terriloui

Actually, these are Barry’s words. He is the writer in the household, and when queried if he had anything to say about my work, he gifted me this:

I’ve been watching Terri collect things and arrange them together for years, but only recently have I begun to understand why and what they mean to her. It’s this passing of the physical world that she captures in her collections, and especially the passing of the physicality – the lives, the people and the artifacts themselves.

Like an archeologist of the not quite modern, the almost gone, she rescues pieces of everyday life just before it vanishes. The way a piece of jawbone or a bronze pin pulled from the ground can reveal the story of a once thriving ancient civilization, she finds in the recently discarded – things once highly valued and no longer – signs of a life that is just now passing.

Divining the discarded.

She sees stories in the insignificant. Lagging somewhat behind, she follows in our tracks after we pass, reading our footprints, picking up the things we leave behind, giving them a turn in the sunlight, then puts them in her pocket to take home.

For the past several years her attention has turned to books. We have just passed through the golden age of book publishing, when books were cheaper and more plentiful than at any other time in history. But that time is almost over. Once valued as prized possessions, books are now discarded in great stacks of dried wood pulp, piled near the curb like leaves for composting. The more sentimental owners, still attached to their old friends, drop them at yard sales or Goodwill stores, or in recycling boxes, a last chance for temporary salvation on their way to the dump.

Terri collects these fleeting artifacts, too, and arranges their pieces and parts into patterns to tell our stories. A mosaic of textbook covers recalls the time we rejoiced when our class was chosen to receive new textbooks. Their covers, unblemished, crackled when opened to proudly write our names first as owner and caretaker of this container and conveyor of knowledge. There are odd how-to books from the ‘50s – How to Write Good Social Letters, and Better Rural Living, and Sportsmanlike Driving – when our parents saw the world differently from us. Each cover, including the book itself, a microcosm of how we used to think.

But what I am reminded of, when looking at Terri’s work, is the imminent mortality of it all. Her presentation is spare, without artifice, her own personality almost frustratingly withheld from view. No more than creatively arranged samples of a most recent past – simple, unadorned, laid out in grids like specimen drawers in the basement of a museum. For a sensitive observer, they create the unmistakable feeling of wabi-sabi, the Japanese esthetic of transience and impermanence. These recent works seem to say in a soft voice “Books are not long for this world, look at what they were while you still can.”