Bones are part of my drawing professor’s practice. Lecturing about the drive to learn and make, she recounts sweeping an artist’s studio when she was sixteen so that in exchange for labor she could look at, observe, and draw his collection of skeletons. She talks about the state of bones here in Iowa; highways littered with all varieties of roadkill. In the spring, find her in creek beds and ditches scavenging bones cleaned and washed away. Discussing Cure, a recent piece of hers comprised of polished deer bones engraved with delicate images of lace-like networks, she writes, “I am building a precious relic of something silent and wild that lives and dies by our agriculture, our economies, and our speed,”(Running).  

Obuchi and I are on day four of Andrea Olsen’s thirty-one day program in Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. The premise for this guide is explained in its preface. Bill McKibben writes, “If you were trying to identify the most useful quality for people’s lives in the twenty-first century, I think you could do worse than settle on ‘grounded.’ We’ve spent the last fifty years in a consumer fantasy world, ever more disconnected from neighbor, from work, from our own bodies” (2002, xiii). For the past two days, Body and Earth has guided us to lie, sit, and stand in meditative states, focusing and imagining our bodies and bones moving as our animal ancestors’ did.

To be honest, the connection Olsen asks us to make felt contrived. My mind understands evolution; but my body didn’t feel it. Frustrated at times during repeated exercises, I would think to myself, yes, I understand we’re connected to fish, but how does that relate to me in land-locked Iowa? Well, I got it today. After another morning undulating my spine side-to-side and thinking to myself what is the point, I left for lunch. I went home ate and lied down to rest. Aware of my body in ways I haven’t been before, I felt my spine push down in a curve against my mattress. I felt each vertebrae against my skin, and instantly my hands were reminded of the sensation I’ve felt oh-so-many-times brushing the vertebrate of fish as I discard their leftover bones.

My art teacher talks about as an amateur trying to distinguish deer bones from human bones. To the untrained eye, there’s no difference. Made out of the same materials, side-by-side the bones bear no distinguishing evidence of the flesh that used to drape over them. They are just bones. Olsen, I understand now. But if bones are bones are bones, then why are some thoughtlessly left in ditches while others are meticulously placed to rest in marble boxes?

Works Referenced

Olsen, Andrea. Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Middlebury College Press, 2002.

Running, Lee. “Cure.” Lee Emma Running, https://leeemmarunning.org/recent-projects/cure. Accessed 31 May 2018.