In 2018, the Collective Arts Network of Cleveland determined to create a parallel exhibition to the first FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, which sought to represent artists from across the globe for concurrent exhibitions in many of the greater Cleveland area’s cultural institutions. In response, CAN brought together prominent regional curators to jury a show to represent artist from this region. Many of the artists chose to explore the theme of water, as a way to focus on Cleveland’s relationship the Great Lake Erie.

In Gyre, below, I’m thinking of my complicated relationship to the natural world: so beautiful, so ancient, and so full of delicate articulations of experience in each rock and leaf. But what have humans done to poison and forever change these powerful places that are essential to biological survival? Marco Wilkinson’s narrative poem, Form-Fall, considers these “great gyres” of environmental change. And Lake Erie is also my source of contemplation in this piece. I’ve bound some of its rocks in silk, and drawn their forms in graphite, so what remains is a silk-skin memory of how the waters coaxed these rocks out from the ground. The colors above are for all great bodies of water that never cease to move me.