DISPERSAL/ RETURN at the Art Museum of the University of New Mexico August 28th to November 25th, 2009

Geordie Shepherd's LAND/ART project will open August 28. Geordie received an MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2004. He works in ceramics, painting, and writing to explore "humanistic narratives of the essence of self and of things both fictional and real."

His website describes the interactive project and invites audiences to take a "traveling box" into the field, alter it, and return it for others to take up and reshape:

Throughout history, travelers have recorded in diaries their thoughts about sights seen, creating documents tracing and transmitting the events to themselves and others. In time the person fades but the document and the land remain. Land is essential, more than just something under our feet, we rise from it and inevitably fall into it, our lives are mere limbs granted mobility and extension from the land’s body. In drawing or writing it, we undertake a self-portrait. The document is culture, understandings we lay upon ourselves, to aid, guide, torment, enlighten, relate, comprehend, progress, and destroy ourselves. However, for those precious few original moments, everything is one.

This interactive project requires participants to borrow a Travelling Box from the museum for the day and travel to a site of my or their own choosing. Once at the site, they then write or draw upon the ceramic forms in the box using the provided ceramic paints and pencils. There are six boxes, Nothing, Fantasy, Shape, Beauty, Blood and Eros, themes elemental to our lives. Participants must return the box by the end of the day. Overnight, the ceramic forms will be sinter-fired and made ready for another participant to travel with the next day. After five or six participants have layered their drawings and writings over one another, the ceramic forms will be glaze-fired to maturity, fusing the form and layered surface together.

Two boxes will be completed prior to the exhibition and exhibited as finished objects, but four uncompleted boxes will be available throughout the exhibition for participant's use.

This project will be presented as part of the Dispersal/ Return exhibition taking place at the Art museum of University of New Mexico August 28th to Nov. 25th, part of the Land Art symposium.