The Myth of Solid Ground
wire wall drawing from the solo exhibition:
Personal Geographies
Clara M Eagle Gallery
Murray State University
2009
• Myths of solid ground (an excerpt from Jeremy Biles' catalog essay Permeations : Personal Geographies)
...Honchell’s wires do not hold anything together; nothing remains stable. The landscape depicted in her sculpted drawing is destined to shift and come apart, as the piece is dismantled, never to be reconfigured in just the same way. Despite their pretensions to stability, security, and connection, these wires are part of a meditation on instability, ephemerality, and uncertain destinations, all the more poignant for having found form in something as apparently enduring as mountains.
In this way, “The Myth of Solid Ground” is about insecurity, an elegant, even elegiac, statement of the fact that the most seemingly solid ground is shifting, fleeting, bound to permute and even dissolve—as evident in the half-there, half-not nature of the wire drawing, which seems to dematerialize in its very materialization. But in Honchell’s hands, the fugacious ground on which we stand is not (only) a cause for anxiety, but for celebration; its passages give rise to new acts of creation.