SunShip: Thesis at Arts Letters & Numbers

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SunShip: The Arc That Makes the Flood Possible

Tens of centuries ago, trees of enormous scale were cut, trimmed, skinned of their bark, and bound together using a particularly robust fibrous rope for the construction of rafts that anticipated the crossing of the great raging seas. Although strong, this rope was not often used near the sea; salt broke down its fiber, sea salt ate away its strength. The trees were bound in such a way that the rolling motion of the sea dug the rope into the soft wood of the trees; the particular knot and binding allowed the push and pull of the sea to work the rope into deep grooves in the wood. In time, as the wood swelled in the water, the grooves closed around the rope, sealing and protecting it from the sea salt. These knots anticipated their own transformation. They are knots in time, space and substance, capturing a wonderful enigma: the strength of fragility, the fragility of strength.

The Ark is the last architecture before The Flood and the first architecture after The Flood; a hinge between two worlds. What if the Ark is an Arc in Time—Arc as in a curve—slowing time, aligning it with Life Time? The Flood would not be a destructive event, but a place of and for life. 

Poetic, material and spatial imaginations are the most precise and thus pragmatic means of addressing our socio-political lives. They produce oxygen within the fibers of our social contract, pockets of space within the collapsed structures of our society. The poetic imagination is a dimension of human life, a mode of insurgency, a language of empathy and difference that includes the nuanced fragilities in our shared stories. There is an urgent need for exploratory works of Empathy and Ethics, and it is for all of us to find the questions, works and movements of our time, to listen to the unheard voices, to search for the unknown linkages, to ask the questions that have not yet been imagined, and to create the transformations that embody our best hopes and aspirations.

“SunShip: Thesis at Arts Letters & Numbers” is a space for exploratory, uncontainable, and independent works ignited from a space of poetic imagination. Works that heighten our spatial imagination and expand our material imagination. A space of inquiry into the nature of the human condition and for imagining and creating the world anew. 

Program Structure
1. On Language and Shared Questions: We Share Words
2. The Studio as Site / Situation: On Spatial Imagination
3. The Studio as Site / Situation: On Material Imagination
4. Towards Seeing, Not Showing
5. Listening as a Form of Imagination
6. Towards an ‘Of-ness’ and ‘Is-ness’ of Drawing
7. Where Do We Know What We Know? Inhabiting Our Questions

“SunShip: Thesis at Arts Letters & Numbers” welcomes all artists, makers and thinkers of any discipline to explore their questions and develop their personal works, voices and practices. There is no predetermined form or outcome for the works participants will develop. This is an opportunity for participants to further develop projects and ideas that they have been working on, or to begin a new creative project, with the seeds of an unknown set of ideas and questions. Participants will be immersed in the creative process of making and exploring new approaches and developing individual and collaborative works.