Sandra Zeiset Richardson 5/5/99 Artist Statement

"Marks"

One of the themes that run through this work is the concept of time and marking. The intersection of events, past and present. How we carry history on us into time which will become more history. Stories. Points of view. Collisions, violent, imperceptible, evolutionary. Cycles. Repetitions. Re and re and re, going back, the same but different. Remembering. Change, turning. There is an implied progression to time. Leading up to something. Growth, learning. But also death and decay. Simultaneousness. Paradox. Dualism. Larger than ourselves yet very personal.

Once, I remember, when we lived in the mountains, coming down Beaver Hill into the Plain Valley, once clearly, but only for a moment, I felt, I saw, time turning inside out and like a wave roiling to end where it had begun.

I did not set out deliberately to explore this theme of time. It is only in retrospect, when I cast around for words to tie to these pieces that I find this precarious bridge. This statement would not be complete if I did not say how difficult it is for me and the uneasiness I feel in assembling these words. How I turn each one over and over before stacking it on the one before. Breathe lightly on these words.

And then there are those who sing.

T. S. Eliot
Little Gidding (part four of FOUR QUARTETS)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.

and

a poem by Billy Collins, from The Art of Drowning

While Eating a Pear

After we have finished here,
the world will continue its quiet turning,
and the years will still transpire
but now without their numbers,
and the days and months will pass
without the names of Norse and Roman gods.

Time will go by the way it did
before history, pure and unnoticed,
a mystery that arose between the sun and moon
before there was a word
for dawn or noon or midnight,

before there were names for the earth's
uncountable things,
when fruit hung anonymously
from scattered groves of trees,
light on one smooth green side,
shadow on the other

Acknowledgements

I would like to name and to thank some people who helped make this show and my work possible. Thank you to Mary Briggs, of Foster White, Kirkland, for giving me this opportunity to show my work. To Rachel, Charlie, Lisa, Nancy for your hands, for your eyes, for your advice, for your support. Most significantly, thank you to Stan, my partner in life, for all the ways you are with me.

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