Hand of Basajuan, 2020
A collaborative exhibition of works by Patricia Fernández and Ian James. The installation features sculptural maps inspired from yearly walks along the Basque sheepherder's transhumance paths in the lower canyons of California’s Eastern Sierra, to the Humbolt-Toiyabe mountains surrounding Ely, Nevada.
The annual trails of the sheepherders were disparate, yet interconnected, as different groups of solitary herders led their flocks across various terrains of the Mountain West, including journeys still taking place throughout Wyoming and Idaho. According to seasonal change, walks would lead the flocks through deserts, mountains, high alpine meadows, and valleys. Along the creeks sheepherders would water their flock and carve into the soft bark of the aspen trees to create arborglyphs, passing time and sharing messages amongst each other. From testaments to the self, to carvings of the mysterious figure "Jani', to lamentations of loneliness, the trees bear messages from the lives of sheepherders who walked the meadows and mountains of the early 20th Century.
James and Fernández began recording the arborglyphs in 2018 through the process of photography, drawing and sculpture. Alginate casts record the writing in the aspen groves; stones and shells create site markers, representing the geologic history of the high sierras as well as the geography of unrooted bodies. A copper hand is a trace of presence, an identifying gesture of human will that states: here is my name. An etched vessel carries the symbol of the Basque lauburu with sheep’s wool. On one side of a sculpture of burnt wood hangs a calendar of an Ikastola, a Basque language school, made illegal during Franco’s dictatorship; on the other is an alginate of a man’s image from 1964. Small framed silver gelatin photographs become documents against erasure as the trees burn or reach the end of their 150- year life cycle. Together, the fragments become a sculptural map and represent the charged space of the grove as a series of notational spaces that imperfectly record an experience bound to site.
Accompanying the exhibition is the artists’ book, In many valleys, the sun, was the eye of god, published through Colpa Press of San Francisco, and a limited artist edition made for Holiday Forever. This book, Hand of Basajuan, documents some of the artists’ process, travels, and delineates the trails of Nevada and California. The works in the exhibition are disparate ends of an empirical and ephemeral endeavor that is an ongoing investigation into re-presenting forgotten histories.
