[Environmental Installation] Letters | Craig Anthony Schneider
Join artist Craig Anthony Schneider as he releases shards of pottery to the waves, scrawled with heartfelt words to be found by later passersby.
Craig, who is this letter for?
Michael.
No more than that, the simplicity of a name. When silence hangs more words will follow but the finality of the name is what sticks to my eardrums. This name spoken alone tells the story of an ending; a friend loved in the past tense.
Have you felt loss? I have. If you haven’t, you certainly will. When it comes, you’d like to welcome the welling of gentle emotions – sadness, fond remembrance, ennuie - but the emotions that pull the hardest are not kind, fair or even rational. Anger, regret, guilt, and a refined kind of hopeless. Knowing there is no way to go back.
Have you ever written a letter that you didn’t send? Stowed it in an envelope and forgotten where it went? I have – the intended recipients now long dead. Do you regret not having sent? Craig, reading between the lines of my face, tells me that maybe my unsent letters were for me more than for them.
Craig’s gift, beyond that of the artist, is teaching you to turn and face yourself. Such tragedy exists within all of us – lives unlived, potential unfulfilled, sentences unsaid – and none know it better than him. He is a mentor to me – and not just to me, to many – because he knows this tragedy inherently, feels it daily. That doesn’t mean he can change it. It means he walks with it churning below.
This man is alone on a beach. He is alone even with all of us here to honour and recognize this moment. In grief, we are always alone. We who witness feel we should look away but we don’t. Surrounded by ocean and mist, there is a feeling like he may evaporate if we don’t keep watching, skipping away like broken pottery in the waves, rejoining.
Today, he relinquishes his thoughts to the ocean. As the shards of a letter etched in clay release from his hands and into the spray, he faces away. We don’t know the look on his face as a porpoise comes close to where his knees lap surf. I don’t see this visitor. It did not come here for me.
Do you have trouble releasing things? I do, least of all regret. Watching this man, I am learning from him all over again. I am learning about letting go or at least letting go of an attempt to change. Craig, when will you stop teaching me things I didn’t ask to learn? I want to be able to change the past, to revoke the loss that lives there. Truth is not usually gentle, especially the kind that speaks of moving on.
There are many words in my head that Craig has placed there. At the appropriate moments, his wisdom sounds internally with the depth and patience of a fog horn. The funny thing is, I don’t even think he knows he is wise. As his student, or perhaps his patient, or perhaps his friend, he has been honest about how I get in my own way. That kind of honesty stings but Craig’s words are devoid of arrogance and so there is no room for gnashing of teeth. No sense being angry with a reflection in the waves.
Back on the beach, the fog horn envelops us and Craig tells of how his lost friend grew up hearing this same lullaby. The sound of the place comes up to meet you like the mist. It whispers the words of a letter now eaten by surf. It eats up the anger and regret and spreads it across the vast sea bottom and with space around each sentiment, it is much easier to carry. Perhaps later the ocean will spit out shards for passersby to find, grateful to be given the words with which to speak a name.
Michael.
Photographs by Hailley Fayle (@hailley.hailley)
Ceramic installation by artist Craig Schneider with the support of the Fredericton Arts Alliance and artsnb. Video response & still images by Hailley Fayle & Ian Humber, written response from editor Allison Green.
From the artist:
Letters/Shards is a body of work bringing together the ephemeral and the concrete. At one end of this process is soft clay and stream-of-consciousness writing. The words initially were expressing frustration, confusion, loss, difficulty, and the incompleteness of things not said, to both loved ones present and past. In each letter writing from center out to the rim, the thoughts and feelings shifted from tight closed thoughts to open, loving, expansive thoughts. This was not planned, nor was the experience of relief, and lightness that came. After firing these letters each one is released into the ocean surf to be tossed, rolled, warn, buried and reveled. Future beachwalkers may come across a fragment of the letters and try to imagine what was being said based on the words they can read. Hopefully they will make up their own stories.
Today also marks the beginning of Craig’s artist residency with the Fredericton Arts Alliance, running until August 15th. We’ll be following his progress on Instagram @craiganthonyschneider and through the Fredericton Arts Alliance channels.
“The work for this residency is about isolation and disconnection, initially from ourselves but it also relating to the experience in the early months of COVID isolation. When our known and familiar realities get dramatically changed there is an experience of disconnect - often to the things we had previously held close and dear.”