Statement for The Boat is a Circle

In March 2020, locked down due to COVID during a residency in Sweden, I began an epistolary collaboration with an American artist and old friend, Joanne Grüne-Yanoff, who now lived in Stockholm. She took me under wing to get me out of my double isolation, of knowing hardly anyone in this foreign country, as well as the isolating fear that permeates a lockdown situation. We talked weekly by phone and emailed letters back and forth with little image studies, generated from what we were saying. The only trouble was I had no photo images for me to work with, so for the first time I had to make things up.

Because of my longtime making artwork about the idea of Eden and working on the ground in the Mesopotamian Marshes of S. Iraq, I had been reading a remarkable book by British archaeologist Dr. Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Possibly this flood story could expand my work in Iraq,  since it appeared that Noah’s place of origin was the marshes where I was working. Here I have an environmental water remediation project (www.edeniniraq.com) making a wastewater garden/environmental art and cultural heritage site to help clean the marshes of sewage pollution.

As I read passages from the book to Joanne, it quickly became apparent that we were in the midst of our own flood story. Covid was raging around the planet mirroring so many extinctions, already in process because of rampant growth, unstable democracies, and climate change. We made an artist’s book of our own process: The Boat is a Circle, with hope of enlarging the ideas we traded back and forth, as these new artworks.

The boat in the Mesopotamian Flood story is a coracle, a circular boat, still made in the Marshes, called a guffa. PBS made a film about Finkel’s book, The Real Noah’s Ark, in 2013, and had a boat made in India. It was scaled to about a ⅓ of the size that the god Ea/Enki described with exact dimensions to Utnapishtim (before Noah) to build, over 3700 years ago (in the epic of Gilgamesh). Blink Films kindly gave me a high-resolution image file to use of the coracle.

We were in the midst of our own extinction story – our  flood being caused by melting glaciers. Where there’s melt, there’s also fire. The increase in moisture traps heat, so as temperatures rise, we also see the oncoming drought in at least half of the world. For many, the deluge is a drought or fire.  In order to make these images, I’ve had to devote myself to my “dragon of the abyss” —the app PHOTOSHOP — to learn more detailed ways of compositing images. These images  have brought me back to much earlier compositing work in the darkroom so many decades ago, as well as montaging in videoworks such as Oppenheimer’s Chair, eleemosynary, and Trees at Sea. In addition, many years of teaching Art and Ecology have helped me understand what’s happening to our planet: the key being to look at ever-changing ecological systems in nature, in culture, in the galaxies over time. Compositing or montaging is a fitting way to represent these enormous changes, both fluid and abrupt, that are afoot for all living things. Once realized and felt, I hope we can engage.

Meridel Rubenstein.  January 2025