Each week a different Architect proposes a question, prompt, or theme to accompany our individual and collective research. Our theme for this week, offered by Jennifer Kayle:
Here’s a raw sort of question/prompt — not fully cooked: How have you thought, how are you thinking now, about LIMITATION, in and through the work we practice? Maybe in a physical sense, or artistic/compositional, or in a metaphysical sense - the limitation of the form based on its nature. Any/all of these ideas filtered through the notion [limitation]. You can read each Architect's response by clicking on their name.
Kathy Couch
I’ve spent the week musing
through long tangly sentences
trying to grapple with my relationship to the ever emerging limitations
of this body at this age
of this society in this age
of this form’s capacity to meet it all.
And this morning, as I attempted to wrestle all the thoughts that had rambled out
Into some kind of sense
I decided to set for myself a new limitation.
Can I say all of this in some more concise way?
Can I put some limit on the words themselves?
And might that beget?
So, confronting also the limits of my imagination,
I went with the most familiar form of boundaried writing I could think of: the haiku
And so sitting by a river in Vermont
waiting patiently for the hours to pass
and carry me to the approaching revelation of the solar eclipse
I counted out on my fingers (my blessed 10 nimble fingers)
these syllables of distilling
Hope they offer some opening from this beautiful prompting of limitation.
Your limitation
expands possibility.
What did we expect?
…
The river rolling
roils around the broken fall
flows through a new way
…
Together we circle,
attend to what can’t be done
watch it fall away
Jennifer Kayle
Pamela Vail
Lisa Gonzales
Katherine Ferrier