Runes

Simone Kearney

PUTTY'S CORONATION is pleased to announce the opening of Runes, a solo exhibition of hand-carved stone sculptures and text by Simone Kearney. The opening will take place on Saturday, September 14th 2024, from 5-9pm. The show will be up until October 20th, 2024.

The word “rune” can mean a mystery or secret, and also a poem or song. Stone, after all, is full of secrets — it is sedimented time, and has gathered the residues of our lives and the stories that make them shimmer for millennia. Language, and the words we speak, fall invisibly to stone whenever we think, feel, utter, muse. Stone is its own silent song — both ours and that of earth.

How can an ecological awareness press us past, and beyond ourselves, into other less anthropocentric centers? In this time of war and ecological crisis, Kearney turns to earth. Whereas the term “anthropos,” as Socrates says, describes one who looks up, away from nature, Kearney wonders what it means to look down at the ground. And in the ground, in the stones that make up the earth, she uses her hands to find something as elusive, mute, and interior as a dream. The artist wants to know how dreaming stone might teach her of a different kind of time, a less disastrous kind of pace. What she practices, perhaps, is a kind of decentering through stone.

“As in a cracked stone, there is beauty at the bottom of a wound,” writes Edmond Jabes. Out of cracked stones, Kearney has attempted to find what she barely understands. For this show, she draws fragmented images from her own dreams. Kearney cracks stones into forms of birds, horses, faces, eyes, houses, boats, cosmic blooms, and other dream things. Like stumbling upon an archaeological site of the psyche, the sculptures are like fragments floating up from the unconscious, like images that were kept as secrets hidden inside the artist, that floated up to the surface.

Dreams are the stuff, the clatter, the knot, the tumult, the gaps and riddles of human experience converted into images and words during sleep – they are the stories our sleeping minds tell ourselves. They are, however obscure at times, a way of giving an account of things – of ourselves and others. Just as dreams are the labor of the unconscious as it forms messages and symbols that can be deciphered, however shoddily, by the conscious mind, translated into language, so too has Kearney labored in turn, chisel and hammer in hand, to find those images again in stone. Stone too, is full of stories. It is old, and holds time, a time much older than human life. Stone is cold as a star, ancient as distance. Stone, too, dreams, one could say. And maybe these forms are the rock’s dream.

Engaging with stone is not just engaging with the stone’s history, but engaging with the history of others who have carved stone. It’s a most primal practice, a practice that connects us to the earliest humans. In Kearney’s work, the material is sometimes polished and shaped, and sometimes the raw stone remains, like the other side of the moon that is always there even when we don’t see it. But here, there is a place to see it. Whatever marks Kearney will make, she knows eventually her marks will return back to the raw stuff of stone, since stone seems to love to return to stone, like a phrase written in sand that eventually the sea will smooth over. These are temporary signs, like a dancer in the stone that appears and then dissolves.

A text composed of single words or word-fragments printed blue on blue loose-leaf sheets of paper, stacked and unbound, functions as another form of sculpture in the show. The word or word-fragment on the page is a very thin object, and viewers are invited to take a single page/word from the stack, so that reading becomes a form of communal sculpture, as the pages are removed from the space. As those words become an absence, the space they leave is like a lung opening somewhere between gravity and lightness.

Simone Kearney is an artist and writer, living in Brooklyn, NY. Kearney’s work has been included in exhibitions at Olympia Gallery, New York, NY; Undercurrent Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY; Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, CA; Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY; NUTUREArt Gallery, Brooklyn NY; and La Mama Galleria, New York, NY, among others. She is author of Dim, Dahlia, Violet, Stone, an artist book of her sculptures and poetry photographed by Hannah Whitaker and designed by Elana Schlenker (ITI Press, 2024); the poetry collection DAYS (Belladonna Press, 2021) and the chapbook My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She teaches at Parsons School for Design.