The title of this engaging work emphasizes that the author lives, works, and creates art in this place--a particular site in the foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The subtitle indicates that place is the arena for investigating engagement with the land and nature, art and creativity, and spiritual life. By exploring the significance of place in our fragmented world and by using her artistic practice as an example, the author hopes to offer readers new definitions of the interrelationship of religion and art.
Haynes is the first to examine the intersection of these three themes, which may be variously defined. First, the land and nature provide the literal site for the book, and the language of ecology is woven throughout. In the face of contemporary global crises, Haynes believes that we have a moral imperative to address how we live and work in the physical environment. Second, visual art, creativity, and the creative process are discussed using historical and contemporary examples. Haynes is a philosopher of art and an artist, whose primary creative work involves carving marble and drawing. Using her stone sculptures to frame the book's chapters, she takes readers on a meandering journey into the history, philosophy, and practice of art. Third, the religious and spiritual life is highlighted with examples from both her practice of yoga and Buddhist meditation as well as from her work with hospice patients.
Deborah J. Haynes is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is both a writer and artist and the author of three books: Bakhtin and the Visual Arts, The Vocation of the Artist, and Art Lessons: Meditations on the Creative Life.
"Book of This Place is a hopeful tale of bonding--a leisurely meditation on self, nature, and art that is haunted by deaths and nourished by resilience and creativity. Haynes's stone sculptures define the narrative as she searches for her bedrock. A welcome addition to the literature of place."
--Lucy R. Lippard, author of The Lure of the Local
"Deborah Haynes is a master at blurring the boundaries between art and life and her new Book of This Place teaches us to intuit new ways of approaching contemporary creative practice . . . Reading this book will not only open doors for your imagination to step into and perform its wonders, it will create a place for the reader to consider their own inner strength as a vital source of renewable energy. Haynes knows this place like a fox."
--Mark Amerika, author of META/DATA: A Digital Poetics
"Artist Deborah Haynes, in Book of This Place, reveals in thoughtful prose the interconnections among her gardening, her sculpture making, and her spiritual quest. She shows her reader how she seeks 'to be grounded in the land,' as she re-creates in a meditation of lyrical words her garden with its sculptural pieces, its trees and plants. Ivydel, in the Rocky Mountain foothills, is home, in this place, where 'nature is alive and breathing. It is sacred.'"
--Gayle Graham Yates
Professor Emerita, University of Minnesota