CopperMind

Inform : to communicate knowledge to : to give character or essence to : to be the characteristic quality of

Rend : to remove from place by violence : to lacerate mentally or emotionally : to pierce with sound

CopperMind is a personal reflection of how landscape informs identity. And how obliterating a landscape rends the identity of those who were raised in it.

This rough draft introduction previews the project theme.  It's next phase is in production and has been included in an international multifaceted effort called Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss.

Reared in a Sacrifice Zone

Christmas 1961 (my sister) - First Photo with my new Brownie Kodak Camera

The place where I grew up No longer exists Not even on a map.

It was buried in the slow consumption Of Company claimed ore Bought at a cost That only corruption can afford.

A landscape that once fed fervent ambition Was crushed without an anchor To hold its place in time.

---

Eaten Alive

On a visit to Butte when my son was young, I drove through the decayed remains of ravaged houses, trying to impress him with a local point of pride that growing up here prepared you to survive anything short of death.

Along the route we happened to pass an old man without an arm and my son took note. A short time later, another old man hobbled up the street with the aid of a wooden leg. With that, my son lowered his eyes and said, “it looks to me like Butte just eats people alive”.

A Sense of Self: Memory, The Brain, and Who We Are
Veronica O'Keane

So...the magic resonance of place-evoked emotional memories goes on and on, and back and back... back to the earliest memories of the childhood home ... deep down to your buried hippocampal place cells and their idiosyncratic tangles with your amygdala/insula neurons. . . your very own psychogeography. We can walk through a city and remember "through its avenues, the feeling I'd once had of being light and carefree",* or see a small gravestone and feel terror. Places - the streets of Dublin, the avenues of Paris, the doorways of Vienna, Edith's gravestone, the herb garden in Cambridge, the childhood home, the haunted house, the barn dance of remembrance -  are, experientially, the anchor for memory and feeling.

* Patrick Modiano, 'Flowers of Ruin', from Suspended Sentences