Ontario poet and visual artist, Chris Turnbull, inscribes language into and on to objects, into the world around outside her rural home. Here is another series of astonishing photos from her work, accompanied by a lovely “prose poem”-like text about her process of making this visual art structure with Thot-J-Bap:
A person has to look through the top screen to access your poem. The birch is arranged on the lines of string as multi-layers; a person reads as they would ‘on’ a page, from top to bottom, but will have to shift body and eyes to access all the text. Toward the end of it, the body can shift toward ground and the side wire. The qr code will either be on a fencing piece that closes the cube or completely outside the cube and on another surface. The pieces in the cube are the 1st page of your Thot-J-Bap. The 2nd page, which I also wrote in birch bark, will likely be inscribed – I had them in the cube, but it was too much visually. I’ll see what the site is like and work from there. The reader has to work, be a bit exiled perhaps, struggle toward the text.
You’ll see the cube is a bit pieced together – as if it has been travelling or is carried with, as mentioned – in the site it will be placed in, the material (black shawl pieces wrapped around the frame) mimics moss and shadow, as well as accoutrement.”
Chris Turnbull’s post script on THOT-J-BAP at Kagawong, Ontario:
I loved what happened with Thot-J-Bap at Kagawong; how In Perpetua was both placed by the river and trees and rock and salmon and trail walkers in that time, but also how that time becomes fleeting, like flow, as perpetua….inscription on the bark also temporary and fixed, shifting. I’ll ask the folks there to take some pictures — see how the cube is transforming, and your In Perpetua (Abigail and Bartholomew!), potentially, moving about.”
thecanada?project 