about
My work, often taking the form of drawing, engages in issues of place and the connection between human and non-human nature through an examination of memory, myth, and both personal and imagined histories. Though pictorially I engage with motifs of nature, landscape, the beautiful, and the sublime, I view these themes as the means to metaphorically explore ideas regarding the spaces (and non-spaces) we create for ourselves, the stories we tell and inhabit, the the desire to transcend the boundaries of our bodies and our reason. A drawing is an image, but it is also a fact, a stretch of observation fixed to a surface. John Berger writes that a drawing is never just an image of a thing, but rather an image of the process of looking at a thing. It exists somewhere between me and the world, neither here nor there, both an image and an object. In this way a drawing is a kind of translation and translations always result in a loss or slippage. Though in that loss there is also the possibility of new insight or understanding.
Recently, I have been exploring the potential pasts and futures of stones as objects which contain records of deep time. The emergence of modern geology, departing from James Hutton’s discovery of his famous “unconformity” in 1789, recognized that the layers of the earth could be read as a deep history, far more active, varied, and intensely more vast in scope than had ever been conceived. In the open spaces of Utah, where I make my home, this record is exposed in a way which is inescapable. One doesn’t need to be a geologist to recognize the near fluid lines of these past layers which also form our own seemingly solid present. I have been working with the medium of stone lithography, drawing images of rocks on stones that themselves have a memory, printing this initial image and then working into the prints with more layers of drawing. The resulting call and response between the printed image and the drawn image allows me to iterate potentialities both in the artistic process and the imagined life of these stones that I encounter.
Like a drawing, a rock also seems to act as both an image and an object, containing a record of its own history and the deep time in which it was formed. There is the old saying, “If these walls could speak,” hinting at the things we might learn from those silent witnesses to our lives. As humans we tend to think on the level of our own scale, in both size and time, but in the span of the life of a rock, something like a wall is a mere blot on the page. What if these rocks could speak? What would they tell us about our own part in this temporary arrangement of materials that surrounds us?
Writer Annie Dillard, in her essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk” suggests that “We [humans] are here to witness ... all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. We can stage our own act on this planet—build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils—but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain.” The witnessing of the geologic gives us the chance to see ourselves as small, and yet part of the whole, the continuous interchanging of matter that is the earth. The strange time that results in this suddenly expanded view is both disorienting and reorienting; in it we lose and find ourselves again. And, perhaps, it is in this same strange time that we can finally understand the language in which the stone speaks to us.
for pricing and inquiries please contact
ronlinn87@gmail.com
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