Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog

May was a quick month and this year is flying by.  I’m still exploring much of the flotsam that was left behind by early Spring flooding.  At several places in the park you can encounter large driftwood mounds and debris fields that are aggregates of the natural and artificial.  I was exploring a large mound near the railroad bridge and came across this large, wooden, manmade structure that was laying partially exposed.  I was curious about what this could be and so I picked a route over the driftwood to take a better look.

Walking carefully to the other side, I discovered that this wooden structure is a fairly long boat dock that the river had claimed.  I was taken by the dock and its visual proximity to the railroad bridge.  The idea that this could make a nice location for another site specific work soon came to mind.  I have been having fun making images and assemblages of plastic bottles that washed into here and looking around…well, despite the overwhelming browness…there is also a lot of colorful plastic mixed into here.

What I could see was a “wealth” of green plastic soft drink bottles that lemon/lime carbonated beverages come in.  So, I walked around the mound and boat dock and collected all the green bottles I could find.  In the interest of full disclosure…there are also a few green glass bottles in here, but 95% of them are plastic.  My idea was to activate this area by massing all the green bottles I could collect and store them “inside” the boat dock.  Here are several views of what this looked like after I was finished.

The wooden dock echoes the structure of the bridge behind it.  I feel that this site specific piece successfully worked with its immediate environment.  The green of the bottles plays against the verdant green of the vegetation.  As of this posting, this artwork is still intact.  Many things I make out here are either destroyed by visitors or eventually fall apart on their own.  If you were looking at this dock from the other side…nothing would betray the surprise that exits on the flip side.  Here’s a few more views of my plastic green bottles piece.  I’m needing a good title for this one, but nothing has registered with me yet.

While I was searching through the debris field, I was also looking for lost flip-flops.  I found a nice number of them consisting of all sizes and colors which I stored in my collecting bag.  After finishing the idea I had for the bottles…I looked around for another location to do a flip-flops site specific piece.  My search took me to the nearby fossil outcropping and rocks.  I emptied my bag upon the rocks and played around with several configurations until I hit upon something I found visually interesting.

I arranged the sandals from right foot to left and from largest to smallest.  The oval shape echoes some of the ancient coral forms present in the rocks which date back to the Devonian Age over 350 million years a go.  One of my all time favorite fossil discoveries was made in Laetoli, Tanzania by famed archaeologist Mary Leakey in 1978.  She found preserved in hardened volcanic ash, a set of bipedal hominid footprints of a possible family group that dates back 3.7 million years and at the time were the world’s oldest human-like footprints.  Flash forward to the present, these flip-flops are the descendants of those ancient tracks.  When I’m out on the rocks at the Falls of the Ohio…I often think about how deep time is and how far back the history of life goes.

June is already shaping up to be a rather interesting month at the Falls of the Ohio and I will be interacting with the park in some different ways than I usually do.  More about that as the month progresses.  For now, I will end with one more image of my flip-flops piece as I left it upon this ancient landscape.  See you later!