Where Matter Finds Its Way
~The Outward Thresholds~ part two
Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction of life, the great stimulant of life. Art is the only superior counterpart to a will to denial of life.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Introduction: Materializing the Unseen
We begin with three thresholds: the desert wind, the river, and the ocean wave.
Each opens onto a different encounter with the world. The wind draws us outward into the landscape. The river carries us through time, memory, and uncertainty. The wave pulls us toward the ocean and the horizon, toward what we cannot yet know.
These are not answers we have settled on. They are doorways where matter finds its way. Thresholds of thresholds.
Wind that cannot be held.
Water that cannot be stopped.
The sea that has no single body.
What happens when art gives form to things that are themselves continually changing — wind, water, movement, time, life?
We often think of art as something that stays put, a finished object to be looked at, interpreted, and perhaps admired. But making and looking are not static experiences. The idea and the physical act of making move together, and the artwork can carry us beyond its edges. These three works approach the wind, the river, and the sea not simply as subjects to be represented, but as forces that change how we perceive and inhabit the world.
Our understanding of art has increasingly narrowed toward entertainment and spectacle, something to consume and own. I wonder whether, in this shift, we have lost sight of something essential to its purpose. Art can unsettle us, disturb us, and take us into unfamiliar territory. It need not comfort us or offer easy answers. But I am interested in what happens when art brings us into a more intimate relationship with life itself — when it changes not only what we see, but how we participate in the world.
Perhaps this is one way art makes life possible: by opening us to experiences that cannot be held still, experiences that return us to the uncertainty and vitality of being alive.
The word gossamer has its own history in my work. I used this as a title for ethereal images expressing connections to something outside of ourselves. Here, I find myself returning to the word for another reason. It suggests something delicate, almost imperceptible, a fine filament that can be difficult to see yet catches the light. I do not mean it as a description of the three works themselves, but as a way of thinking about the threads that might run between them — connections among material, memory, perception, and the living world.
Carving the Wind — The First Threshold
Exhalation: The Breath Between Things That Matter
The wind is a breath passing through the desert. The wind draws us out of ourselves and into the landscape. We cannot hold it. We know it through what it touches, what it displaces, what it sets in motion. It crosses the skin before we have time to name it. It moves through the landscape and, somehow, moves us with it.
I could see the wind move clouds above the high desert by following their shadows across the landscape. Cloud shadows shift into phantom shapes. Something touches the skin, then disappears. The past arrives like a presence I cannot quite grasp. I wondered if I could carve the wind and catch its boundaries.
To create Lams-e-Maazi: Phantom of a Desert Breeze, I wanted to attempt the impossible. To give the wind fluid boundaries is to give form to something that refuses to remain within a form. The sculpture stands before us — material, tangible, and still — yet what it brings into our experience reaches beyond the shape itself. We begin with an object, but the encounter carries us elsewhere. Our attention slips past the perimeter of the anchoring stone and the twisted armature. Our eyes begin to travel into the veiled boundaries and the landscape enters the work — or perhaps we enter the landscape.
A sculpture cannot contain the wind. It must find a way to behave like something the wind might do.
In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram explores how we encounter the world through the living medium of our senses. The air is not simply an empty interval between ourselves and the world. It is part of the very relationship through which we experience it. The sculpture invites us to consider that relationship, to feel our immersion in the world rather than stand apart from it.
This is the first threshold: not simply a movement from sculpture to nature, but a moment when the distinction between looking at the world and participating in it begins to loosen.
The anchor for this work is its Urdu title, Lams-e-Maazi, which translates as “the touch of the past.” It carries associations of longing, desire, and the strange persistence of what is no longer present. The idea of nafs, with its associations of the self and its desires, offers another way of approaching that restless inward pull: the longing for what has passed, the attempt to recover what cannot be recovered.
The word nafs carries a depth of meaning that can be lost when it is reduced to the body’s baser impulses or treated as something separate from ourselves, an inner force to blame for our desires. In Islamic thought, its meanings are more complex, encompassing the self and the inner life, including the struggle to understand and transform ourselves. I am not Muslim, and I do not claim to speak for this tradition. My understanding has been shaped by my reading of The Ranks of the Soul and conversations with my friend Imam Mehdi Khorasani. I have come to think of the nafs not as an enemy to be escaped, nor as something that is simply good or bad, but as part of the inward movement through which we experience desire, loneliness, love, and longing. These inward movements take many forms: the desire to be loved and understood, the grief of losing someone we love, and the longing for safety and belonging in a world where even children can lose their parents or their lives to war. The nafs, as I understand it, is not simply about what we want for ourselves, but also about the complex inner life through which we respond to love, loss, and the world around us. For me, understanding the nafs is a way of considering the invisible forces that shape how we live, the choices we make, and what we bring into the world through our art and our own being.
The wind cannot be held, and neither can the past.
Yet the past is not always confined to memory. Sometimes it seems to arrive from outside us, suddenly and unpredictably, as a sensation before we can explain it. A touch, a movement, a change in the air can return us to something we thought was gone. The sculpture reaches toward that fleeting encounter — the phantom warmth of a connection no longer physically present, leaving its shape behind. Desire itself is exactly like the wind, this phantom. It is a powerful pulling force centered around something that isn’t physically there, trying to fill an absence.
The Portuguese word saudade offers another language for this experience, a longing in which absence and presence become difficult to separate. There is pleasure in the ache, and an ache in the pleasure. What is missing can still exert a force upon the living.
The sculpture gives this intangible experience a physical presence. It does not bring the past back, nor does it make the wind stay. Instead, it offers a form through which we might encounter what cannot be held. A memory, like a desert breeze, may touch us and pass through us, leaving us changed.
Perhaps the gossamer thread begins here: in the fine connection between what is present and what is absent, between the material form before us and the force that carries our attention beyond it.
We feel the wind, follow its movement, and lose sight of where it began. Then the landscape opens, and we find ourselves looking outward.
The wind gives way to the river.
The River: Art Is the Bourne of Rivers — The Second Threshold
The Fluid Line: Art Can Be a Destination Without Being an Ending
The river carries us through time, memory, and uncertainty.
Rivers drift into memory. The word bourne opens a doorway to Shakespeare, my family, the Masons, the assemblage, and the clay banks of my childhood. The memories meander, meet, and separate, as rivers do. I never know where they will carry me next.
I found the title Art Is the Bourne of Rivers through my curiosity about a word. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we encounter the “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.” I had long wondered whether time itself might be that undiscovered country. Following the word led me into Masonic language familiar through my father and grandfather, whose meetings meant a great deal to them.
Their involvement connected them to a community and to shared values, something they believed could be good for the family and the wider world. The phrase about traveling upon the Level of Time brought Shakespeare’s words closer to home.
My own connection to this world came through my grandmother, who wanted me to join the Rainbow Girls. I was at the end of middle school, and one of the best things about belonging was getting out of the house on a school evening. I remember being allowed to wear white nylons and pumps I had never worn before, though I cannot recall exactly what else we were required to wear.
The other girls weren’t really my friends. My two closest friends were Catholic, and Catholics were not allowed to join. Once I understood that, I began asking questions. I had never thought about people in those categories before, and I began to notice a kind of elitism I had not encountered in quite that way. I sometimes wonder whether, without my grandmother’s connection, I might have been blackballed myself. I felt more at the edge of the group than a part of it.
Get Sherburn LaBelle, Yampa Sculpture Studio’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
These organizations meant something to small-town New Englanders. Freemasonry has a long history of connections to the building trades, architecture, and the liberal arts, as well as to ideas of community and shared obligation. But the lodges in different towns could vary considerably. I suspect my father and grandfather valued the community they found there, and perhaps also enjoyed having somewhere to go and spend time without the women. I can respect the community they found while recognizing that some of the attitudes and practices I encountered were outdated, even as people tried to hold on to them.
The experience left me with questions about the boundaries people create: who is allowed in, who remains outside, and how much can depend on a rule, a ritual, or a single quiet decision.
That question returns me to the assemblage.
Its three sections seem to hold different relationships to time. At the top, an oil-pastel adaptation of a portrait of Renoir smoking a cigar appears beside a more modern portrait of a young girl. Mica smoke rings drift between them, like a mirror carrying one image toward another. The transition is dreamlike. Past and present do not sit apart but begin to mingle, as if time itself were drifting across the surface.
In the middle, the work shifts into another world. A boatman tries to push his way through pieces of mica, which might be ice or the shadows of clouds. The passage is uncertain. We cannot quite decide what lies around him or what kind of surface he is crossing. He seems to be moving through a world that will not hold still long enough to be fully named.
At the bottom are the birds. Here I think again of the Masonic phrase: “Remembering that we are traveling upon the Level of Time to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” The words once belonged to a ritual world my family knew. In the assemblage, they become part of a larger question, one that reaches beyond any organization or set of beliefs. We travel through time in our own minds, carrying memories, images, and the lives of those who came before us. We try to imagine what lies beyond what we can know.
The river in my own childhood was another kind of passage.
An old railway bridge crossed the Baker River a little way before it joined the Pemigewasset. We were not allowed to go beyond that point. We floated downstream for miles in inner tubes. I loved surrendering to the current and following the river as it meandered. And the river was never quite the same from one trip to the next. Beaches disappeared; trees fell; birds nested. Each turn revealed a changing landscape.
At one bend, we came to the clay banks. Their smooth but treacherous inclines formed slick terraces of slate-gray and rich ochre clay above the glistening water. We left our inner tubes on the sandy beach across the river, swam the current, and climbed the great slope of earth.
At the top, a wide field opened before us, but our ritual took place at the edge. We slathered cool, heavy clay over our faces, arms, and legs, transforming ourselves. Then, with buckets of river water, we drenched the slope until it became a slick track. Sliding down was a kind of surrender to the earth. We became the clay itself as we hurtled downward and splashed into the water below.
Looking back, that was the moment I was called to be a sculptor. Coated in mud and rushing toward the river, I learned what it meant to lose myself in my material — a feeling I still chase whenever I step into the studio. We returned to the same stretch of river, but never to precisely the same world.
Perhaps this is why the word bourn gathered such force for me. It can suggest a stream, a boundary, or a destination. My title, Art Is the Bourne of Rivers, uses some artistic liberty. I liked the way the word looked, and its spelling echoes the story of my family name, Sherburn, which had an e in England that was dropped in the New England family spelling. The word became a meeting place for language, family history, memory, and the work itself.
I feel that art can become a destination, a powerful journey. We arrive before a work, and something that has drifted through time — an image, a memory, a movement — takes form where we can encounter it. But I do not want to close the idea there. The assemblage does not offer one settled story. The smoke drifts between portraits; the boatman moves through uncertain matter; the birds inhabit the lower part of the work while the phrase of the undiscovered country hovers in the mind. The work brings us to a place, but what we find there may carry us further.
Perhaps the bourn is not simply where the river ends. Perhaps it is where the journey becomes visible for a moment — where we can pause, look, and sense how much is still moving beyond what we can see.
The river has carried us through memory and brought us to a threshold. But a destination need not be an ending. The current continues beyond the place where we stand.
The Final threshold: The water opens into the sea.
The Threshold of the Outward Tide: The Wave
Before sunrise, we would cross the footbridge over the lagoon, where sailboats and fishing boats lay at anchor. The bridge had a lifting span. We would take the dinghy out to the sailboat and head to sea to watch the sunrise.
In the small sailboat, I would wrap myself around the mast as the boat rocked and bellowed on the water. I became the wave. Not the water, but the bellowing wave itself, as if its movement were pulling the sun up from the darkness.
The experience was a feeling of belonging to the movement of the sea, perhaps to something larger than myself. I was still in my own body, holding on to the mast, but the movement seemed to reach beyond the boat and beyond me. The sun rose, opening outward, toward the horizon.
Perhaps the body is where this connection begins. We do not encounter the world from somewhere outside it. We meet it through our senses, through movement and touch, through the rhythms to which our own bodies respond. In Eye and Mind, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explores the relationship between the body and the world it perceives. Seeing is not simply a detached act of looking. We are bodily beings, already immersed in the world we encounter.
Our bodies contain a great deal of water, as does the ocean. This fact does not explain why we might feel connected to the sea, but it offers a way of thinking about our relationship to it. Water is not entirely foreign to us, something separate from the world we inhabit. We belong to the same material world. The sea is not simply out there, beyond us. Water is already part of us.
I think about this when I consider The Wave, a sculpture that began in wax. The wax had a slippery, yielding quality, and I was drawn to the rhythms of the form, the way it could hold attention and seem to move even while still. Casting it in bronze preserved something of that movement. The material changed, but the sense of movement remained.
A sculptor, I think, is more of an alchemist than a chemist. Material matters not only for what it is, but for what it does — for the relationships it enters into, and for what becomes possible when it meets another material or a new context. The wave’s movement is never entirely its own. It collaborates with currents and wind, continually becoming and collapsing.
Tim Ingold’s writing about materials offers a way to think about this ongoing movement. Matter does not simply arrive at a final destination and stop. It participates in relationships, changing as it encounters other things. A form may appear complete, yet the world it belongs to remains in motion.
When we stand before The Wave, we return to the work not to decode a fixed message or discover what it definitively means, but to discover what else it might become in our experience. The form may be still, yet our perception is not. We bring our own memories, bodily rhythms, and associations. The encounter unfolds between the work and the person looking at it.
The naturalist Loren Eiseley once wrote that if there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. I think of that sentence when I consider the relationship between the water within us and the water moving across the world. The river carries us through a landscape; the sea draws us toward a horizon; the wind moves across the desert and through the air we breathe. These are not separate worlds. They belong to the same material life.
Perhaps the gossamer thread becomes most difficult to see here. It is not a physical line joining us to the ocean, nor proof that we are all experiencing the same thing. It is the fine connection between bodily sensation and the world beyond the body, between a form we can encounter and a movement we cannot possess.
The wave gathers, rises, and draws outward. We follow it toward the horizon, where the eye can travel but cannot arrive. The horizon is always moving away from us, and yet it continues to invite us forward.
The sun rises from the sea. The wave moves on.
Toward a Conclusion — The Unframed Studio
Across the wind, the river, and the sea, the artwork becomes more than a contained object. The wind draws us into an encounter with an unseen force. The river carries us through time and memory, leaving uncertainty open as an experience in its own right. The wave draws us outward toward the horizon, toward what has not yet been discovered. Each work changes where attention can go.
These are different movements, but they are not unrelated. The wind moves what it touches. The river carries what it encounters. The wave gathers the movements of currents and wind into a form that rises and falls. None exists entirely by itself. Each belongs to a world of relationships, of matter continually meeting matter.
The word matter has been doing double work throughout this paper: the physical material and what matters to us. The distinction is not always clear. Material becomes meaningful through the relationships it enters, while our experience of the world takes shape through our bodies, memories, and encounters with people and things.
I return to the word gossamer now as a way of thinking about the fine connections that can run between things, experiences, and memories without making them identical. A gossamer thread does not erase the distance between two places. It makes us aware of a connection that might otherwise go unnoticed. Perhaps something similar happens in an encounter with art. We stand before a form, yet our attention travels beyond it — to a memory, a landscape, a bodily sensation, a possibility we cannot quite name.
Karen Barad’s thinking about matter as an ongoing process of becoming offers another way to approach this relationship. What appears before us as a completed form remains part of a world in motion, shaped by its encounters with other things. Matter does not simply arrive at a final destination; its possibilities continue beyond the form it takes. The artwork may be finished, but the relationships it opens are not necessarily finished with it.
This is one reason I return to the question raised by the Nietzsche epigraph: how does art make life possible? Perhaps not by offering an escape from the world, or by making life easier to understand. Perhaps art makes life possible by returning us to the world with a renewed capacity to feel, perceive, and participate in it.
The wind, the river, and the wave do not ask us to stand outside their movement and master it. They ask something different: that we remain receptive to what is changing, that we recognize our own place within the material world, and that we allow the encounter to carry us beyond what we already know.
The intensity of making can be fierce and unpredictable. At other times, it softens into the quiet grace of a form that feels balanced. Art holds the roar of the quarry and the whisper of carved space, the force of becoming and the stillness of arrival. It magnifies life through the sculptor’s touch — and then opens outward again, toward a horizon that remains unfinished.
Perhaps art is not simply a way of representing the world. Perhaps it is a way of entering it more fully, of discovering the threads that connect us to what lies beyond ourselves. These connections may be as delicate as gossamer, yet they can alter how we inhabit the world.
As an artist, I always feel my body as an internal compass. I find my way through the breath of the wind, the flow of the river, and the mesmerizing wave of the sea. I reach for a fine thread of connection to the world, discovering that the journey through art is also a journey into life.
Perhaps sculpture does not make the invisible visible. Perhaps it gives the invisible somewhere to happen.
Continue the journey: Read Part One: The Shape of What’s Not There — The Doorways Within.
