SHAUN O’DELL was born in 1968 in Beeville, Texas. He is a graduate of Stanford University’s MFA Program and has exhibited both nationally and internationally appearing recently at Inman Gallery, Houston; Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; The A Foundation, Liverpool; Berkley Art Museum, Berkley; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco and San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the de Young Museum.
The magician scratched an image of the waterfall into a photograph he had taken of the large wooden doors that obscured his sculpture.
One spring they visited his mother who lived halfway up a volcano. They drove the summit road just after the snow was cleared. The melting water burst from every crevice. There was a rushing bubbling and trickling sound all around.
Later, he asked if she would think about Long Island with him. They began researching and discovered an ancient and monumental waterfall.
They had also been thinking about magic. Although he really knew nothing about magic he did have a feeling for it. A feeling that he had known quite a lot about it in the past but, after being knocked on the head by some powdery yellow stones had forgotten all of it.
She told him to think about the waterfall. She reminded him to focus on what was behind the waterfall.
The origin of water on Earth is not completely understood. It is likely that water was present during the formation of the planet and also created from internal processes and rain producing volcanic eruptions over time. It is also possible that comets and meteoroids brought water to Earth.
They sat together and talked about Long Island Sound – the sound of Long Island. How did it get it there?
¹It took half a billion years for the sequence to unfold. There were three mountain building events, oceans were successively heated, and bedrock terranes accreted, metamorphosed and crumpled. The bedrock units have a north-south grain. The weaker components yielded to stream erosion as the Appalachian Mountains were worn down. A south-flowing bedrock drainage system evolved. Then two glaciers flowed over Connecticut and enhanced the pre-glacial drainage system. The north-south grain of the land was preserved as the last glacier retreated.
This drainage system carried sediments of quartz, garnet, marble, schist, magnetite and feldspar from the eroding mountains to the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Coastal Plain and continental shelf were born.
²It took 1,500 years for the Wisconsinan glacier to melt back from its furthest position along the north shore of Long Island. As the ice receded, melt water formed glacial Lake Connecticut, which was dammed by the Orient Point-Fishers Island moraine. A similar lake, dammed by the terminal moraine, existed in Block Island Sound.
The lakes remained fresh and the continental shelf to the south remained exposed because glacial melt water had not yet increased ocean depth to its current level. At the eastern end of glacial Lake Connecticut a massive waterfall developed at a low spot on the ice dam created by the Orient Point-Fishers Island moraine, now known as the Race. The waterfall was nearly a mile wide and sixty feet high.
She said, “My astral body merged with the waterfall and I became a thundering spectral spume. From above I watched Pleistocene melt waters erupt and spill back upon the earth in dark roiling torrents. I was the transformation of frozen barren plain to fecund oozing bog.
I captured energy from the waterfall and returned with it to the matrix of present reality. All creative potential in the Holocene era emerged from these waters.
They introduced my body to the body of nature. We were the holy voice of heat when the land inhaled. We caressed the transitional miracle in its original form. I re-established contact between self, the material world and the body of time. The effort defies being absorbed, consumed, and nullified by digital consciousness and its decimation of our bonds to each other and the natural world.”
³The spillway for the lake that occupied the Block Island Sound basin crossed a low spot in the terminal moraine just east of Montauk Point. Water issuing from this lake system flowed southward to the sea through Block Channel. As the spillways were eroded, lake levels dropped.
By around 15,500 years ago, worldwide melting of the Wisconsinan ice sheet was contributing to a rise in sea levels. Locally, the ice front stood near the Massachusetts border, and the shore of the rising sea was still well south of the terminal moraine. Erosion of the spillway across the terminal moraine had allowed the lake in Block Island Sound basin to steadily lower, and eventually drain completely.
This sequence of events lead to a similar fate for glacial Lake Connecticut, as the waterfall at the Race slowly yielded to erosion. An east-flowing stream system developed on the exposed bed of glacial Lake Connecticut. This drainage turned to the south as it passed through the Orient Point-Fishers Island moraine, and headed for the sea across the drained lakebed in Block Island Sound basin.
The system of stream channels that developed as glacial Lake Connecticut drained away, and as sea levels increased, became the avenue for salt water to enter the Long Island Sound basin around 15,000 years ago. The rising sea began its intrusion through the Block Island Sound basin and entered the Long Island Sound basin through the waterfall notch at the Race. It then spread westward along the channel system. By about 9,000 years ago seawater had completely replaced the fresh water glacial lakes and Long Island Sound was beginning to attain its present configuration.
4 Fresh be will thus enters and what wax
The of pores fine, the though vessel waxen, the into way its find gradually
Then will water the orifice, its vessel though waxen, the into overflow, not shall water, the that water, salt with filled vessel another in it
Place so and wax of vessel concave
Thin a make freshBe to found, be will
Distillate the and alembic
An in distilled gently be water salt
Let fresh be to found, be will this of
Out wrung water the steam
The in suspended napkin clean a and pot
A in boiled be water
Salt let fresh become will
It and sand through filtered repeatedly be seawater
Let four ways, in seawater, from prepared, be may water fresh
-The British Journal Of Homeopathy, 1775
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¹There is a Mountain situated in the midst of the earth or center of the world, which is both small and great. It is soft, also above measure hard and stony. It is far off and near at hand, but by the providence of God invisible. In it are hidden the most ample treasures, which the world is not able to value. – Thomas Vaughan, Allegory Of The Mountain
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²The waterfall that splits the cliffs’ broad edge,
I gaze at with a growing pleasure, when
A thousand torrents plunge from ledge to ledge,And still a thousand more pour down that stair,
Spraying the bright foam skywards from their beds.
And in lone splendour, through the tumult there,
The rainbow’s arch of colour, bending brightly,
Is clearly marked, and then dissolved in air,
Around it the cool showers, falling lightly.
There the efforts of mankind they mirror.
Reflect on it, you’ll understand precisely:We live our life amongst refracted colour. -Goethe
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³A certain thing is found in this world,
Which is also everywhere, and in every place,
It is not earth, nor fire, nor air, nor water,
However it wants neither of these things,
Nay, it can become fire, air, water, and earth;
For it contains all nature, in itself purely, and sincerely,
It becomes white and red, is hot and cold,
It is moist and dry, and is diversifiable every way,
The band of sages only have known it,
And they call it their salt. -Sendivogius, 1656
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4 Rrose Sélavy connaît bien le marchand du sel. -Robert Desnos
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