Summer Reading List | Skye Gilkerson
Skye Gilkerson, 15° S; 115° W at 7 seconds, sound vibration and suminagashi ink on paper, 21” x 15”
Summer Reading List | Skye Gilkerson
Make Ink: A Forager's Guide to Natural Inkmaking
Jason Logan
I've been making my own ink for over a decade, mostly based on hunches and experiments, and I decided it's time to make it official with actual recipes. Summer is for foraging, so I wanted help identifying sources of pigment in the woods near my home. I selected this book based on the promise of lovely illustrations (it delivers), and, to my delight, it also contains charming introductions to each color, including references to Newton's experiments with prisms, da Vinci's ink of choice, and other odd tales. Between recipes for oak gall and black walnut inks, we learn that in 2009 British geologists discovered ink from ancient squid. Ancient squid ink! The still-preserved ink sac tissue was excavated from the fossilized remains of the prehistoric squid, and used in an illustration of the creature.
Sin Eater for Quanta Magazine
“The Thoughts of a Spiderweb”
Joshua Sokol for Quanta Magazine
This article examines animal perception, particularly the ways some animals' cognition seems to extend to other parts of their bodies, and even, perhaps, to objects beyond their bodies. Researchers hypothesize that spiders relate to their webs in a way that could be described as storing memory or filtering information, in other words, extensions of their brains.
The Spell of the Sensuous
David Abram
On a related note, this book addresses the ways in which human cognition is woven into the ecosystems that enfold us, and is one of those texts that gets into your veins and forever impacts how you see the world. Abram uncovers sources of human disconnection from earth, and sets us into slipstreams of reconnection:"By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths. And indeed each terrain, each bioregion, seems to have its own particular intelligence, its unique vernacular of soil and leaf and sky."
Skye Gilkerson
Skye Gilkerson is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York, with roots on a fourth-generation farm in South Dakota. Her work in sculpture, installation, photography, film, and collage often playfully compares human timescales with celestial cycles and has been shown at the Pensacola Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum of Baltimore, and FLAG Foundation in New York. She was awarded a Chenven Foundation grant, a Smack Mellon studio fellowship, and artist residency grants with the La Napoule Art Foundation in La Napoule, France, and Tilleard Projects on Lamu Island, Kenya. Gilkerson’s solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art was listed by the Baltimore Sun as one of the Top Ten Art Shows of the Year. Her work is featured in the Robert L. Pfannebecker Collection, the Vanderbilt University Collection, and many personal collections in the US and Germany. For updates, exhibition invites, and the occasional postcard, sign up for her mailing list and follow her on Instagram.
Skye Gilkerson, 10au.03 at 5 seconds, sound vibration and suminagashi ink on paper, 12” x 15”
