“Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair and, in a way, more frightening. And immensely more rewarding.” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
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Desperation accompanied me on every walk into the fields on the farm where my family lived from November of 2015 until February of 2019. Desperation eclipsed the beauty that surrounded me, and eventually led to acceptance as going “out” and looking - at everything and nothing-in-particular - became ritual experience of life and death reflected in observations, in personal relationships, and in the healing enacted through circuitous, repeated walks that traced the landscape…, over and over.
The majority of my investigations have been rooted inside of making visible the moments hardest for me to capture. I regard them as the unknown. The trees and the horizon, the “back field” and abandoned silo hold mystic power and they pulled me into them. I became a spiritual seeker in that place. Time slowed down while days stretched out and space both opened and collapsed.
FIELD GUIDES are all the things my language cannot form into words.
These FIELD GUIDES are real locations, places I could not stop returning to. They allowed me to reclaim a part of myself I hadn’t realized I’d lost, including fundamental ideas of belonging. They are also my family, Josh and Finnegan. When the world we knew dissolved, they remained.
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Nikki Brugnoli, December 2019
