SONATA. Will be shown at AMP Gallery in Provincetown June 25 – July 21, 2021.
  I - Chaos
II - Resilience
III - Loss & Renewal
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Phyllis Ewen’s recent drawings in “Sonata” are in many ways revelatory. These eloquent and evocative visual entries span a year wrought with enormous hardship and change. Working on graph paper, each work is like a rough-cut recording of a single note sounding a moment in time. Scientific, tonal and organically explosive, “Sonata” distills through meditative mark-making the beauty that can be found in chaos. 
– Debbie Nadolney, director and curator of AMP Gallery, Provincetown MA
 
Sonata is a marvelous new series of drawings. Tender weight of line and lyrical gesture are the scaffolding for powerful political statements that are also deeply personal. It is a complex and unexpected dynamic that gives Ewen’s art the power to effect change.
- Barbara O’Brien
Former Executive Director, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
 
As 2020 unrolled before us, around us, and in us, with its incipient fascism, its ravaging disease, its exposure of racism, Phyllis Ewen mapped it in drawings.  Recording our national catastrophe, and with it our seasons, growing things, the possibility of life: she has faithfully kept in sight the fact that the coronavirus looks like nothing so much as a grain of pollen.  What would I have done without her translations of our fears and passions?  Not cameos or snapshots, but taken together, an epic.  "Epics record, “sing of,” shape the fall of human worlds, and sometimes their foundations.
 
The shape that emerges from this sequence of images is a map of the United States, outlined in the names of murdered Black folks, deluged by waves, smothered with chrysanthemums, disintegrating into embers, bursting apart with rage--or is it energy?  We are still here, in a dangerous space between worlds, one damaged and one (or more) possible: it’s fitting to close this series with one covert map made of tulips and another smothered in viruses.  We are exploring still.
Mary Baine Campbell,
Poet, Professor Brandeis University
 

This project, which I learned about at an exhibit at the Pier Art Center in Stromness, Orkney, is provocative and a different way to think about issues of climate change in connection with long-term natural changes in the landscape.

How do individuals and communities understand Deep Time? A relatively short-term perspective is dominant in contemporary societies as they face the complicated ongoing consequences of landscape change on every aspect of the human life, from agriculture and provision of food and energy to the protection of natural or cultural landscapes. A more holistic and deeper knowledge is required.
 
http://www.cire.group.cam.ac.uk/Orkney
 
Orkney: Beside the Ocean of Time
The action of the sea is constantly reshaping and reducing the islands of Orkney, eroding the glacial till and the underlying sandstone. A continuous gnawing, but with moments of drama that thrust deep time into the full glare of consciousness.
At what temporal resolution should we view human activity? In order to understand the processes of change that shape the landforms under our feet and the resources upon which we depend, we need to think beyond the short-term time-horizons of rapid economic transactions and electoral cycles – the days, months or even years of human time. Yet, if we attempt to place human activity against the backdrop of Deep Time – the vast and gradual time-scale of Earth’s geological history – the temporal span of a human life almost disappears. This presents Science and Humanities scholars with a conceptual challenge. In attempting to understand how communities respond and adapt to landscape change, we need to understand the factors that shape attitudes and behaviour, and the present-day, immediate context in which people narrate their lives. Yet understanding change also requires a deeper time perspective, one that recognises long-term histories of human settlement, in the context of deep time ecological and geomorphological transformations. With short-term time horizons, the understanding of the places where we live can only be in relation to a single point in environmental history; as such we risk locking ourselves into single point assumptions. If we expand our time horizons, recognising environmental fluctuation, we will increase communities’ resilience to landscape change. How, then, might thinking with a Deep Time perspective destabilise present-day certainties, and how might researchers work together to expand the time-depth of their work while remaining sensitive to the temporality of human experience?
This project brings together perspectives from Social Anthropology, Literature, Archaeology, Palaeoecology, and Geology, working in collaboration with Orcadian artist Anne Bevan and our project partner, The Pier Arts Centre, to find innovative ways to investigate and represent time-depth in landscape, using Orkney as a model. The project will develop and pilot an interdisciplinary methodology that will enable new insights into Orkney’s rich literary, geological, palaeoenvironmental and archaeological heritage, which is coupled with contemporary concerns over coastal erosion and the political and economic importance of energy generation.
 
Research Questions:
1)      How do communities respond and adapt to landscape change?
2)      What is the time-depth of people’s engagement with place?
3)      How do we make deep time visible?

 Artists Re_Solve
Artists ReSolve addresses the divisions intensifying in the United States and brought into focus by the recent presidential election. The site gives artists– writers, dancers, visual artists, performers, composers, etc.– a platform to connect and collaborate in response to the current environment. Working with another person through a creative process can spark curiosity, critique, and new re_solutions towards a common good.
Artists Resolve put out a call to artists who wanted to respond to the current political situation by collaborating with another artist.  It seemed like a good opportunity to engage with someone outside my usual circle and to use art in a more direct political statement. 
I responded to their solicitation to collaborate and was paired with the wonderful story teller,  poet, and teacher who lives in Hawaii, yet  travels the world sharing her knowledge, passions and good vibes,  Kimberly Dark. 
We spoke by phone and she sent me three poems that I would interpret visually.  I had at first thought that it would be fun and politically relevant to do a joint online action in support of Planned Parenthood.  My wish was to find a way to invite people to donate to the organization and 'honor' Mike Pence who supported a nefarious bill that would defund Planned Parenthood and used his position to break a tie in the Senate. 

 I responded to their solitation to collaborate and was paired with the wonderful story teller,  poet, and teacher who travels the world sharing her knowledge, passions and good vibes., Kimberly Dark. 
We spoke by phone and she sent me three poems that I would interpret visually.  I had at first thought that it would be fun and politically relevant to do a joint online action in support of Planned Parenthood.  My wish was to find a way to invite people to donate to the organization and 'honor' Vice President Mike Pense who had just broken a tie in the Senate, in support of a nefarious bill that would defund Planned Parenthood.

When I received the poems, I chose this one. It spoke to me of the way in which beauty is made significant when it becomes part of collective action-- in this case political action. 

My thinking about the poem and imagery.
how could your loveliness matter?
Become part of the sparkling crowd.
By becoming engaged, joining with others, being part of humankind, by acting. 
And here I took the liberty of deciding to act on behalf of Planned Parenthood, both because Mike Pence had just broke the tie and it was being unfunded, And because the poem seemed to be about women, about you and me, and us. AND I wanted to use pink in the piece, a color that I almost never use in my work about water and land, with earth and azure colors. 
Your action is part of you when you engage with others, like breathing, but takes work (sweating pretty)
Placing your beauty –- into the humming, chaotic, breathing earth, stormy
I envisioned the sea as a chaotic hurricane – the background images are of hurricane Sandy, which hit the East coast two years ago. And from another storm in the oceans.
The individual self is small (irrelevant, insignificant) and doesn’t mean much in the scheme of things -- nature, the universe, however it’s defined, but becomes meaningful in action, commitment.
resplendent in my insignificance.  I changed the last line to 'resplendent ...[in] significance'

                                        Kimberly and I submitted our collaboration to Artists Resolve. 

I am very excited about my return to Iceland in September to work with Elva and Soffia at Hvitahús for a week.  We will continue to expand our collaboration and talk about how to make visible aspects of global warming.  Elva sent me 3 images of other panels from our collabotative piece, Horizon. She and I talked this morning about dates for my residency with her.

                       Elements like this would be included as part of a large wall that I hope we will create together.