An Attempt at Exhausting a Place at Shotpouch Creek is a short investigation into the long time of the forest and mountain, where change happens so slowly and incrementally that it is virtually invisible to our senses. Biologist John Magnuson suggested that we inhabit an “invisible present” that limns the embodied limits of our perception. For novelist Georges Perec this was the “infraordinary” or the decidedly non-extraordinary. It is what happens over, under and between the monumental events and spaces that punctuate a life and a place. Over a weekend in October 1974, Perec sat in the Place Saint- Sulpice and wrote An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, an extended snapshot of the insignificant, everyday life of a small bit of the city.

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Following Magnuson and Perec, over one day in April 2013 I sat along the edge of Shotpouch Creek near Burnt Woods, Oregon, and used words to sketch the insignificant, everyday life of the creek, or at least the life of this one day when nothing grand happened at all.

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Produced while an artist-in-residency at Shotpouch Creek. My residency was sponsored by the Spring Creek for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word.