A kingfisher flies into a window. A mud puppy slides between the warm metal walls of an electrical box. A kestrel, panicked by the approach of a mountain lion, flies into the unyielding trunk of an oak and breaks its neck.
Moments of Passage
Janice Wilson Stridick
A kingfisher flies into a window. A mud puppy slides between the warm metal walls of an electrical box. A kestrel, panicked by the approach of a mountain lion, flies into the unyielding trunk of an oak and breaks its neck. Such moments of passage occur daily, without witness, in the city as well as the country. If noted at all, the remains are bagged and tied, discarded far from view.
Except in the world of artist Ellen Lynch, whose ranch studio in the foothills of the Grand Tetons provides a theatre of inquiry into the nature of impermanence. To her, these relics of nature carry stories, even spiritual gifts, to be uncovered through the process of making art.
Her goal, to recreate and honor spirit, requires restraint. She avoids the value judgments typically bound with death, such as significance gained through commerce, achievement and relationship. Her clear-eyed observation of matter in its transitory beauty transforms the discarded relic of a bird into an iconic portal. While human deaths inspire headlines and obituaries resembling little novels, the natural world has no such narrative requirement. There, death is simply passage. It’s this acceptance that intrigues the artist and drives her visual and spiritual exploration.
Passage has been a central theme for the New York native even before she traversed the country in 1996 to set up studio in the mountains of Idaho. "As a young catholic in upstate New York, my family attended funerals every other week. It was as much of a given as going to church and gave me the sense that a life passing was something to mark." Today, her investigations into the nature of the ultimate passage surround her in eloquent witness to the varieties of exit strategies available in the natural world. Rather than focus on the mode of death, she turns her artist’s eye to the life that passed, coaxing an ethereal beauty from the natural process of death through her own method.
She has coined the word chronograph for the visual measurement of a particular moment in time. In painted chronographs of the remains of flora and fauna found near her studio, Ellen Lynch strives to honor their spirits at the moment of departure from leafed, furred or feathered bodies. She’s driven by a need to look placidly into the forms of nature for spiritual truth, culling references to relics and patterns of light from the stained glass windows of her childhood. She questions why, though death is more inevitable than birth, we rarely contemplate it.
"The moment of death presents as much opportunity as the moment of birth," she says, "it’s full of meaning, important and sadly uncelebrated." So she has begun the investigation in Idaho, with the wild birds, plants and animals that expire around her. She finds them approachable and they call to her. They call to others, also, in various ways.
"In a gallery, people look at them as conventionally beautiful, like a photograph in a magazine, until they realize the subjects are dead." Observing viewers at the moment of recognition, she has often seen someone standing inches from an image when it dawns on them that they are examining death.
"They shut down, move away, sometimes cringe." She says, "Clearly, some people feel as if they have been betrayed or they are embarrassed because they were looking so closely, even admiring the image. Some become afraid and some just deny it, asking me how I got the bird to pose so still. A few, the rare few, have a light go on, an ‘ah-ha’ moment occurs and they see that there’s another level to appreciate in the work."
In St. Anthony, Idaho, Ellen Lynch celebrates the small, miraculous passages that occur in the mountains and desert. A sparrow drops. The delicate, iridescent wings are cradled between gentle fingers and placed in a light box. Waves of electronic energy caress the body, collecting thousands of pixels for a shroud. The artist paints the background and frames the image, celebrating the dignity and impermanence of life lived and released.
