THE WHISPER CALLING US HOME
ESSAY FOR MYA KERNER’S SOLO EXHIBITION, these WHISPERS, THESE TELLINGS, AT winston wÄchter Fine art, SEATTLE, SEPTEMBER 2021
the whisper as prayers carried across the wind
the whisper of stories told by the ancestors
the whisper as secrets given by healers
the whisper of trickery, fairy-led
the whisper as warning
the whisper as spell
the whisper calling us home
szept
the word itself a whisper
the whisper of stories told by the ancestors
the whisper as secrets given by healers
the whisper of trickery, fairy-led
the whisper as warning
the whisper as spell
the whisper calling us home
szept
the word itself a whisper
Mya Kerner, This Borderless Distance, 2021 oil and graphite on panel, 43 x 129 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Winston Wachter
TREES
It’s an early summer day in Seattle, and I’m listening to Mya Kerner paint a picture with words. She’s lost in memory but startlingly present while describing the surreal aftermath of a tornado in Pennsylvania. In her description, a graveyard of sycamore trees, splintered and ravaged by the storm, composed a sort of beauty in the midst of this tragic scene. She explains how these remnants of trees will eventually be logged, but in the meantime, wildlife—eagles, foxes, bobcats, wildflowers, brush, and greenery—are all finding a home amidst the wreckage. There’s a wistfulness in the wake of this verdant return; joy burdened by the knowledge that after the pandemic, despite the revitalization of the land and its inhabitants, the area will be razed rather than reestablished as a thriving green space. These words are a painting of loss and grief, echoing our collective story about life and living through a capitalistic anthropocene.
Mya connects this memory of the storm-felled forest to a memory of her visit to one of the last and largest remaining stretches of Europe’s primeval woodlands, Białowieża Forest in Poland. While there, she wasn’t able to enter, but she could view the forest’s edge through a tall fence. Within both these stories are deeply embedded metaphors about returning home, reconnecting to ancestry, and navigating the uncertainty in doing so. What will be left? Where can we return to, and what can be rebuilt? What relationship does longing have to the idea of home?
While listening to Mya speak about her work, I’m also spending this time looking through her body of paintings and sculptures. I find myself sensing a familiarity in these vignettes of angular valleys, hills, and trees. Though beautiful, like Mya’s stories they carry the weight of memory and wistfulness, of ravaged lands weathered by time and by cataclysm across millennia. No warmth or safety lies within these places—something about the light is off, it's too stark. I sense the crackle of electricity and I know the figures and their positions are an invitation, and a warning. Appearing throughout many of her paintings are gatherings of stones, sometimes arranged in a circle. The stones are an assembly of gates, courts, and temples. These assemblies are passages and portals into new ways of seeing and being. They provide an opportunity for intimacy, a close up view that asks us to examine something more deeply, in detail, beneath the surface. Here, stand there, look closely, listen. Here is another space and how you may enter. Mya refers to them as touchstones, and like many hidden things that slowly reveal themselves over time, once you start looking, they appear everywhere. To be uncertain, and unsure, in our journey towards connection or reconnection is to exist in the pause between questions. It is to be in limbo; hung in the balance. At a threshold. Liminal.
Mya connects this memory of the storm-felled forest to a memory of her visit to one of the last and largest remaining stretches of Europe’s primeval woodlands, Białowieża Forest in Poland. While there, she wasn’t able to enter, but she could view the forest’s edge through a tall fence. Within both these stories are deeply embedded metaphors about returning home, reconnecting to ancestry, and navigating the uncertainty in doing so. What will be left? Where can we return to, and what can be rebuilt? What relationship does longing have to the idea of home?
While listening to Mya speak about her work, I’m also spending this time looking through her body of paintings and sculptures. I find myself sensing a familiarity in these vignettes of angular valleys, hills, and trees. Though beautiful, like Mya’s stories they carry the weight of memory and wistfulness, of ravaged lands weathered by time and by cataclysm across millennia. No warmth or safety lies within these places—something about the light is off, it's too stark. I sense the crackle of electricity and I know the figures and their positions are an invitation, and a warning. Appearing throughout many of her paintings are gatherings of stones, sometimes arranged in a circle. The stones are an assembly of gates, courts, and temples. These assemblies are passages and portals into new ways of seeing and being. They provide an opportunity for intimacy, a close up view that asks us to examine something more deeply, in detail, beneath the surface. Here, stand there, look closely, listen. Here is another space and how you may enter. Mya refers to them as touchstones, and like many hidden things that slowly reveal themselves over time, once you start looking, they appear everywhere. To be uncertain, and unsure, in our journey towards connection or reconnection is to exist in the pause between questions. It is to be in limbo; hung in the balance. At a threshold. Liminal.
FIRE
Throughout Mya’s work, dark slender figures of carbonized trees arrange themselves in bonelike gestures. Their firm stance is a fight, a declaration, a resistance; defiant. Defiance as fire, defiance born of sparks and storm and grief; the pause between breaths. I think of my own ancestral languages and my studies of the Irish ogham alphabet which, while not explicitly related to trees, does often refer to them in their kennings; a series of phrases that lend descriptions for their associations. Ailm is especially significant here, described in several ways: the tall pine, so prevalent in northern forests; a great groaning, as in a birth; the transformation of an arrival; the beginning of an answer; the moment after the exhale and before the next inhalation.
The positions of all trees form a pause between breaths, a space. They are the trees from Mya’s memory. They are the trees in Mya’s present. They are the figures left standing after the havoc wreaked by storms, fires, climate change; and time. These are future trees. They are in relationship with these events and we to them; walking among their shadows in the quiet landscape, interrupted only by a breeze. A whisper. What have we observed in this tremendous collective experience of slowly unfolding transformation? Like these trees, we humans have been ravaged by uncontainable, untamable fires. We are exhaling in a great collective groan; wondering when we will be able to breathe. In such a pause we may find ourselves reflecting on questions, becoming necessarily lost in thought; lost in the way that not moving towards something is sometimes how we observe the way through it. In this way we're building a map, one that will guide us through a next time, a future occurrence. What remains, after the burn? How does it stand, what grows?
Our charred remains stand lonely against a pale sky. We are together but apart. Burnt limbs no longer brush up against the bodies or branches of others. But amidst that newfound bareness is an expanded visibility, new landscapes and new neighbors we didn’t previously know before. Will we endure or will we perish? Can we help one another? What are the unseen ways in which we are connected below the surface? Perhaps like the great boreal forests, we are a fire-dependent species; not just in our need for warmth and food, but in our capacity for regeneration as well.
The ecology of forests cannot be discussed without also including a conversation about the relationships of humans to them, and our abandonment of them. When we began to enclose European forests and call them a “wilderness”, we severed ourselves from our ancestors, relegating them as Other as in, “not us” or unrelated to ourselves; as separate from ourselves. This would later spread itself across the world as the colonial, capitalist systems of oppression, exploitation, and extraction that we live with today. This appears in many subtler forms as well, such as the fence around an ancestral forest, or the razing of trees left broken by a storm.
As we continue to learn from global Indigenous climate leaders, and land and water defenders, we are slowly beginning to regain a sense of what it could mean to belong to the land, and live with the land, inseparably. To explore this knowledge is to explore the meaning of relationships; to remember the interconnectivity of all things, human and nonhuman, seen and unseen. It is to become rooted. It is to see the things that lie below.
The positions of all trees form a pause between breaths, a space. They are the trees from Mya’s memory. They are the trees in Mya’s present. They are the figures left standing after the havoc wreaked by storms, fires, climate change; and time. These are future trees. They are in relationship with these events and we to them; walking among their shadows in the quiet landscape, interrupted only by a breeze. A whisper. What have we observed in this tremendous collective experience of slowly unfolding transformation? Like these trees, we humans have been ravaged by uncontainable, untamable fires. We are exhaling in a great collective groan; wondering when we will be able to breathe. In such a pause we may find ourselves reflecting on questions, becoming necessarily lost in thought; lost in the way that not moving towards something is sometimes how we observe the way through it. In this way we're building a map, one that will guide us through a next time, a future occurrence. What remains, after the burn? How does it stand, what grows?
Our charred remains stand lonely against a pale sky. We are together but apart. Burnt limbs no longer brush up against the bodies or branches of others. But amidst that newfound bareness is an expanded visibility, new landscapes and new neighbors we didn’t previously know before. Will we endure or will we perish? Can we help one another? What are the unseen ways in which we are connected below the surface? Perhaps like the great boreal forests, we are a fire-dependent species; not just in our need for warmth and food, but in our capacity for regeneration as well.
The ecology of forests cannot be discussed without also including a conversation about the relationships of humans to them, and our abandonment of them. When we began to enclose European forests and call them a “wilderness”, we severed ourselves from our ancestors, relegating them as Other as in, “not us” or unrelated to ourselves; as separate from ourselves. This would later spread itself across the world as the colonial, capitalist systems of oppression, exploitation, and extraction that we live with today. This appears in many subtler forms as well, such as the fence around an ancestral forest, or the razing of trees left broken by a storm.
As we continue to learn from global Indigenous climate leaders, and land and water defenders, we are slowly beginning to regain a sense of what it could mean to belong to the land, and live with the land, inseparably. To explore this knowledge is to explore the meaning of relationships; to remember the interconnectivity of all things, human and nonhuman, seen and unseen. It is to become rooted. It is to see the things that lie below.
Mya Kerner, They Seep, They Burrow, 2021 oil and graphite on panel, 36 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Winston Wachter
OTHERWORLD
I return to thoughts of the chthonic as an indwelling, root-bound space, a space of crossing over into the spirit realm. Stones are a literal ground, a weight, a settlement of the remnants of an ancient mountain, having arrived in the valley below on their way to become sediment and sand. But they are also a marker of hidden times, and hidden spaces. Within their formations are millennia of stories waiting to be told. They come from the underworld itself; they are the very bedrock of our lands. Their presence on the surface of the sacred space where earth meets sky, where the breeze touches topsoil, is a monument. These stones are homes to spirits; they are spirits. These stones are the land and the ancestors; residents and travelers of many worlds. The stones gather as sentinels, establishing landmarks, forming a map. If we're paying attention, we'll know the way and where we can or cannot enter. It warrants our attention that some of these formations are not in fact gateways, but barriers. Do not enter, do not pass. Not all places will welcome us, not all places are meant for us to go. Look at how the rocks are formed; what does their posture indicate? Do they offer a way through, or form an impenetrable wall? Look closely to observe their smooth or jagged edges and surfaces. Where there are no footholds, there will be no venture forward. In those places, we do not belong.
ANCESTORS
The folklore of the deep, dark boreal forests of Europe have a reputation for enhancing the great mysteries of what it means to be human amidst forces greater than ourselves. Buried deep within many of these tales are bits of knowledge passed down through generations about the relationships between humans and nonhumans. They describe protocols, cautionary tales, prohibitions; and both happy and unhappy endings. These tales unflinchingly portray the stark realities of the life of people in agrarian and hunting societies, and the penalties paid for not living in right relationship to the land and resident entities. These speak volumes to me of both the living memory of the people of the land; but also, of the longer-lived memory of the land itself. I think of the regenerative qualities of mycelium, the ways in which this underground rhizomatic network is a nonlinear intergenerational knowledge system, built from both the ancestors and current populations of trees and fungi; and in some ways, future ancestors. Future generations are already reaching back through this network to engage healing; in turn healed by ancestors from long ago. This is a kind of dreaming that reinscribes the past, and reimagines the future we want, and need. Future dreaming is a way of healing, and belonging.
Mya Kerner, These Whispers, These Tellings, 2021 oil and graphite on panel, 36 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Winston Wachter
belonging
What does it mean to be connected to the land? This is a question that lies deep within the heart of all diaspora. There are the lands from which we come, and the lands on which we now live, and each requires our engaged responsibility. Where is home—the homeland we’ve never known? Or the land we have known all our lives? Here’s what I believe: all lands are connected deeply, across time and across people. We know this, we can see the remnants of the seams where the land was torn apart by great tectonic shifts. These lands are not strangers to other lands. Therefore I believe they are waiting. Waiting for us to recognize them as our kin, waiting for us to realize and remember they are all parts of the same land and we are to love and care for them as deeply as we would love and care for ourselves. The land and people are not separate. There is no “wilderness”; that is a myth designed to separate us from our relationship to the land, and to each other. To know this, is to be in relationship with the ways in which the land offers us a space of great familiarity to which we are welcome; but, also, to be in relationship with the spaces that are profoundly unfamiliar, and not our own.
What if we don’t belong to anywhere anymore? Where does that leave us? Where do the lands and the waters know us? This is where we may focus our attention, to live in right relationship with literal land-given knowledge. There is where we are wanted, and there is where we are needed most. The places that know our scent, our forms, and our names. The places where we know their scent, their forms, and their names. What cycles and seasons we have observed; how well we know the angle of the light and which wind brings the storm and which wind brings its ease. Perhaps this sentiment fills us with a sense of heartbreak or longing in our uncertainty. This is the space between questions, between breaths, that begins the work of our healing.
What if we don’t belong to anywhere anymore? Where does that leave us? Where do the lands and the waters know us? This is where we may focus our attention, to live in right relationship with literal land-given knowledge. There is where we are wanted, and there is where we are needed most. The places that know our scent, our forms, and our names. The places where we know their scent, their forms, and their names. What cycles and seasons we have observed; how well we know the angle of the light and which wind brings the storm and which wind brings its ease. Perhaps this sentiment fills us with a sense of heartbreak or longing in our uncertainty. This is the space between questions, between breaths, that begins the work of our healing.
embodiment
It’s easy to look at images of a forest and observe the trees as an entirety; a homogenous whole. We might even look closer at more individual trees. But Mya’s works implore you to look in the spaces between them. Her series, Those Left Standing, is an installation of tall, twisting, welded steel sculptures. Their monumental forms echo the wire sculptures of her past work, but they are also living embodiments of the slender forms in her paintings. These pillars of steel resemble the charred, hollowed out skeletal remains of trees through which we view, in the distance, Mya’s painted landscapes and pathways. This farsightedness, or detailed sightedness, reveals as much about the trees as where they are located. In this painting, clusters of trees are gathered so tightly that each tree is locked in an embrace with another, and the light barely escapes. Here, in another, this grove begins to open out into a clearing where beyond lie grasslands and there abruptly appears the close bright peak of a mountain. In yet another, we see a ridge of foothills upon which lonely, isolated trees stripped bare of their branches and foliage stand like solemn monoliths, ghosts of a previous civilization. Through each of them, the presence and the light of the sky pours through almost oppressively. Their stark parliament forms a gathering that both reveals and conceals secrets. What their naked boughs frame, we now see more clearly: the rocks and boulders carpeting the forest floor and the earth, the abundance of underbrush; the rise of the hills and slopes of the distant mountain; the meandering river; the shape and the light of the sky.
By situating us among these iron trees, Mya is embodying us within the work and therefore the world more presently. Like the wildlife in Pennsylvania, we are finding a home amidst the wreckage; living within a new kind of forest. We have traversed urban corridors, along old fences, and across fields to find ourselves at the edge of a forest. Here, we find a revitalized interconnectivity of humans, stones, grass, sky, mountains, brooks, and trees. We walk through the spaces between, touched by roots and boughs. There is no negative space. There is another space. Perhaps a space to which we may finally return and revitalize ourselves. We are once again with the ancestors, carried along by the whispers of witches, and all our ancient guardians.
By situating us among these iron trees, Mya is embodying us within the work and therefore the world more presently. Like the wildlife in Pennsylvania, we are finding a home amidst the wreckage; living within a new kind of forest. We have traversed urban corridors, along old fences, and across fields to find ourselves at the edge of a forest. Here, we find a revitalized interconnectivity of humans, stones, grass, sky, mountains, brooks, and trees. We walk through the spaces between, touched by roots and boughs. There is no negative space. There is another space. Perhaps a space to which we may finally return and revitalize ourselves. We are once again with the ancestors, carried along by the whispers of witches, and all our ancient guardians.
Mya Kerner, These Whispers, These Tellings, installation view with the sculpture series, Those Left Standing. Image courtesy of the artist and Winston Wachter