Vanishing Point | Point Vanishing
Lake Herrick
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia
November 2017
Installation Team Carolyn Brass & Jefree Shalev: Photography by Noah Lunberry
Drone Photos by Kiley Aguar
Video by Jason Woodworth-Hou; drone footage by Kiley Aguar
The initial idea for this “writing on water” project began with the old wooden bridge seen in photographs of Lake Herrick on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.
Months before, I had been asked by the University of Georgia's Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) and the Department of English to create a site-specific art and poetry installation on the lake.
From aerial photos of the site—one which I did not know and had never visited—I could see that the lake was large but the bridge offered a structural division, a line of crossable separation and connection. The bridge also appeared to present a point of view, a point of vision, that I imagined, once walked upon, would create a point of vanishing, its receding parallel lines converging across the glistening water and onto the darkening shore beyond.
In early November 2017—in specific response to these thoughts about the site, and about that old bridge—the large words VANISHING and POINT (with each letter approximately 6’ x 6’) were written on the water with the aid of a kayak, positioned alternately on each side of the bridge.
Once in place and walking across the bridge, a viewer moved alongside those floating words as if enacting the vanishing inscribed on the water below, embodying in one’s movement a point of disappearance onto the opposite shore.
Over time, the force of the wind detached and disassembled the floating word POINT (its letters becoming an unreadable jumble in the middle of the lake as if the materials themselves had heeded the project’s own legible message). Fittingly, the word VANISHING remained in place until the end of the month when it too was finally removed from the water—a vanishing of vanishing, a silence of sorts restored to the lake’s stilled surface.
Months before, I had been asked by the University of Georgia's Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) and the Department of English to create a site-specific art and poetry installation on the lake.
From aerial photos of the site—one which I did not know and had never visited—I could see that the lake was large but the bridge offered a structural division, a line of crossable separation and connection. The bridge also appeared to present a point of view, a point of vision, that I imagined, once walked upon, would create a point of vanishing, its receding parallel lines converging across the glistening water and onto the darkening shore beyond.
In early November 2017—in specific response to these thoughts about the site, and about that old bridge—the large words VANISHING and POINT (with each letter approximately 6’ x 6’) were written on the water with the aid of a kayak, positioned alternately on each side of the bridge.
Once in place and walking across the bridge, a viewer moved alongside those floating words as if enacting the vanishing inscribed on the water below, embodying in one’s movement a point of disappearance onto the opposite shore.
Over time, the force of the wind detached and disassembled the floating word POINT (its letters becoming an unreadable jumble in the middle of the lake as if the materials themselves had heeded the project’s own legible message). Fittingly, the word VANISHING remained in place until the end of the month when it too was finally removed from the water—a vanishing of vanishing, a silence of sorts restored to the lake’s stilled surface.
Many Thanks to Mark Callahan, Artistic Director of the University of Georgia's Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), and
Jed Rasula, University of Georgia Department of English.
Jed Rasula, University of Georgia Department of English.
Copyright © 2018 Clark Lunberry. All rights reserved.