(October 13, 2019: Nearly a year after my residency with La Wayaka Current in the Atacama Desert in Chile, I’m posting journal entries and photographs from this life-changing trip. Entries will be filed retroactively to correspond with the actual date on which things happened.)
Arrived in Los Angeles to fire, but what I saw over the Hollywood sign wasn’t the worst of it: Malibu truly evacuated as Mom had suggested. Now taking off to North in thick smoke, emerging above to sun and reflecting. The last day was spent with Carol and Maggie in Carol’s beautiful stucco architect-designed house in Beverly Hills. Square built to lot line with courtyard inside, and a ripe persimmon tree with orange-red dropping fruit. Customized tiles and bricks, interior and exterior. Craft & art everywhere, integrated into the house, adorning and functioning — the prints on the walls, the hand stitched throw on the daybed where I slept, the ceramic plates we ate off, the blown glasses we drank from. Beautiful dinner of roasted cauliflower, squash, mushrooms and carrots, peeled asparagus and Parmesan and soft boiled egg on top. Coffee and croissants for breakfast. Carol graciously drove me to the airport after Maggie played and sang the song she had composed for her wedding to Carol’s son, in front of the fireplace, with a fire.
Carol was a ceramicist first, and this love drove us to LACMA to see the show of Mimbres pottery there. These pots are recognizable by their coloration (terracotta with white and black glaze) and their form (open bowls) and patterning (geometric, linear, spiral, radial symmetry), and though I had seen them to a point of generic recognition, I had never looked deeply until now. The curators told a story of the connection between the imagery on the pots and the datura plant, which was native to the region. The bowls map both the growth patterns of the flower (which blooms and withers within a day) and the effects of consuming the seeds of the plant, which were used as a hallucinogenic pathway to spirit understanding. The spirals, the white tunnel at the center bottom of the bowl concavity. Photos of the flowers were displayed above the bowls to heighten the visual connection and for reference, a great teaching tool about the ways abstraction actually happens.
This entry is so nonlinear, maybe a good way to begin this trip. Fraught night of sleeplessness and general discomfort on the plane rewarded on the morning descent into Santiago de Chile by conversation with my seat mate, who spoke of the silence of the desert where I’m headed.
Approaching Los Angeles, November 8, 2018
Mimbres pottery with datura photograph for context
Furling/unfurling datura, two ways at LACMA