In the garden we engender
the reciprocal other
- Hélène Cixous
ECHO CAMP (2021) is designed as one long horizon, directly influenced by the landscape of my mother's childhood on the edges of the Badlands in Alberta. Using her book of short stories, 'Flamingos', as a starting point, I approach its form as an expanding map from which I write outwards from: a gesture towards a book’s incompleteness (and ongoingness). Here, the absence of the physical mother is replaced with poems, archived letters, photographs and text messages; all of which circulate around a painting of Bianca Saricini suspended aloft above the city of Siena. A landscape is formed from words that echo to and from this central image of a woman, whose motion seems to permeate both backward and forwards, her one hand empty; palm to the sky, and in the other; an object resembling a snowball.
Echo Camp acts out a kind of dialogic ventriloquism, a garden where we learn to speak with another person's words, reflecting on ideas of continuity, reciprocity, and hearing as a form of company. Allowing myself to possess or embody another person's words as if they were my own, becomes in itself a form of mothering, a way of renewing meaning indefnitely, through echo, synchronicity and episodes of EMPATHY.
“ Do you ever notice as you write that no matter what
there is on the written page something appears to be
in back of everything that is said, a little
ghost?”
-Barbara Guest, “Wounded Joy”, Forces of Imagination, p. 100.










