Eden Climber
“Eden Climber” was a collaborative installation created by the artist Regan Golden and the writer Sarah Clark. The title of this piece, "Eden Climber," was about aspiring to protect what is beautiful and seeking to transcend the everyday through plants. Eden Climber is actually the name of a robust and resilient hybrid rose species, but it is also a reference to Sarah Clark's poem "Eden Climbs" which was inspired by Golden's original collage.
Clark's poem opens with the lines "It started with a rose - the center of broken things - Just one petal - bewitched - plucked from a pile of used ballots - x-ray films - cropped images transferred from books fired." Sarah Clark is a local writer and wrote this poem as a recent participant in a yearlong poetry apprenticeship at the Loft Literary Center. In the installation of this piece at the Outlook Gallery we have combined this text with Golden’s photographs of the rose petals. The rose petals are printed on a translucent film so that one can see through the image in places and the petals appear to float upwards behind the text. This piece is about rising up to protect whatever you cherish. A rose can be thought of as fragile, but in truth it is incredibly strong, much like the human spirit.
As daylight and the gallery light change, the colors printed on this translucent material were cast onto the walls and onto the print hanging behind. The bold swatches of color on the window film will lead the eye of the viewer on the street upwards to the top of the poem printed on the rose imagery. The composition of the whole artwork explores time and sequence, as well as fragmentation and cohesion through the combination of photography, plants, words and technology. This project celebrates the mission of the MCBA which is to nourish the human spirit through the poetic integration of text and image.