Dreaming summer and The Book of Dreams

THE Book of Dreams is my artist statement for this pinhole portfolio, many of the images are here in my blog so it seems appropriate to post. i'm also putting it here today for Andy. he will understand why i think... certainly the land speaks to him often and more intricately than it speaks to me because he spends his life working with it, growing beautiful things...
so keep dreaming Andy. You are awesome and amazing!!
xx
iva

The Book of Dreams
Artist Statement
I live on a farm in a remote pocket of New York’s Hudson valley. I wander the fields for hours and often for as many hours there is no human conversation. At first, I believed myself to be alone. I believed myself to be lonely. In fact I often used to find myself shouting out to the Drowned Land Swamp.

“I am lonely. I am lonely.”

And much to my surprise the swamp had a reply.

“ Stop. Look. Listen. Learn the summer. Learn the winter. Underneath the silence you will hear the land humming quietly. We are dreaming here under the snow. Under the saw grass and cattails. We are dreaming here. Come back to these places over and over again and we will teach you to dream with us.”

And so this is what I do. I dream this place. There are moments of great joy. Great beauty and then, inexplicably, there will be a sudden rush of overwhelming fear. It is not rational. It is not an intellectual exercise. It is a dreaming between the beating of my heart and the sudden flight of the heron loping overhead. It is a dreaming with some unfathomable creatures. Wearing wings. Wearing masks and befriending crows. They whisper to me and I am a child again. Unfettered and free.

I set up my camera. Literally a large format wooden box with a pinhole for a lens. I slip in a sheet of film and begin to dance the dreams. The dreams of a place. Light falls onto the film. The film drinks the light and images form and the pictures are made. I am never entirely sure what pictures will come. I print the images and the dance continues. When another person views the images they become part of the dream . Their own dream in their own place.
1500 years ago in Mexico the Toltec people talked of dreaming heaven on earth. It was the human job to realign our hearts with God by dreaming heaven here. An anonymous Aztec poet later wrote
"These Toltec’s were very wise,
It was their custom to converse with their own hearts….
They created a whole system,
The book of dreams…"

This work is my Book of Dreams.





today it is cold and there is snow. it is april but winter is holding on tight. it takes a fierce determination on my part, to keep listening and working with a place when it snows in april, but i learned with my heart in peru that even if we cannot see the sun, it is always there, in the heavens and in our hearts because we are of it. we are of the earth and of the sun and of the cosmos, the great mystery, we are it... and so now while the snow is still coming down, and i live in this place on earth in my human body, i am dreaming summer... this dreaming began two days ago when the sun actually came out from behind the gray and brought with it a hint of warmth. a taste of things to come. the birds burst into a delirium of song. I stayed outside as long as i could, i hauled my camera out with me. and i am learning, i am learning, slowly but still learning, to live with a place, no matter what...

and soon my beloved crab apple tree will be bursting with raucous blooms. in the meantime, my angel and i are dreaming dreaming dreaming summer....


xx