RIVERNEST
River Nest Project,
Reclaimed wormy chestnut wood, steel, local river sound recordings, Mp3 player, speaker, wire, found glass bottles & reused corks, stream/river water, porcelain, silicone, lead, photographs.---seven 24 x 24 inch units.
Courtesy of the Artists
“This collaborative piece weaves object making, water- way exploration, and sound, with romantic literary impressions of Western North Carolina. The project started with a passage from the book Thirteen Moons by novelist Charles Frazier in which he describes a local mountain medicine made from “River Nests.”
A River Nest is a collection of tinder that gathers in the hollow of rocks along tributaries, which can be used to create a potion that grants the ability to forget or retrieve a love. With this concept in mind, we embarked on a pseudo-scientific exploration, collecting underwater river sounds, water, and nests from seven tributaries that feed into Cullowhee.
We made love potions from boiling collected water and nests. The bottles found hunting for nests were used to house the potions. Porcelain relief maps indicate Cullowhee and river nest locations. Coordinates of the nest locations are stamped in lead labels.”
–Kevin Kirkpatrick and Morgan Kennedy