“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 them a 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.
Read more:
Field Notes @ The Byre part 1: Looking Down at the Sea from the Bottom of a Lake
Field Notes @ The Byre part 2: The Confluence of Past, Present, and Future
Field Notes @ The Byre part 3: The Calm
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About the author
Lani McGregor
Lani McGregor Director, Bullseye Projects
Co-owner with Daniel Schwoerer, Bullseye Glass Co.
After 32 years at Bullseye Glass Company, I eventually arrived at the position of Director at Bullseye Projects, a role I trained for by regularly creating positions and departments within the company, then recruiting dedicated staff to collaborate and continue the work. From founding and directing Bullseye’s Research & Education Department in the early ‘90s, to setting up our first Resource Center in 1995, Bullseye Gallery in 1999, and finally Bullseye Projects in 2015, I consider myself a genius at envisioning projects that demand minds far better than my own to fulfill.