an aesthetic of care

I have written in my sketchbook that the Russian poet Alexander Vvendsky's poem Rug/Hydrangea contains the line "I don't like the fact that I'm mortal." The swinging states of the garden and the studio--- in fact even the back-and-forth between these two arenas, walking, cleaning, shifting tools---are a way for me to attempt to comprehend something of this corporeality. The plants or the materials are there and they shift and they change and they eventually disintegrate. And me, I am responsible for what I think of as an aesthetic of care. Everything seems to be an entity of some sort. Everything seems ambiguous. And everything feels its weight. Sometime I find things so beautiful that it is almost hard to look at them, and I am only forced into confrontation with this beauty by the reluctant knowledge of its vulnerability and ephemeralness.

Paying attention to the muteness of things. Also to the way that nothing can be assumed. Like this year, a host of radishes showed up in the garden, thanks to some passing birds perhaps? Or maybe the swishing tail of that back alley cat. The garden, like the studio, ends up a tangle of trajectories. Collards, dahlias, fennel, mint, feverfew, potatoes, poppies, hollyhocks, and mustard greens. A plaster H, some chickenwire clots, orange squiggles, silvered three-demensional polka dots, the word OH made out of painted canvas. I have to see them all together.