To the Artist's Page                 To our home page

To Luke Buckham's previous piece     To Luke Buckham's next piece

landscape & bran
dedicated to Ben Rogers

I grinned foolishly at my friend because we didn't have a corkscrew and the winebottle was full and inaccessible. I threw the long thin bottle against the rocks and the thin light-red vapors joined the body of low mist that hung over the wasteland. "breathe deeply enough and you might get tipsy. let's take some photographs." so much cluttering this wasteland, hulks of twisted rusty metal, huge windows through wrecked machinery crossed by thin bare branches in autumn, autumn with it's own rust. huge concrete cylinders alive inside & out with graffiti, obscenities that will someday be outdated and perhaps considered sacred, dull plywood crossed by the footprints of deer, tinfoil trailers flattened as if gravity had always been too great for them and they finally admitted it. we snap photographs blurred by motion, photos of our hands fingering old plumbing, meshing somehow, the kinks of the pipe and the slight bulge of our knuckles making sense together, hermaphroditic and perfectly logical. we form sculptures from trash, connecting plastic tubes to metal pipes to treebranches, my friend finds an old machete caked in rust and starts sawing a piece of plastic in order to fit it into the sculpture, cuts the back of his thumb deeply, the old blade still holds a threat, and for a moment i see the dry sinews white and uncomfortable atop the bone, then the blood fills the space, making the cut easier to look at, and we frame his bleeding hand in front of a metal shard riddled with pellet gun holes, his beautiful eyes already tired at eighteen, premature crow's feet mapping his eyesockets when he smiles, but energy emerging from his laugh. everything is incorporated here. i find a pine tree sawed down, so i lay bicycle chains at the severed trunk, extending them in root-like patterns, and the tree is momentarily resurrected, dead nature and dead technology joining each other. later when we look at the pictures, a disconcerting transformation takes place. the rusty bicycle chains are actually growing into the tree, and the tree is accepting them, it's bark moistening with new vitality that looks like engine oil, not sap. a picture of an old tire chain with a discarded glove on one end now shows the chain curling upward like an arm, reaching toward the foreground of the photo. a picture of my friend draped in rusty bedsprings reveals that his eyes are filling with rust, tinted by it like reflections of rich soil. in another, one where my pinky finger is disappearing into a rusty pipe, the rest of my fingers splayed, we find that the fibers of the metal are joining my hand, first tinting the palm's creases with rust, then making the hand itself distinctly metallic as the photo develops. in another picture my face peering out of a smashed trailer has become like ashtray glass, thick but nearly transparent, cracked.

i remember camping in the wasteland, waking in my tiny body-length tent in the middle of the night, woken by the heavy running footsteps of a deer, and feeling the dead technology and struggling nature all around me, the soil under me drained of nutrients and the buildings stripped of supports, it was like waking up with your own hand fallen asleep across your face when you think for a moment that you're being caressed by the hand of a corpse, caressed by a hand that can't caress. ruins are relaxing, until night falls and they remind of death. the juxtaposition of surviving nature with crushed technology is stunning, and makes you think of all the heaped junkyards across the country, all the destroyed machinery that will be there decaying slowly thousands of years after our attempts to recycle it all have failed, some beloved simon & garfunkel tape rotting in the glove compartment of a forgotten car that someone once made love in at a dangerous speed, all the lost idiosyncratic treasures lost in the wreckage, a country like an above-water Atlantis walked by zombies who will never rediscover it's clashing beauties, never accept the absurd loveliness of oak trees and skyscrapers on the same planet. i would love to be able to insert a microchip into the stalk of a sapling and watch it change seasons, rebelling against the landscape around it, would love to see that bent washing machine over there sprout a few branches and scatter little metallic seeds, sprouting new washing machines to make up for it's inevitable impending uselessness. but ruins are alive only in the motion of their decay.

To the top of this page