Linda's Plank Path

Plank Path and Berry Bricks, Linda Carson, 1993

Installation featuring a plank path throughout the gallery (elevated on bricks) and a small area of floor "tiled" with bricks of frozen berries

What you're looking at is an installation view of Plank Path and Berry Bricks at my graduating show for my M.F.A. at the University of Saskatchewan. This was a path of 2X12 planks that threaded throughout the entire gallery. Each plank was tied onto brick "feet" to raise it just a few inches above the floor, and the path wandered through most of the exhibition.

Okay, this is the piece that got me in the most trouble, and distracted a lot of people from anything else in the entire show. This is the piece that turned the theme of the show into "permission." Weird.

The path originated from a simple idea. I'd been very aware, the whole time I was in grad school, that I wasn't living "in" Saskatoon or Saskatchewan at all; I was just treading a small paved triangle between the University, my studio and my apartment. I thought I'd make it possible for someone to see my show the same way: without ever touching Saskatoon. The path was stable but a little distancing, a very basic way to invite the viewer to share my own disorientation, my sense of dislocation.

The path confused a lot of viewers (in a not too scarey way) as they all tried to make up their own rules about how they could use it. And that's okay. That's interesting. Some people thought (because this is a Gallery and we Don't Touch in a Gallery) that they should not walk on the path. Then they were a little frustrated because the path formed a (very low) barrier in many places throughout the gallery. Some people thought that they had to walk on the path, and never leave it. Then they were frustrated, too, because there were certain pieces in the show you could not approach closely from the path. And some people thought that the path, which formed a loop around some central works, was a kind of "art corral" to keep them away from the pieces in the middle of the gallery. People got quite preoccupied with what they were allowed to do with the path. I got quite preoccupied with how this little dent in the conventional gallery situation threw even art students for a loop.

But wait, it got worse. A lot of the work in this show was very contained, even repressed. Lots of stuff in globes, in boxes, in heaps. Careful, tight, held in. And I wanted to have a few places where I broke free, where things got out of hand. So I created a place, just one place, where the Plank Path was necessary as a bridge across something (and not just a corral/barrier/route). I laid a 7X3 matrix of "tiles" under the path, red tiles of frozen berries, taken straight out of the box while they were still nice firm bricks. Then I left them to do what they wanted, to bleed all over the white linoleum.

And I heard about nothing for two weeks except "how are you going to get the berry juice off the floor?"

Remember, this is a student gallery. It's whole purpose is to stage our exhibitions. I was explicitly told that I could do anything to the space as long as I repaired it afterward. The janitor responsible for the space visited the evening I hung the show, expressed continuing interest in the work, and agreed with me from the start that (between us) we'd have no problem cleaning up. (Then he told me horror stories about which shows were impossible to clean up.) In the end it cleaned up like a dream.

Faculty wanted to know if I could clean it. Students wanted to know if I was allowed to do that. Permission. And how good a housekeeper I am. That's what two years of my life came down to.

Oh it smelled good.