EACH ROCK A COARSE LOVE
Site-specific contemplative and interactive installation at San Francisco’s Incline Gallery. One poem, two artists, three rock pedestals, four handmade rakes, five (almost six) tons of gravel.
2018
In collaboration with Melissa Wyman and curated by Brian Perrin.
Incline Gallery was once a mortuary. The entire gallery is a series of ascending ramps and landings that were used to wheel bodies up to an embalming room. For 'each rock a coarse love', Wyman and Namkung covered the gallery floor with two inches of gravel and set irregular shaped rock pedestals on each landing. Visitors were invited to remove their shoes and rake and smooth the gravel as they would in a Zen garden.
Incline Gallery 3rd landing
Incline Gallery 2nd ramp
Incline Gallery 2nd landing
Incline Gallery 1st landing
Rakes by Melissa Wyman. Her extensive documentation can be viewed here.
View Wyman and Namkung’s other collaboration, ZEN GARDEN RADIATOR WARS.
each rock a coarse love
by Michael Namkung
I gather myself to go down,
to drop open my hands
the further I descend
the more I am walking uphill
Along the same path that
the living wheeled the dead
to the mountaintop
on rickety gurneys
Toward their preservation
toward their re-presentation
toward their Eternal Presence Illusion
I too, walk this path.
Sometimes I stop
to rake my fingers through the water
and let the rocks on the riverbed—each rock a coarse love
that together, hold the weight of
my rickety body,
dig into me,
and mark my feet with their sharp impressions
My feet receive attentively
holding these marks
before they disappear
into the next step
before me
the rising path, falling away
a destination unknowable
behind me
the water runs swiftly
washing all the illusions of now
that followed me here
For more of Namkung’s work at Incline Gallery, see DOWNHILL FROM HERE.