Unknowns rising to the surface
Kristen Mallia on generating "Substratum," in "Dirt" at 249 A Street
In Dirt, Kristen Mallia’s two-person show with Don Eyles at 249 A Street Gallery, there’s a magical mundanity in Kristen’s soil from home composting ; it contrasts with the grandeur and drama of Don’s photographs of earth moving for the Big Dig. Dirt is the very stuff we stand on and spring from, our anchor and our home. It’s also… well, dirty. In this case, it’s made of garbage. The material holds a thousand meanings: Soil holds and nurtures life. It’s the ground we stand on. It’s the earth; it’s our landscape. And we tend to do whatever we damn well please with it to meet our small human goals.
I invited Kristen to write about a piece from the show. She shares her intricate, time consuming, evolutionary process making Substratum below. It begins with rules, ritual, and record-keeping, data-driven collection, and play. The rituals involved mirror the work of her home-composting machine. Add time and patience, and a kind of alchemy occurs. Language, graphic design, and art installation take form. I love that she quotes Rebecca Solnit on darkness as a source of creation here. Kristen finds a corollary for darkness in the stuff of earth.
She keeps religious track of her daily composts, cultivating rich loam. She records what goes into the composter and isolates what comes out in small jars, saving some for mixing in a larger pot to experiments into the nature of dirt as an art material. What is this substancee that feeds us, holds us, in some ways birthed us, and that we return to when life ends? Substratum is a matrix for questions about how we make a home for ourselves and on this planet – and loss is implicit in the experience of home, alas.
Kristen writes:
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