En El Cielo

Artist Statement:

En El Cielo

Newport Art Museum, February 2023
 

I was fourteen when my cousin from Spain visited and told me this tongue twister:  El cielo está enladrillado. ¿Quien lo desenladrillará? El desenladrillador que lo desenladrille, buen desenladrillador será. Of course it makes no sense and it’s nearly impossible to translate:  The sky is full of bricks. Who will unbrick it? The unbricker who unbricks it, a good unbricker will be. When I was invited to the Call and Response show at the Newport Art Museum, and viewed the library ceiling, I recalled this tongue twister. I have been practicing it for all these years and here I saw it in reverse. The poetic image of bricks in the sky brought the stars to the ground beneath my feet. This installation is my effort to make this image real.

 

Libraries are a home for words, stories and imaginings. Language can take us places, question our assumptions or help us understand. It can both confound and illuminate. The image of stars on the ceiling has its obvious metaphor, appropriate for a library. Reversing this with the image given in the tongue twister, poses a new metaphor, a new absurdity.

 

This tongue twister plays with the difficulties of rolled Rs and double L‘s in rapid succession and multiple accented syllables. It plays with the ability of a language to verb a noun, turn it into an adjective or an adverb, switch tenses and then come full circle and turns it back into a noun. The silliness of the sound and difficulty of saying it, mirrors the absurdity of bricks in the sky. The difficulty of language to say what we mean particularly across cultures lands us in a place of risk and trust.

 

For many years my work has dealt with language as an inadequate negotiator between cultures. My intention is to coax the viewer into pondering the installation and consider the metaphorical and actual implications of this as magical, humorous and even ominous.