Lesley Patterson-Marx
Artist’s Statement

(May, 2008) Daily, throughout the year, no matter what the weather, I leave the familiarity of my home and begin an hour-long walk. It is a journey, a search, a daily ritual.

As I walked, I looked down at the sidewalk and found a robin’s egg. I held it lightly in my hand so as not to crush it. Mother bird, you and yours are mortal too. Many springs have passed and I have made a collection, delicate blue evidence of your labor and loss. I walked past a junk store and found a collection of old photographs of unknown people. They were brittle and golden leaves, the remains of lives lived long ago, plants who had long since gone to seed, whose origins have been forgotten.

I decided to take them with me, so that a gust of wind could not sweep them up into the swiftly moving river of everyone who has ever been. I have seen the changing of the seasons, and I have seen that everything that ascends must descend, and I have hoped that there would be a few exceptions, and I have learned that there will not. I have seen the black butterfly hovering behind my back.

I should walk more quickly. I should take these findings home and make something from them, I could make something as delicate as they are, a meditation on change and the longing for stillness and symmetry in a chaotic world…and I could bind them tightly with thread, preserve them, so that the vines can’t cover them.

No…I should walk more slowly so that I don’t miss anything else that I may stumble across. I can walk slowly and scan the edges of the sidewalk for some new discovery.

I looked up and I was home, at my front gate. The hour had passed and I was back in the same place that I began, bound by cyclical nature. {cont.}