Elie Porter Trubert

Walking is when my deepest thinking takes place, and my creative work has long been assembled from gathered and altered natural materials collected on walks. While walking I connect deeply to both the natural world and, as with writing, to my internal landscape. I see both as embodied methods of processing life's events, yet only now that I have walked myself out of the woods and onto my own life path, walking within, have the two converged.

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I have kept a journal on and off for more than fifty years and have more than forty of them, beginning with the five-year diary I received as a gift when I was ten years old. Like the journal intime, they were written for myself and never intended as a personal legacy, a memoir or historic record, yet, as they accumulated, I wondered what to do with them. I wavered between wanting to leave them to my children and asking for them to be destroyed after my death. Did I want to remain silent or speak out, leave them behind, or take them with me? Instead I found a way to do both, by transforming them using clay, text, and audio into a multi-sensory archive.

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At the start, my intention was to completely eliminate any trace of the original journals, turning them wholly into new forms, mixing my bodies of work with clay bodies from the body of the earth. I began by selecting a journal and reading it, then culling a sentence or two from each day's entry. I invited people who are the same age I was at the time of writing to record themselves reading these excerpts, forming an audio component of the work. The actual journal itself, its written pages or later, its content, was transformed in relationship with wild clay found locally, often on my walks, each becoming a unique set of twelve ceramic vessels, witnesses to the passage of time. Finally, a written element re-imagines and expands on the traditional exhibition materials list to include a description of both the process and the journal’s contents. In this way, nine journals were released into new forms. Later I kept the journals intact and allowed the form of the clay vessels to be inspired by the content of each journal rather than literally containing it.

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“Walking Within” was created during the Confluence MFA program at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. My creative walking practice led me to this thesis work, this walking within my own life path where I have visited the past in order to meet myself in the present.

 

Artist Bio:

Elie Porter Trubert is a New Jersey artist who works across a variety of media including sculpture, installation, audio, photography, and creative nonfiction. She is driven by a deep connection to nature and interest in non-traditional art spaces, and has developed an ongoing contemplative walking practice that involves the creation of ephemeral, site specific sculptural works assembled from gathered natural materials. These pieces allude to impermanence, interconnectedness, and attunement. 

Elie creates “circle meditations” during her walks and leaves them for human and more-than-human others to find, fostering a relationship that is mutually healing, consensual, and reciprocal. She is currently "walking within," retracing her own life path and making interdisciplinary work based on decades of journals that are transformed using wild clay, audio, and written elements. 

​A long-time nonprofit arts leader, Elie left her position as Executive Director of The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, New Jersey to deepen her practice and recently completed an MFA through the University of New Mexico. 

View her previous exhibitions and awards here.