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mEANDER INSTALLATION
The third story about water is about the Meander River by way of ornamentation on vases and mosaics . The hanging scroll is a loose representation of the Meander near its source.
It started for me years ago when I noticed similar patterns on Greek vases from 900 BC, and in Roman mosaics, Chinese Shang dynasty bronzes, and the borders ofTurkish doors. I made many sketches of this pattern, and tried to draw a complex border from memory. Much later I learned that the name of the pattern was based on the name of a river. As it happened, traveling through Turkey in 2015 I crossed the Meander River. The source of the river is on the Anatolian plateau in the ancient region of Phrygia, and from there it tumbles and winds its way to the Aegean Sea. Herodotus called it a working river because, in its meandering, it made the fields fertile.
The meander pattern has since the beginning been associated with bounty, and also, of course, with the freedom of wild things to wander. The Meander is no longer pure and untamed. For much of its course it has been channeled in the service of industry and agriculture, the very personification of Herodotus' working river. The loss may exist primarily in the mind. There are many other wild rivers in the world, but the very name, meander, makes this particular river symbolic of a greater reality. The third story, then, is about water, once thought to be the sacred space between earth and sky, now in part diminished to a resource for human use.