Unspoken Stories

by Dennis Jarrett

Munson Gallery Catalogue, May 2000

The first story I read by Lissa Hunter was called Stone Stack, a freestanding gray square with a stark, Euclidian niche in the middle filled with gray river rocks. Like a poem in the Japanese tradition of makuzuke ("connecting with the previous verse") it announces Hunter's intentions and its membership in a community of like-minded pieces. The others don’t progress from it—each work predicts the others—but each is a unique variation on her theme. Hunter's explanation of Stone Stack is almost as basic as its subject. She writes that her childhood home was filled with incongruous objects, and that as a youngster she realized "they all had histories." Nothing on earth has as much history as the most ordinary rock, and Hunter's fascination with stones is perhaps as strong as her fascination with stories. "I think rocks are beautiful," she told me, "I like to hold them. Stones are the most primal material on earth."

Primal is at the top of the list when I imagine a short glossary of Hunter's Stories. Many of the other words in the glossary, as you'll see, would be scribbled in the kind of runic handwriting that requires a special monk to interpret, and he is nowhere to be found. Primal’s cousin, Primitive, doesn't appear on the list because the sophistication of Hunter's vision rules it out, or at least keeps it in the background.

What Hunter does in Stories is to create a protective setting for her primal, or primary subject, usually a basket. Basketry is the foundation of her art, but at this point in her development the baskets both reflect and transcend their ancient heritage. These are the great-grandchildren of the woven boxes that once carried apples, ears of corn or seed. What embodies and displays them is not simply a platform. It's an environment, and rather than yielding to the main subject, it contributes to it. Again, a Japanese term comes to mind: a tokonoma is an alcove "in which may be placed such objects as a calligraphy scroll, a stone, or a flower arrangement." I asked her about the impulse to sequester baskets inside these little caves.

"Most of my baskets, over a period of ten or twelve years, were much larger and stood on their own," she replied, "I wanted to find a way of incorporating them into a visual context. I didn't want pedestals, I wanted a place for them to be which would expand on the meaning of the piece. Since I also wanted text, I needed a flat surface. It was like a spiritual engineering problem."

You're quite likely to notice this visual context before you pay attention to the item it presents. And context is the perfect word, because often Hunter surrounds her baskets and her pots with words. As she says, she wanted text. You encounter Hunter’s words like a young child or a foreign scholar because you're unable to read them. Yet you can almost break the code. Hunter’s text is like the English of the future: it’s recognizable, it's divided into words, it even has the character of a particular handwriter. It reminded me at first of looking at my own notes, scribbled in haste. I can see that I wrote them, but I don't know for sure what they say. Like molecules, like the Rosetta stone, like good art, these words require scrutiny. So does the volume which contains them.

Take a look at Rare Earth, for example. It's a 30-inch square with a protective slot which holds (tightly) a woven wire basket, an ovoid. Like her other baskets, it's made from the technique of coiling. Here, Hunter has used a coated wire ("hook-up wire" from Radio Shack), not a traditional material. It's covered with wax linen thread. "Rare Earth", she explained, "is made like the others. I cover all my baskets with paper, gluing it on, and then I paint it with a light wash of water-based pigment. This makes the paper look like a skin—it tightens onto its base. On top of that I stitch a net onto the surface of the basket."

You want to know what's inside. (These pieces are a museum guard's nightmare. Alone with it one day, I took it out and looked. Inside was a piece of a paper with a number on it. I replaced the basket and examined its surroundings.) There is a spread of indecipherable writing. You can see the shapes of words, even notice a certain cursive style—perhaps Hunter's own, or that of a wizard. After a few minutes, you’re apt to decide you've come upon an impenetrable encryption.

But maybe not. If I lived with this piece, I'd spend a lot of time puzzling it out. Or I'd turn to an apparently easier chunk of discourse such as the text written on A Fool’s Tools. On its front are six lines of script, enticingly black and well-defined. You stare at them. They're even more frustrating (read: interesting) than the vocabulary of Rare Earth because Hunter's private language looks maddeningly familiar. You create, or recreate, known words in the text, like thee and gain, some and arm. If you look away and try to find them again, they're gone, reabsorbed into their own tied tongue. On a ledge above the text are four striped containers, each filled with the pencils of an architectural alchemist, their stubby, blunt writing points sticking out. But of course they don't work, they don't write a single word for an ordinary person like me. I tried. Like certain functions on a computer, these pencils are "unavailable." Unless you know the secret.

If Hunter's sculptures arrive at the eye like mail from the only native speaker of their language, why does she call them stories?

"One of the things I like about this collection of pieces," she told me, "is that other people see stories in them. They're a juxtaposition of objects and a faux text, and so people come up with stories. I'm not trying to tell anybody anything, but I like the fact that people read them. I have no story in mind, but I write in response to what the piece is. I used to represent crows and I'd think what would crows write like? I realized the script can have its own voice."

In other words, Hunter's work provides the occasion for stories, the impetus to imagine or invent them. Faux or not, her different dialects almost beg for translation and in the process you find yourself looking for the words, the baskets, the rocks, the entire work, to mean something—to signify as well as be. It's conceptual art at its best—not the illustration of an idea you can parse, but the suggestion that certain kinds of meaning are beyond words.

Unspoken Farewell contains a small basket that looks like a wasp's nest because Hunter has crocheted knobby beads onto the wax-linen surface. It's capped with the river rock God seems to have made precisely for this basket. Naturally, it's covered with words. The script—I'm tempted to say the vocabulary—of this piece is so tiny and cribbed that it seems to have been generated not just by a different scribe, but by a different grammar than you see on the other pieces. It's unspoken and then some.

Reunion, the largest piece in the collection, is a sort of tribal display of baskets, all different sizes and as laden with family resemblances as an Icelandic picnic. At the base, each basket is coiled raffia palm fiber wrapped around cord. The top of the basket is a stiff paper surface which Hunter insists is "just art supply store stuff" but which in her hands, takes on the appearance of something other-worldly. When I told her that, she said, "Good. I like to transform things. I imagined it as family reunion. You see these tattered snapshots of old people and kids who look vaguely the same, the overweight patriarch and matriarch usually in the middle. Think of, you know, Uncle Bud who lost his arm in the war. So this is like an album of photos."

But of course a great transformation has taken place. The relatives at their luncheon on the grass have been turned into baskets. Often during our conversations, Hunter spoke of her interest in transforming things. "Part of this interest," she said, "is, Can I do it? I want to make it mine. I like taking an anonymous, plain piece of paper and enhancing it, rumpling it, putting spackle all over it. By doing that I make it my own. I think it's my job to take anonymous things and make them my own."

Whatever you experience when you look at this adventurous work, whatever you bring to it, you're reading the stories of Lissa Hunter.

Dennis Jarrett is a freelance writer in Santa Fe, New Mexico.