These Temple Bones

Art project meditating on the affective power of memory and time by creating activated ritualized spaces at abandoned cultural and postindustrial sites throughout the Pacific Northwest. Multimedia collages will document the ceremonial visits to these memory shrines.

The title “These Temple Bones” is a reference to a poem by Galway Kinnel that has spoken deeply to me since I read it.
It’s a section from a full poem:
“5

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing

Galway Kinnell –“Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”, Part 5