Merridawn Duckler
I wanted a very large book to honor the grandeur we experience “reading” nature. Books are about preservation and the natural world is fleeting but both live in memory and body. Rain, sun, insects, spores, scat sign GUEST BOOK in subtle and bold gestures. I invite visitors to do the same, marking a landscape that leaves its mark on us.
My performance L.O.G. offers a Tarot reading using Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a self-published book the poet revised his entire life. Together we’ll divine present, past and future from a body of work that “contains multitudes.” Don’t we all?
PHOTO CREDIT: Stephanie Honeycutt
of Stephotography - PDX
“I’m excited about participating in Terra Incognita because land art is my favorite genre and I can’t get enough of seeing modern iterations of this aesthetic. The classic land artists often made work that stood alone, expressing the individualism that is part of our western psyche. But in Terra Incognita we have many works gathered together, in conversation with each other, animated by discovery and connection, I think that speaks more to our contemporary feelings for art. We don’t expect passivity these days; everything has a comment thread. People want art they can get inside and experience and that’s exactly what’s happening here.”
Merridawn Duckler works cross-genre in poetry, performance, installation. INTERSTATE (dancing girl press) IDIOM (Harbor Review) MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press). Beulah Rose poetry prize, Smartish Pace, Invisible City CNF contest, judged by Heather Christle, Elizabeth Sloane Tyler Memorial Award from Woven Tale Press, judged by Ann Beattie, 2023 Drama prize, Arts and Letters. Fellowships/residencies/: Yaddo, Squaw Valley, SLS in St. Petersburg, Russia, Southampton, HBMG National Playwrights Retreat, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Poets on the Coast, Horned Dorset, Spokane Playwrights Lab. She’s an editor at Narrative Magazine and the journal of philosophy Evental Aesthetics. She’s a member of Blackfish Gallery.