Visceral recollection pushes aside a factual record. This is human reality to me—what
we experience as fleeting life events, what we grasp into ourselves and retain—it lingers
within us. Much of my work involves taking possession of places which have experiential
significance for me. I relive some aspect of a place where I have traveled, redefined with all the inexactitude that memory imposes. We fragile humans like a potent taste of existence.
The Caves of Frasassi in central Italy are enormous caverns, lit fairly low. Spiky formations penetrate the volume of space and line the walls. These water-formed obstructions to space enter my sight and my thoughts. Inside the caves I draw and listen to the creaks and drips, the sounds of clinking glass, that are ever present.
The sciences of geology, anthropology, and physics guide me. They deal with forces on
grand and minute scale, with time perception, with our evolutionary development, and
with our understanding of the world and the universe. They take me into prehistory, or
through geologic time, or to observe molecular activity. These places enter into my work as much as any landscapes do.
The dynamic of the cave is undulating…I consider the cold, the light bouncing, the work
of moving water. I think about ages and eras and the beings who preceded us; the world
in its most elemental state of motion; places on the inside and outside of the earth that are usually beyond our reach; spareness and isolation.
-- Lynn Sures