shorelines Stephanie White
Shorelines, where the known meets the unfathomable. It is all about the edge: not a border between two equal states, but an edge between the safe and the dangerous, the firm and the liquid, the stable and the mutable. A reader recently took issue with my description of books in my father’s library, mostly by early explorers of northern BC and Alberta: exploring and discovering; exploring a land already occupied, and had been for millennia. Well yes, that is true, these were not unknown lands in an existential sense, but they were unknown to the people actually discovering (uncovering) places they themselves did not know, and relating what they had found and how they found it back to people who also did not know this land. When explorers set out to ‘discover the world’ for themselves, for their countries, they had crossed a shoreline from a known culture, belief system and rapacious morals to a place where their knowledge was inadequate and put them in danger through sheer ineptitude. Persisting, they gradually learned the new place. Like learning how to swim. That is a discovery, a personal discovery, one can’t unlearn it. It has never meant that no one was able to swim before you, yourself, learned how.
There are other names for this, threshold being one. Motion is implied, moving from one state to another, not just one room to another, but from one volume to another, from one world to another. The line has a material presence; it should be painted scarlet so that each time we cross it, we know exactly what we are doing and where we are doing it. Shorelines have exactly this material presence. They are a zone of special activity, a threshold if one crosses at right angles, a zone if one walks them lengthwise. And this is what is interesting about any kind of zone between two dominant worlds: it is ambiguous, lawless, a site for the undetermined. Neither fish nor fowl, betwixt and between, unaccountable. The infra-mince, where one thing is a nano-second away from another thing, fairly vibrates with tension. A shoreline is such a place, where we stand, trembling, on the verge of discovering something enormous and life-changing. *
detail of The Restless Image: a discrepancy between the seen position and the felt position , 1998, by Rose Finn-Kelcey. Shown recently at The Air of Ideas, 301/2 High Street, Rye, England. Photograph: Angus Mill/Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London https://www.katemacgarry.com/artists/55-the-estate-of-rose-finn-kelcey/
58 on site review 49 :: shorelines
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator