There, 2009

hand-cut adhesive shelf paper, rubber stamps, ink, acrylic paint, mulberry paper, on BFK Rives

94” x 155”

This collage is based on images representing the five letters T-H-E-R-E, one letter for each panel, molded into ovoid shapes suggested by the gores for globes. Within the blue margins around the gores, on slips of thin rice paper stamped with my alphabet images, I have spelled out a passage from Thoreau’s Walden Pond:

What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific ocean of one’s own being alone.