Joan Harmon

Totem Orchestra

The Totem Orchestra is three mixed media interactive sculptures each of which is a shrine to a particular class of vertebrate: Aves (bird), Fish (humpback whale fluke) and Mammalia (stag). The primary materials are wood and steel. Each sculpture is comprised of original fabricated musical instruments joined together in totemic forms that can be played by participants.

We Walk the Bottom of an Ocean We Call Sky

This piece with submerged feet in a circle is working with archetypes of wholeness and infinity. The feet are traveling, but are on an endless journey. The title for this piece is a fragment of a poem by Jim Harrison, which gives greater depth to the idea of inversions and expanded perception of the natural world.

Stream of Consciousness

A child-size bed in a small field of grass with an illuminated cast glass stream-like form and pillow is in a darkened room. The sound element is of a child’s dream, children’s voices playing merging with sounds of the inner body.

Aftermaeth

The inspiration for Aftermaeth is that moment after a storm when all is quiet in the wake of extreme violence. Our manmade world is rearranged and rewoven with nature's forces and a new charged moment experienced. Another reference is an excerpt from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, "The Lee Shore" which seemed to resonate with the sculptural moment I envisioned.  Here is a small portion of the excerpt I have included in the aural aspect of the sculpture..."Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"

Footpath

In this piece, I am setting up several inversions. A path emerges from a tree, leads to the water, enters the water, and disappears. The path is also visually the thing that is walking. The other inversion that interests me in this work is the exposure of the feet - that part of the human form that is rarely seen, except in more private, intimate situations. This vulnerable part of the body is now exposed and disconnected, and given a new relationship to the earth. The narrative that is suggested by these several hundred feet could also be that of an exodus or a crossing - the suggestion of humankind, instead of the individual.

Soles

Submerged

The circle is an archetypal symbol of wholeness and infinity. Being underwater suggests weightlessness as well as not being able to breathe. The feet are traveling, but are on an endless journey.

Riverbed

Water holds a balance between extremes of solidification and evaporation, always retaining its possibilities of transformation. The river becomes the body, the vehicle for dreams.

Under the Shadow of Vesuvius