After dragging a sawdust torso out of the debris hut.
Snow, dye, sawdust, and footprints.
Snow, dye, sawdust, and footprints.
Dust makes physical the elusive passing of time and is a signature of lost time. It is a fragmented reminder of something now gone. I created a scenario where I would become dependent on sawdust. It is an act that acknowledges those who have come before me, and what they’ve left behind. I imagined that it would be as if my dad and his dad were cutting wood in front of me while I collected the sawdust. I took all the wood they’d given me, and almost 1000lbs of sawdust and built a shelter with it. The shelter is modeled off of a basic survival hut. The interior space is tight and meant to be warmed by my body heat. It could be described as being roughly the scale of the inside of a coffin. But this coffin is to keep you alive. The hut’s interior and exterior were covered with sawdust that acted as insulation. I spent hours rolling around inside the shelter, packing myself in with dust and dyes and freezing all the while. The work ended up being a residual evidence of my physical contact with the material. These were shed forms after squeezing and applying as much pressure between the sawdust and my body as I could. They became a prosthetic of the emotional imprint left on me by the material. It was hard and taxing, and at the end of the day I would be cold, wet, and without strength. This process reminds me of an old story I read about a tracker out following the trail of his grandfather. The grandfather’s name was “Stalking Wolf” and he had prophesied how he would die by a “walk to the mountain”. During this walk the tracker picked up Stalking Wolf’s trail and followed him through a vast terrain in the southwest. When he finally found his campsite, he realized that this site was left as an obvious marker for the tracker to find. All that was left there under a mesquite tree was “the mound that buried the ashes from his campfire, and the place he had slept still yielded up the shape of his body”. (Brown 185) The tracker camped there for the night as well and in the morning he covered his tracks. The one thing he could not bring himself to do was erase the impression from Stalking Wolfs body. “Grandfather could rest there – till the wind carried him away.” (Brown 185) Stalking Wolf had left this very obvious marker for the tracker to encourage him along the path. It was a reward, a way to entice a continued search. The shed sawdust objects I brought back from the campsite have the impression of my body as well, and are meant to instill an attitude of exploration even when you’re not present with the objects. However, I reflect on this story, as well as the work that I did, to be reminded of a type of shedding that takes place around a persons activity. Sawdust is a shed from two prior generations of woodworking in my family. Written by impressions of my body is the evidence of my temporary dependence on it for protection. If dust can be seen as the last breath of tradition, the objects can be seen as an attempt to put tradition back together.