That is why smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice.  The creaking of ice and the song of the sands.  Striated space, on the contrary is canopied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriving from it.      –  Deleuze and Guattari

 

Personal Experience & Collective Memory, Formal Research, The Great Plains & Mongolia

 

Native to the Great Plains, my work as a visual artist looks to visualize the interplay between interior thought and exterior landscape, and to illuminate the experience of existing in vast space.  My own knowledge and experience of the plains is important in understanding my engagement with the subject of landscape and memory, and the artistic and academic research that I pursue.

Growing up near a very small town on the edge of the Nebraska Sand Hills, I led an interesting childhood as the daughter of teachers living on an old farmstead.  My imagination was fueled by hours of play in abandoned farm buildings, walks through pastures, and frequent drives through the countryside. These drives were a family affair, and often we would head off to investigate an abandoned farmhouse, or perhaps drive by the newly discovered fossil dig. 
Immediately following high school, I married into a ranching and truck driving family.    For the next seven years of my life, I worked as a truck driver, hauling cattle throughout the entire Great Plains region – from Montana to Nebraska to Texas and all places in between.  This life was attuned to the seasons and the cycles of livestock.  Routes were traced and retraced.  Fall meant the northern routes, spring was local, and summer meant the south.  During this somewhat nomadic existence, thousands upon thousands of miles were spent looking through the windshield of a truck.  I gained a clearer understanding of the subtle changes in earth and grasses that occur over the broad stretches of the plains, and I developed an innate understanding of weather changes through observation of changing skies and light.  Courses of the major rivers were followed and crossed, all the while remaining on the invisible Jeffersonian Grid of township and range that was laid over the plains during the nineteenth century.  My understanding of this landscape is simultaneously intuitive and rational.  I have a deep sense of the environmental forces that affect it, yet I mentally traverse it through the grid which establishes place and ownership.  Both my childhood and adult life have provided me with countless stories, each of which is attached to a specific place.

Now several years removed from this life and landscape, I have begun to look at this intimate understanding of land and environment through a different lens.  My focus is on vast, open, sparsely populated landscapes.  And specifically, how people who inhabit such landscapes chart their way in and through a terrain with few obvious landmarks.   I see this charting as multidimensional – it is external and directional, helping one navigate through physical space, and it is internal and reflective, using specific geography to mark and locate memory and history, to remember stories and events that guide one through life. 

To develop these concepts, I have looked to the work of anthropologists, novelists, historians, and philosophers who have written about open landscapes or studied the cultures that inhabit them. Two very informative texts have been Wisdom Sits in Places, by Keith Basso, and A Thousand Plateaus, by Deleuze and Guattari.

Books, however, are not enough to sustain my interest, particularly when what I am interested in derives primarily from the experience of a place, a terrain, a geographical location – a landscape.  In an attempt to understand my ideas and my own experience better, this summer I traveled to Mongolia, a land similar in terrain to the Great Plains, but very different in culture and structure.  This became the ultimate displacement, for it was an immersion into a landscape that was familiar yet unknown, and a way of life that I recognized – a life centered livestock.  While there I spent time looking and listening, attempting to absorb all that was around me, and surrendering to a way of life and circumstances that were beyond my control.  I documented this experience through drawings and photos – and very often it was drawing that helped me to make any sense of things at all. 

To get there, I joined Professor Cliff Montagne and the BioRegions expedition from Montana State University on their annual work trip to the Darhad Valley in northern Mongolia this June.  Professor Montagne, a soil scientist, and the students and researchers who join him have been working in this area since 1998, and their mission is to support “locally-based projects that promote public health, education, environmental preservation and economic development.”  BioRegions has recently been awarded a grant from the National Geographic Conservation Trust to support three areas of focus: environmental conservation, public health, and traditional knowledge.

So why Mongolia? Here is my answer:

Imagine that you are standing in a field of grass on the Northern Great Plains.  Surrounding you is an expanse of land that appears at first homogenous, a horizon line that is unbroken by tree or building, and a sky that dwarfs human scale.  There may be traces of people, a fence line, or the dust from a distant road.  Now, imagine that you could turn west and walk in a straight line until you reach the same exact point on the opposite side of the planet.  Once again you will find yourself within an expanse of grass and horizon, for you will be in the “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky” – Mongolia.