EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Cecil Howell
I’m looking at a rock, green with lichen, bulbous in form, large as a whale. It is there, but as I study it a cacophony of earthen memories surface: the rock I played on as a child, the outcroppings where we found fossils, the boulders by the lake. They collide and recombine, a metamorphic process out of which a new rock emerges, composed of granite, memory, emotion. This is the way with place; it is always a layering of the physical and cerebral. Always part bedrock and part air.
I make work that studies this layering, digging into it and pulling up samples to examine. I make work with curiosity; I make work to remind myself that I’m here, that we’re here.
The series presented here an archive of ephemeral moments. They are drawings of deeply ordinary objects and shadows captured in fleeting compositions. The pieces lend import to the accumulation of subtle shifts that make our days, but also speak to the fragility of our time; with a gust of wind everything changes. I look forward to sharing this work with the community at the Elizabeth Foundation Studios and continuing to push this archive into different mediums, including printmaking.
I return to the rock. I retrace its forms. Perhaps it holds a trace of me too. Perhaps we each hold each other on this spinning ball made from dust.
