Created from dust
A Found Sculpture Collaboration With The Desert
clay hills cracked with thirst
where earth remembers the
rain 102 degrees
This Entity is born from dust and tumbleweed, sun-bleached bone and roadside plastic. The heat was oppressive, It was 102 degrees out, the ground much hotter. The air heavy & thick with the stinging haze of distant wildfire smoke. You could taste the stinging burn of the dragon bravo fire on the wind, it had been looming over South East Utah for days now. I walked the blistering desert, searching for the right artifacts.
sunbaked highway screams
iron beasts pass, unaware
trash drifts on dry wind
Collected from desolate side road shoulders and dry wash beds, just outside the remote town of Green River, Utah ( I-70 exit 160). This found sculpture came together during my time spent at Fieldwork, Utah MOCA’s summer artist camp.
The challenge was simple, to create a found sculpture.
So I did what I always do. I wandered. Let the land speak. Picked up what called back.
Roadside victim,
broken deer skull bleached by sun
I carry you home
I moved slowly, gathering remnants, abandoned things weathered by time and sun. Wading into the cool water of the Green River, I washed the dust and caked mud from each piece before beginning to weave them together.
baptized by river
mud slips away with the current
you rise, born anew
I'm deeply grateful for the time I spent with all those artists in the small town of Green River, it really is a special place, too easy to overlook if you haven’t spent any time there.
It gave me me something I didn’t realize I so deeply needed.
True. Unstructured. Play. Without. Shame.
the days were filled with joy and laughter. We rode bikes through the glowing desert sunset. Sharing delicious meals. We played in the mud. We told stories, We looked for bugs. We spent our time swimming in the cold river, stretching out on the hot sand or cement until we were warm again.
At night, we watched for meteors and admired the glow of the full moon as it lit up the far canyon walls, bats singing overhead.
I was happy.
This workshop pulled me gently but firmly outside my comfort zone.
I felt so exposed showing up to a campsite of eighteen other artists. My imposter syndrome immediately reared its head……I didn’t feel like I belonged here, i’m a illustrator not a sculptor.
in felt vulnerable in that I truly had ZERO idea of what I was going to make. knowing that whatever I created would be entirely shaped by what I could find was making me more anxious. followed by learning that it was going to be on display at the UTAH MUESUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART FOR THE PUBLIC TO SEE HAD ME PANICKED!!!!!!!
As nervous as I was, once I began working I felt better. In my solitude from working at home I had become unaware of how much I was deeply craving shared creative space. to get to work alongside others, to be able to talk through creative problems when we are stuck or just even bounce ideas off one another, I had missed it. Being an artist on the internet can be incredibly isolating. Having a creative community online is great, and I am thankful for the one i’ve found, BUT it’s nothing at all like being in the same physical space as other artists.
When you're making something in front of others, they get to see the whole process, it’s messy, vulnerable often “ugly” it’s not like the perfectly edited videos on instagram. It is often a kind of “controlled chaos” the super rough beginning stages, the awkward in-betweens where you have no idea what you're actually doing, into the slow transformation of something complete and whole. It feels so much more human than anything we really see online.
Some artists brought materials from home. Others gathered objects from the local thrift store or at the transfer station. But that process just didn’t connect with me enough, I didn't have any draw to the materials, they didn't excite me. I was struggling as we walked around in a group looking for materials, the only guidance i found was a card from a children game, it had blown into the fence, i picked it up and saw the words “Former Planet Pluto” i knew i could work with that, so far i had gathered a filthy muddy matted ball of bailing twine filled with burrs and a very tall long skinny tumbleweed. I had a rough concept that afternoon. I made it my goal to find the right bits, I needed the materials to find me. I needed them to speak.
how many stones now
rattle deep in my pockets
small things I carry
I’ve always been a kind of a finder, my eyes are always wandering looking, picking little things up off the ground, turning them over in my hands, holding them to the light. Sometimes I sit quietly with an object, just admiring its form & texture, sometimes I ask these “objects” questions or tell them my worries.
I often return things to their home where I found them. But not always.
The dashboard of my van often looks like a museum, the pockets of my jackets and bags are filled with stones, feathers, sticks, fossils and bits of bone. Things that felt like they wanted to come with me.
Every winter its always a fun surprise when I reach into the pocket of a coat I haven't worn in months and see who's in there. its like I am re-discovering them all over again.
I’ll never forget going to a concert in New York City, it was November. Without thinking, I had chosen to wear one of favorite “woods” coats. it was a tough hardshell jacket perfect for working my through the throny underbrush of the east coast. At security, they asked me to empty ALL of my pockets. without thinking I laid out what, to me, was completely normal: small animal bones, bags of owl pellets, seashells, bird feathers, driftwood, snakeskin, beach stones. They were absolutely horrified and looked at me in a frightened way i’ll never forget, one woman screamed.
I didn’t know how to explain. I had forgotten I was in a city.
Walking the desert felt instinctual & familiar. I was on a quest, wandering in windy paths through bushes, letting my intuition guide me. This is a core part of my creative process, to go into the desert or wilderness, move through it, watching, listening , feeling it wait for it to respond or point me in the right direction. So much of what I make is rooted in forming connections with places. watching a plant grow over the course of a year, prayers for rain, watching the moon rise, knowing that a certain bird will show up in my camp once I start to make dinner, hearing the coyotes sing in the canyon. all of this leads me to where I am now.
As I walked along the noisy, windblown shoulder of I-70, I wasn’t expecting to find any bones, especially not an antlered deer skull. It belonged to a young buck, maybe a year and a half old, his life violently cut short. his skeleton was splintered, his skull was broken, shattered by the impact of a car, yet beautifully bleached by weathered, time and the sun.
On his forehead, the cranial sutures had begun to separate, their lines resembling the deep cuts of a river canyon.
To be honest, I didn’t plan to use him in my sculpture. I carried him home almost out of habit. But the longer I sat with him, observed him, and looked at the beauty in the bone structure, the more it felt like he was supposed to be part of the work.
He is what gives Entity I-70160 its spirit.
Making a something from what the desert had chosen to offer me felt right, it felt more like a collaboration between the land and my hands. It felt in tune with the way I move around in the word.
I’m grateful for what Entity I-70160 has taught me, how it reconnected me with the desert, how it got me to play, how it engaged my curiosity. How it captures something I’ve struggled and failed to express over and over again in my work. the sometimes haunting but insanely beautiful strangeness that lives in parts of the remote desert, how it feels to me.
No matter how hard I've tried, It’s not a feeling I’ve ever been able capture by drawing. But maybe it’s something I need to keep exploring. My hands itch to create more.
I could not draw you
so I shaped you from the land
teaching me lessons
Thank you for reading, Entity I-70160, as well as many more sculptures created by my camp mates during Fieldwork will be on display at UMOCA on September 26th.
-Holls