Gillian Moore

I have spent much of my life in the desert. Traversing the gradient between precipice and plain, space opens like wings on a draft when the cradle of a canyon yields to a blue horizon of salt-washed earth. The size of the sky sets itself in the psyche. It establishes itself against the smallness of life in dry soils. It announces the thinness of our constructions on this planet’s surface, hard-edged with hubris. In this way, I know a lot about the land.

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There are some things you learn fighting fire for the government. Your daily movements rest on the bureaucratic and spatial structures by which land is governed on epic proportions. In the breathlessness of a dispatch to a new start, there is little time to think as you scribble longitude and latitude on the windshield of the engine in dry erase marker. You steel yourself for a physical challenge. You locate yourself on the map. Days in, prepping fireline along logging trails or fencelines that cut relentlessly straight across drainages, you understand through sweat the insanity of that map hewn from Jefforsonian ideals. Why do we live in this way, imposing a geometry so alien to the shape of the land it purports to describe? Under an enormous sky filled to the troposphere with smoke, how do you deal with a grid in crisis? 

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In the winter calm between fire seasons, the sky drew close again and merged gray and white with a blanket of Michigan snow. I wrote my ecology thesis. I measured and quantified. I analyzed through vast datasets the footprint of settlement-induced change on the landscape. It is easy to see the charred hillsides of California and sense through shock and awe the transformation of this world by catastrophe. But what of quiet calamity? When destruction is only understood in the particulars–of vegetative homogenization, or measurements of water quality, or the disappearance of microorganisms? Under the shadow of insidious transformation documented on spreadsheets and understood through the schematic power of the map, how do you deal with the crisis of ecological disaster without the grid?

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These are all things that can be grasped by the mind and told, if incompletely, through the linearity of language. But the vice of consciousness can be a grid-like prison in itself. By contrast, the animal character of the body has its own repository of physical understanding. In the remnants of labor, on the landscape and on the canvas, I am so attuned to the alien quality of my own body. Lying under the stars, I would often think that I was so laughably missuited to the task at hand. The rectangle of my issued uniform—a garment designed so explicitly for the stolid squareness of masculine stature—resisted the irritating curves of a body that was constantly pressed to failure. At home, the mirror was a jolt. The scale of my hands, the span of my arms, was so out of kilter with my physical aspirations. The softness of what femininity I could not eschew was so estranged from my world of sweat and hard edged determination. And yet what I am left with is an understanding encoded more in the surface of the skin and the memory of muscle than the thoughts that transcribe them. A physical practice, not an intellectual one. A knowledge of places I’ve lived in, running deep.

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My work reaches for a tense synthesis between structure – whether in constructed or found geometries – and paintery gesture. It is the document of a struggle that enacts itself over and over again between what is understood and what is felt, what is scientific and what is phenomenological, what is hard edged and rational, and what is mutable and organic. It articulates a longing for unity between oppositional forces enacted upon the landscape, and within the self.