Underwater Conversation

Shannon
Apr 23
3 min read

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

--Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

With her recent collection of short fiction, How to Capture Carbon, Cameron Walker demonstrates that art is a way--maybe the only way--to communicate some things which lie beyond the realm of the quotidien. The quotidien being what it is today, I was especially glad to take a recent opportunity to transcend daily reality and develop a conversation around the colorful, dreamlike, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing images and themes in Walker's writing.

For myself, I find there are many things that are socially unacceptable or otherwise just not possible to express in the language and conversation of normal life. Art is the place. Walker rather fearlessly addresses matters in this category: Her characters and plotlines confront complex interior emotional experience, still-taboo topics around sexuality, the building of fantastic self mythologies, the persistent mysteries of growing from child to adult.

On the theme of past experience and people who are no longer present in our lives: Although invisible to others, they cling tenaciously to the part of us that lives beneath the surface.

Left: "Barnacle"

Right: "Self with Hidden Barnacle"

Many of Walker's stories have a watery connection. Below are a few pieces from the group show that drew inspiration from the collection's lead story, "Star, Fish."

From left:

Hema Bharadwaj, "Star, Fish"

Christine Walinski, "Monotype Sea Star"

Megan Moore, "Forget-Me-Not at the Bottom of the Sea"

"Girls Room"

With inspiration from the collection's title story, "How to Capture Carbon," this piece is about parenting adolescents and the mix of hope and fear that color the future we imagine for them, particularly as they come of age during the climate crisis.

Ekphrasis is a vivid description of a work of art that deepens and expands its meaning. The works in the How to Capture Carbon Reverse Ekphrasis group show of visual art certainly brought additional depth and expanded meaning to my understanding of Walker's writing. It's been a pleasure to be in non-verbal conversation with all the artists who have participated in the project. Here are a few more of the pieces that are part of the show on view through April 27 at Eremita Cafe in Philadelphia.

George Dixon

Left: "Snip, Snip" with inspiration from "Ripening"

Right: "Lost and Found" with inspiration from "Golden Hour"

Isabel Brown, "Like Bats"

With inspiration from this passage:

"When my girls were little, their toes were so strong that they could cling to my hair with their feet like bats. We would walk like that as the sun rose, their warm bodies wind-chiming gently against my back." (Cameron Walker, "How to Capture Carbon")