//symbols in our DNA//

Rebecca Carlton discussed two intertwined ideas that I enjoy thinking about: an artist's memory stores, from which personal symbols emerge in their work; and our memory stores as a species, from which globally intelligible symbols emerge. Carlton described using these global symbols intentionally, so that people are welcomed, drawn in aesthetically, and then from that commonly intelligible jumping off point her work can bring the audience into deeper questions about the issues important to her: social and environmental justice. Some symbols she mentioned include trees, leaves, eggs, containers and baskets, items that exist on nearly every continent and in every human community. 

I appreciated the opportunity she gave the audience to go back into our own memories and find sensory experiences that have influenced us since, and the subsequent questions she posed - what is the intention of your work? What do you want the viewer to receive about you as an artist? And her statement - aesthetic experiences move us to create things that are found deep in our souls. One of the core memories she shared with us was standing in a redwood forest as a young child, surrounding by the smell of campfire smoke. This memory, and the handful of others she shared with us, imprinted on her and reflect in her work. In her words (paraphrased from my notes), you can see a continuation of imagery from those memory stores that are within her. 

Vanish: To Become Zero

The symbol of the leaf is one of these images that both stems from Carlton's core memories and from global human memory stores. I was particularly drawn to this work of hers because leaves and trees are some of the images I keep coming back to, as well. I grew up outdoors, climbing trees and digging in the dirt in my parents' backyard, wandering around the alpine lakes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, sleeping under the redwoods and coastal fog that Carlton might also have slept under as a kid. 

One of my really clear tactile memories from my forest time is of stripping the bark off dead branches and tracing the maze-like beetle galleries underneath with a finger. Many years later, I'm still a huge squiggle fan, and Carlton's talk helped me contextualize this imagery not only in terms of my own memories but in terms of the universally relatable. Beetle galleries look sort of like river deltas, like the human nervous system, like root systems, like tree branches, like lightning. These fractalish patterns show up all across the world and would be intelligible to pretty much any human, and maybe that's why they lodged so deep in my own consciousness as a kid. 

Carlton's talk made me reflect on the images I hold close in an entirely new light - what would happen if I leaned into my fascination with bones, hands, roots and beetle galleries, brick walls, lamps, jars, candles? - and on the physically repetitive, meditative, obsessive processes of making art/words/music/movement that I've just begun to explore. What if, like Carlton and Louise Bourgeois, I reproduced my symbols obsessively, making thousands of a symbol with my own hands (like Carlton's 5,000 porcelain eggs in 5,000,000 (5 Billion) to None: An Extinction) or constantly recreating a symbol in different forms, exploring all its facets (like Bourgeois's spiders)? What can be made possible, what worlds can be made accessible, through such a simple shape as a leaf or a spider or a jar, meditated on ad nauseum? How do such repetitive practices thwart perfectionism, and free the perfectionist? Such practices shift importance from product to process, I think, and that's a hugely important shift that I'm trying to undertake as a maker of things.