The Enduring Edge

by Lani McGregor AUGUST 2020

Image: Artists Jeff Zimmer, Anne Vibeke Mou, Anne Petters, and Annie Cattrell at Latheronwheel Harbor; photo by K. Sutherland.

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

- Haruki Murakami, “Kafka on the Shore”

Six months after opening the second Byre exhibition we returned for a final photo shoot of its rooms. It was early March of 2020 and what had seemed at the time a quick visit to the site with plans for future additions, alterations, private tours, and events merged almost overnight with a world in which a precarious edge was moving into its center.

I returned to the US as our borders with the rest of the world slammed shut. The closures brought with thema novel sense of time, as if the timelessness of The Byre had traveled with me into a world more unknown and more fantastical even than the one translated by our artists with their installations.

Reflecting now on the "Field Notes" installation, I am both saddened—at the opportunities lost in these months of lockdown—but also heartened.

Artists have long gone into distant territory to find answers that the familiar can bury beneath the cacophony of routine. "Field Notes" at The Byre encapsulates timelessness. I am denied access to it and likely will be for many months to come. Yet it is even more vividly present because of this challenge. In a “continuous, endless loop,” The Byre holds magically intact the insights, the visions, the engagement of its four artists. I am deeply grateful for it and to them.

Thank you, Annie Cattrell, Anne Petters, Anne Vibeke Mou, and Jeff Zimmer. You have brought the edge permanently into our space. It will be here long after all this has passed.

Thanks also to the writers/ curators for this small publication: Michael Endo and Karlyn Sutherland.

To my own reduced but indefatigable staff at Bullseye Projects, and to all the people of Bullseye Glass who have looked over so many edges in recent years and always brought back ideas for a brighter center.

LANI MCGREGOR is the Director of Bullseye Projects and co-owner of Bullseye Glass Co. in Portland, Oregon.

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.” - Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore