ABouT SHIRLEY WYRICK
SOME OF HER THOUGHTS...
I have attempted, in composing this website, to keep from being redundant, but the two statements that follow have been crucial to my work and I believe they should be stated again. The first is general:
Movement – change – passing of Time – the partly remembered – the selections of forms and materials to strengthen the expression – are all participants in my work. My hope is, above all, that my artwork will remain challenging because it stays just on the verge of revealing itself.
The second statement is printed in the brochure about Free Flow (Section 9) and is a distillation of my thinking as I conceived of each of my exhibitions about The River:
The river speaks to each of us by letting us hear ourselves, and by allowing us to reflect and to listen to that river of thought and feeling that flows deep within each of us.
The intrigue of fluid movement grew within me from an early age through listening and watching. I spent a good deal of time just looking, listening and feeling the action of waves and boat motors while on many family fishing trips, being fascinated with the “rain babies” that formed when raindrops fell in puddles during heavy rains, observing the slow formation of ice on a nearby creek and gazing in wonder at the languid movement through the air of smoke from my dad’s ever-present pipe.
A river speaks
Audibly only when it encounters obstruction
Or the wind makes waves lap its banks;
When it rushes into a newfound channel
Or when it falls over a dam in turbulence.
Yet, even in its silence,
the river speaks to each of us . . .
Shirley Wyrick
Others’ Thoughts...
There are innumerable quotations about the river that I could have selected, but I leave it for you to find the ones that speak to you. You may add them to the two that I show here. Barry Lopez’s writing has been especially important to me.
“. . . at the headwaters itself, farther up than is shown,
ravens are meditating, and it is from them that the river
actually flows, for at night they break down and weep;
the universal anguish of creatures, their wailing in desolation,
the wrenching anger of betrayals –– this seizes them and
passes out of them and in that weeping the river takes
its shape.”
Barry Holstun Lopez
River Notes
The Dance of Herons
1979
The termite hill is the river of wisdom in sub-Saharan Africa and it is believed to contain all words spoken by everyone living and dead.