Herons to Herons (September 2022)
Kelly Chen and Caleb ChaseStoneware, rotisserie motor, wood disk, galvanized steel flashing, oriented strand board
Ceramics residency/work share at Pillow Fort Arts Center (Andes, NY)
Herons to Herons is a zoetrope and poem by Kelly Chen and Caleb Chase, produced in residence at Pillow Fort Arts Center in upstate NY on ancestral Haudenosaunee land (Andes, NY) in September 2022. It is a large scale motorized reproduction of an original model made by the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, re-directed about the interconnectedness of all things and generations of collective wisdom of the workings of the land, sea and sky.
When I finally looked up,
I discovered how
clovers becomes sweet grass
becomes goldenrod,
and how milkweed becomes chickweed
becomes a butterfly,
and in time, the wind reveals
the technologies of light that becomes me
and the strategies of shade that allows
a heron to see itself in another heron.
I watched herons to herons,
egrets to egrets,
and every shape in between.
In the softness of my citizen,
I have learned and taught all of these contours.
When birds take flight,
pulling up out of this continuum,
everyday labor and everyday violence find better shapes.
Speculatively, waiting to become another thing, shapes flicker.
This might be the mystery that saved my life.
I believe in birds.
I believe that flying is a mode of embodiment
that dissolves the ideations that culture anxiously clings.
Flight is where the picture of the girl proliferates.
Flight is where I can get away with just about anything.
It is October and all my friends have gone South
to New York City. Gardens have gone to seed,
I have developed a trigger finger,
and I have found more time than ever.
The sky, where I am currently,
tells me things that frighten and excite me.