Shawn Kielty
Master of Fine Art in Sculpture
Statement
Journal 16 September 1995 near Mono Lake.
Skin.
Utterance.
Warm glow of flesh in the sun.
Liquid warmth flows around our bodies. Silence. White filters intimately down, melting in the steaming pool, covering the skin of the earth with its silence, obscuring the daylight. A certain presence exists in this tabernacle. Esoteric rattlings exist, carried in the wind, and in the feathers of the birds that fly overhead, misunderstood and uncompared in the bustle of the time; only heard in the temple, the quiet, of the self; whispered endlessly in the ears of the reflexive spirit.
If man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would abandon forever such fantasies of the supernal. He would learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.
Gunshots shatter the complexity of that silence, my silence.
Skins hang on the fence; as a warning to the others who might consider pursuing their own life a necessity. The waters seem not to run.
Waters boil, camp coffee boils and I burn my skin as I sort out the sticks and twigs and the grinds with my fingers and teeth, I wonder how I might point out this disparity.
My sculptures are an effort to speak of the fragility of the spirit present in nature, to conjure up that spirit, that utterance, that silence, and to speak of the fragility in us as part of nature, and of our effect upon nature, and upon each other, using an intimate metaphor of desire, of the sacred, of secrets, and of will, which exposes a personal journal: like parchment evidence of my skin.
1
Shawn Kielty
24 September 1995
1. Edward Abbey, from Desert Solitaire