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Tracing Time: Mississippi Meander Belt
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop...is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.
- From Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991 Gretel Ehrlich
Tracing Time is inspired by Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River Maps (1944), a study conducted for US Army Corps of Engineers to better understand the natural movements of the river. Traveling over 2000 miles, and based on gathering geologic and historic evidences, Fisk recorded ancient meanderings of the river over thousands of years. Visually intriguing as an image, the map signifies the complexity of the earth’s movements over vast millennia and so reveals the markings of time.
My river map is fashioned out of paper coils, a practice derived from a traditional Korean paper technique called jiseung (paper coiling) which requires intense labor, time, and hand strength. It is a very slow and meticulous process ordinarily applied to the making of utilitarian objects like baskets, basins, and tea wares. As I came to see it, the labor of hand-coiling paper was inseparable from the beauty and diligence of the original river maps, which depended on Fisk’s exacting and painstaking efforts to determine the history of the Mississippi River. As I followed Fisk’s journey down the Mississippi, I was matching not only his lines and shapes—his ghost trails—but the incalculable handiwork that took him deep into the river’s alluvial valley.
Tracing Time: Mississippi Meander Belt
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop...is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.
- From Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991 Gretel Ehrlich
Tracing Time is inspired by Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River Maps (1944), a study conducted for US Army Corps of Engineers to better understand the natural movements of the river. Traveling over 2000 miles, and based on gathering geologic and historic evidences, Fisk recorded ancient meanderings of the river over thousands of years. Visually intriguing as an image, the map signifies the complexity of the earth’s movements over vast millennia and so reveals the markings of time.
My river map is fashioned out of paper coils, a practice derived from a traditional Korean paper technique called jiseung (paper coiling) which requires intense labor, time, and hand strength. It is a very slow and meticulous process ordinarily applied to the making of utilitarian objects like baskets, basins, and tea wares. As I came to see it, the labor of hand-coiling paper was inseparable from the beauty and diligence of the original river maps, which depended on Fisk’s exacting and painstaking efforts to determine the history of the Mississippi River. As I followed Fisk’s journey down the Mississippi, I was matching not only his lines and shapes—his ghost trails—but the incalculable handiwork that took him deep into the river’s alluvial valley.