil erosion in this environment has been rampant, destroying the biodiversity of the area. So the BR has begun to design and build a series of patterned check dams built from locally sourced mesquite branches, or recycled chunks of cement or “overburden” from local mines. The styles are referred to as media lunas, trencheras, and Zuni bowls. These three shapes create patterns strategically spaced throughout the arroyos and flood plains, beautifully woven into the landscape- indicative of both aesthetic and functional compositions. This type of creative resistance, implemented through the intervention of human hands, is left alone to allow nature time and space to recover, an optimistic salute to art that heals.

A Different Breath

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff

Muley Point, Bears Ears National Monument, UT

September 29, 2017

       There air and light up here feel different. The pressure on my temples and chest are lifted. I feel like I can open my eyes wider, like I am not afraid to look because here I know I will not hear or see an oil, or natural gas pump. But for how long? How long will it take for Trump to destroy Bear’s Ears and litter it with money hungry pumps that draw from the ground like it’s bleeding a pig? Jonah says this is a place for healing, for everyone to use. This place is a part of his way of life, and this space is an everyday space. Are we truly going to continue this behavior of breaking treaties and marginalizing the indigenous population all in the name of exporting an energy Band-Aid over seas?  Is this really OK with you? Are you really OK with just ignoring and denying the existence of other human beings and their homeland that they share with visitors? Is this denial really easier than giving voice and agency to renewable energy and environmental justice? Maybe it is easier now, but when we run out of air and food and we start eating money, we will wish we could go back to the age of “choices” and choose differently. Our children will ask us: what was so important that we couldn’t bring ourselves to care, to act?

Line of Sight

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff

Glen Canyon Dam/Lake Powell, AZ

September 28, 2017

            Someone back home asked me how my trip was going so far. I told them I don’t even know where to begin. I told them I was exhausted and felt displaced, like maybe I accidently got in the wrong van and lost the LAAW van back at Wild Rivers. I could not really reply with fully formed thoughts so I sent them a vocabulary list to get them started: colonialism, extractivism, exploitation, and cultural genocide.

            I really have nothing more to say about this place except that the one thing they (the security officers at the dam) don’t want you to talk about seems like the only thing that matters now: SABOTAGE.

School Bus Loading Zone

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff

Angel Peak (Fracking Reality Tour), Four Corners, NM

September 22nd, 2017

                    There is really nothing OK about what is happening in the Four Corner’s region. Not only is the exploitation of land and language difficult to swallow, but also the air itself is difficult to breathe. I don’t think any of us expected such an acidic environment, with such an awesome view. Even the view is stained with a low flying brown and green cloud that all but conceals the environmental impact the power plants and oil extraction fields have on this space and its inhabitants. We weren’t on site but two days before some of us began to feel ill and out of sorts. I could not imagine being forced to accept this type of pollution as my home, let alone as the fate of the home of my ancestors.

                   And for me this is not the case. I am able to get in the van and leave, to go home to my apartment and put this region far enough away that I am able to breathe again. Daniel Tso tells us it is all about choices. This does not seem like a place of choices, unless you are on the refinery’s payroll. They paint the pumps and water tanks green, as though we won’t notice them punctuating the landscape, drawing from an empty well. Ironically, some of these pumping stations are solar powered. Even the oil and gas companies do not bother to deny the simplicity and functionality of solar power. Nothing about this place is OK. Choice and agency feel are a phantom here.

Untitled (I Wrote Your Name in the Sand)

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff

Wild Rivers, NM

September 9, 2017

To better inform my exploration into eco-sexuality and how a partnership with the environment become equally beneficial for myself, the environment, and my partners, I have started addressing the dirt and the earth directly in image making and in my writing.  Hiking has become a practice in looking and watching, and less about a destination and it has never been about collecting objects or vegetation. Any work I do is immediately taken down, erased, or the water will eventually erase it as it did for this piece- the image featured here. The expanding circles evolved from the previous crop circle in the rye field. They have taken on a Fibonacci form and will be the dirt’s namesake. What I mean by that is when I wanted to make a romantic gesture towards the earth I decided to write its name in the sand. However, in keeping with ideas of communication and consciousness outside of language I am moving towards a semasiagraphic type of lexicon.  So if the earth’s name were to have a logographic type of representation between it, my partners, and myself it would be these circles. The size and number of circles is determined by the space or surface on which the image is drawn.  I write love letters to my partner and today it began with, “Today I wrote your name in the sand.”

Untitled (Self Portrait)

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff

La Villita, NM

September 5, 2017

Today I made a crop circle in a field of rye. The physical act of pushing the rye down with my whole body, pushing with my legs and forearms became a new form of drawing that moved beyond the material connection of the string I was previously using (in Cunningham Gulch) and the size of the work made my hands less essential. Moving in concentric and growing circles made me think of time and how we track time in western history as a linear function. Moving in circles, spiraling out, my body and the rye became a timeline of recurring events in space and time, when certain events can coincide at similar points in the spiral.

Then I was abducted. Leaving my clothes and water bottle behind trace a partial portrait and indicate that I am still trying to insert myself into the work without making it a direct portrait. I am not sure I like the idea of having to be so direct when I would rather it be a peripheral, even undetectable portrait. I just feel the image is more bio-centric and less Anglo-centric, but I am not sure what that means for a larger body of work.

Binding/Repair

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff & Adele Ardent Eden

Rio Grande Headwaters, CO

September 1, 2017

AAE: It is clear how much we are reliant on a chain of civilization to survive in these “wild” landscapes, even in those that are being used as playgrounds for city-living humans to go “out” and “get away from it all.” We have to bring our technologies with us to survive, our mass-produced food, shelter, and tools. A human hand on the landscape is never a singular hand; we are touching the land through the hands of others who have made our presence possible.

Still from “Binding/Repair” collaborative project by Amy Catherine Hulshoff & Adele Ardent Eden.

In my previous work, I’ve wanted to explore the complex systems that arise between individuals in relationship, and the ways that we balance a need for connection against a need for control. In this collaborative work with Amy Catherine Hulshoff, we explored a relationship between two humans and the ice formation that encloses and contributes to the stream that shapes Cunningham Gulch. We found ourselves working with similar materials, such as needle and red thread, but diverged in our goals and actions: She was looking at ways to repair the deteriorating ice, while I was looking for ways to break into it...

Still from “Binding/Repair” collaborative project by Amy Catherine Hulshoff & Adele Ardent Eden.

As we sewed ourselves together, and to the ice, for me, this became about the challenges of finding points of connection to the landscape and to my new community that were strong, without being too destructive, or too binding.

ACH: Working with Adele opened up a new channel of communication for my work, not only between myself and another person, but between myself and our materials. Working to cope with the surroundings at the headwaters worked best if I attempted to essentialize my arena. However, in pulling bits and pieces from the landscape I found myself left with mostly broken pieces of a much bigger system- specifically here in this work we had what was left of a small glacier like tract of snow bridging the stream near our campground. I felt the need then to attempt to "repair" or stitch back together the winter's detritus of snow, sticks, and stones. With Adele, sewing our hands together, and into the ice, showed me one of the many possible way to insert myself back into this system, rather than impose myself upon it. This small performance of repair and communion echoes a much larger attempt to form an equitable relationship with the environment. I think this begins with a type of communication that exists more in material and less within an understood notion of "language". 

Untitled (Self Portrait)

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff
Rio Grande Headwaters, CO
August 30, 2017

I hiked to about 12,290 feet to get to the Highland Mary Lakes. On the way up I would stop and draw on different surfaces with a length of yarn predetermined by certain measurements of my own body. At the top, on the shores of one of the lakes, I found myself unable to move, my feet were screaming for me to just sit still for a minute. So I was staring mostly at the ground and traced the cracks in the dried mud with my eyes. Like the peaks of the canyon we were camping in, even the numerous and delimited cracks were difficult to cope with and take in all at once. Using the yarn I am able to essentialize a pattern in the cracks, and with each push of my fingers tips I gently lined the cracks with the red string, learning intimate details and textures.

The line is informed by the topography of the dirt, but the intervention of the colored string into the naturally formed cracks becomes a type of self-portrait, warped to the agency of the found earth, and not entirely an imposition of my own will. I will try and push more of my own physical self into the image or at the very least document the process of the unification of human and non-human agencies. Forming an intimate and genuine relationship between the dirt and myself is an essential step in establishing an eco-sexual companionship that will involve sincere listening and looking on my part to exchange knowledge with the environment.