EUTIERRIA

TAYLOR KIBBY, LIAM LEE, CATO LØLAND, SE YOON PARK, BRIAN RATTINER, PAULINE SHAW, GRACE WOODCOCK

CURATED BY KATE MOTHES

OPENING FRIDAY, 05.17.24 | 6 – 8PM

ON VIEW UNTIL 06.29.24

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit

on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,

until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost

unhearable sound of the roses singing.

—Mary Oliver, from Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

CARVALHO PARK is thrilled to announce the opening of Eutierria, coalescing the cross-disciplinary practices of seven artists: Taylor Kibby, Liam Lee, Cato Løland, Se Yoon Park, Brian Rattiner, Pauline Shaw, and Grace Woodcock. Varied and acute alignments with the natural world reverberate through the space, engaging physical senses while also echoing them, as aspects of our humanness find their correlative in these works. Eutierria opens the evening of May 17, and is on view through June 29, in CARVALHO PARK’s newly expanded space.

We have always been collectors, observing nature through a deeply ingrained desire for meaning. Growth and natural cycles are intrinsic to our desire to gather, compare, and admire—a persistent search for wholeness and connection. The earliest-known keepsake interred with a human was a small cone shell, Conus ebraeus, which had been notched by hand and strung on a pendant, unearthed from a Stone Age infant’s grave—a ritual, a gesture, a return to nature—transmogrified in time and place.

Environmentalist and sustainability scholar Glenn A. Albrecht coined the term eutierria, from the Greek eu, meaning “good,” and tierra, “earth,” to describe the pleasing feeling of “oneness with the earth and its life forces, where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated,” resulting in a deep sense of peace and connectedness. (Albrecht characterizes the phenomenon’s opposite, solastalgia, as an emotional distress kindled by changes in our environment.) Self and nature become indistinguishable. Moments of physical connection, like observing trees wavering in the sun through closed eyelids, digging our hands into the soil, or sitting still and undistracted on the bank of a river, catalyze a reawakening, a symbiosis with our surroundings. The systems that circulate blood through our veins, produce breath, and protect us also mirror the inhalations and exhalations, nourishing streams, and varied terrain of the planet itself. Simultaneously resilient and vulnerable, these systems are interwoven yet mutually susceptible to the other. Eutierria provides the starting point for this exhibition featuring seven artists working across media, from wood and watercolor to clay and wool, examining the delicate balance and mutuality of bodies and nature.

Through the delicate hexagonal framework of metal fencing, Løland weaves textile strips into scale-like skins suspended between aluminum armatures, as if curing or stretched for display. His new series Could be me, could be we emphasizes the link between individuality and collectivity, investigating relationships between presence and absence, or disparate materials and their associations. The works are shaped like curved shells or shelters, with the insides facing the viewer, possibly opening but also possibly closing, hovering somewhere between protecting and revealing—what the artist describes as being “about what’s there as much as what’s not there; a structure that is empty but at the same time full.”

Kibby’s work considers the nature of protection and vulnerability, especially as a metaphor for the human body, whose membrane is as much a protector as it is susceptible to injury. Her Double Skin series draws on photographs by Toshio Shibata that document incredible civil engineering feats around the Japanese countryside, which hold up hillsides or hem in rivers. Redolent of nets or woven textiles, Kibby calls on the materiality of earth itself to translate a sense of interconnectedness and pervious tissue.

Cascading from ceiling to floor, Rattiner’s The Air She Breathes draws us into an ungraspable and rhythmic landscape. Water, rocks, and foliage emerge in a metaphysical, stream-of-consciousness of terrain that suggests depth and space, while perpetually drawing us to the flatness of the surface and the bodily action of drawing. Rattiner’s compositions roll and tumble like a series of ineffable sensations, glyph-like, flitting in and out of coherency.

Woodcock’s shell-like forms implicitly suggest a wearable feature, something to engage with the body itself. Curved, ridged forms suggest the spinous process of the back, composed of fabric stretched tautly over wooden structures that become slicker and fleshier through layers of primer and oil paint. Interstice hovers obliquely in mid-air as if manipulated by its own gravitational pull, while Aphelion emerges from the wall like a fossil of some enigmatic primordial creature.

Likewise transfixed in time, Park’s elegant Birth traces a moment distilled—glinting facets; a water droplet in the thrall of a vessel; a velvety abyss. Through repeating forms and symmetries, Park draws on contrasts between light and dark, focus and fuzziness, stillness and motion, or earth and sky. His sculptures appear to be growing or stretching toward an invisible yet sustaining energy source, like a sapling seeking rays of the sun beneath the canopy.

Lee describes his practice as a kind of “gardening,” a cultivation of life and its inherently wild, natural varieties, while simultaneously noting the impulse to sculpt and control our surroundings. An internal-external duality develops through his research and the materiality of wool, porous and permeable, yet insulated and protective. Microscopic organisms, moss-cloaked stones, tree branches, seed pods, and star charts reveal parallels between interior spaces, our physical and psychological interiority, and our relationship with the outside world.

Similarly interconnected, Shaw’s organic-edged tapestries are evocations of metaphysical landscapes, botanical entanglements, or the connectome of the human brain in felted wool. Routes and patterns crisscross the soft topography, coalescing into near total abstraction were it not for the hints of leaves, xiangyun—traditional Chinese stylized clouds—or serpentine scales. Shaw entices us to follow branching paths that could just as well be chromatic Rorschach tests, rivulets or oxbows, neural pathways, or veins—all of which meander and renegotiate perceptions of ourselves in relation to space.

— text by curator and arts writer, Kate Mothes