Artist Prompt: Timescapes
Timescapes
Designed by Mollie McKinley
“A cellar underneath the house, though not lived in,
Reminds our warm and windowed quarters upstairs that
Caves water-scooped from limestone were our first dwellings”
—Excerpt from W. H. Auden, About the House, 1965
Introduction
This is a writing exercise about expanding space and exploring time.
In my last exercise about dissolving the boundary between art and life, we talked about the poetic.
The poetic is a written or visual language that expresses an intense state of emotions or ideas. The process of poetic observation often changes what we might otherwise see as odd, ugly, or everyday into something beautiful and interesting.
Today we are going to focus on written poems. You don’t need any creative writing experience to do this exercise; in fact, try to forget anything you may know about poetry. Most modern and contemporary poets do not use rhyme. Many modern poems look like stories written in short lines across the page. Often these poets describe ideas or feelings about life, which they have observed with great detail.
Writing
You’re going to write a poetic story about your house from the perspective of each room.
Take a couple of minutes and walk through the house with a notebook and pen in hand (or whatever you like write with). Try to observe each room as if you’re seeing it for the first time.
Choose your favorite room to begin with—mine is my studio, but maybe yours is your bedroom.
Find a place to sit where you can comfortably write for a few minutes.
Imagine that YOU are this room.
Describe what you, as the room, are like visually. What are your floors made of? Your ceiling? Your walls? What colors are present? Describe anything about the windows that might be relevant, like how light shifts over the course of a day. Perhaps there are no windows at all; how does that change the feel of the room? What furniture or objects are there?
Still imagining that you are the voice of the room, tell us what happened within this space last week, two years ago, twenty years ago, two hundred years ago. What happened on this land before the house existed? Before people existed? Tell us what will happen in the future. How long will this structure exist? Who or what will live in it?
Write with the idea of the poetic in mind. You get to choose what poetry means to you; there is no right or wrong. When you have finished, see how you have traveled through time as the rooms of your house. How do you see your house now? How do you see time?
Go Further
If you would like some inspiration, here are a few related poems to read:
Nikki Giovanni, “Mothers,” 1972
Denise Levertov, “What My House Would Be Like If It Were a Person,” 1978
Gertrude Stein, “A Substance in a Cushion,” 1914
Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm,” 1954
We would like to see your creations and add a selection of them to the blog. Please share images and sound recordings of your work by emailing submissions@diaart.org.
Mollie McKinley is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores relationships between the body and nature, often through tableau performances in remote landscapes. She also works with sculptural materials such as salt, glass, and earth, pursuing transmutations of time, erosion, and light. She is a former codirector of the School of Making Thinking. McKinley is an artist educator at Dia Beacon working with the Arts Education Program. She currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley and New York City.
