Desire Archive
2021, photographs, text, email, dimensions variable
Article by:
LEFT: I can’t tell you but you feel it, 65, White oak tree to the southeast of the Dickinson Homestead property, possibly self-sowed or planted by Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin. Amherst, MA. Photograph taken by Alex Sutcliffe, October 2019. Photograph on board, 80 x 120 cm (image).
RIGHT: found the words to every thought, 581, My left hand pressed against the bark of the oak tree. Photograph taken by Alex Sutcliffe in October 2019. Photograph on board, 37.2 x 55 cm (image). Photos: Thomas McCammon
Grace Marlow’s Desire Archive takes as its starting point a white oak tree on the grounds of American poet Emily Dickinson’s (1830—1886) home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and in particular, a photograph taken during a visit to the site in 2019. Marlow presents the idea of the tree as a ‘living archive’, perhaps knowing more of her than the objects, images and poems in libraries, archives and on display in the homestead. Marlow is particularly interested in the fact that Dickinson did not publish her own work, choosing instead to share individual poems with family and friends and perhaps never intending for us to read her work at all.
As part of the FIELD NOTES opening day symposium, Grace presented a text-based work exploring the idea of the body as the archive, in recognition of the myriad ways we hold ideas and carry them forward.
The Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens is built on the Indigenous land of the Nonotuck people.
