Sue Patterson

The infinite lawn 

Set of nine cast polyeurethane street grates, with inlaid photographs and text (my own). 1996

Walking the line between lost and found, as the shaper and the shaped.  More than half way from

beginning to end. 

Nothing’s like the destination.  Conversations shift to that imaginary present with even-handed shades of grey.

While not very flashy, this parable of the meadows with fuzzy leaves and neat corners sounds vaguely familiar.  Bouncing along the bottom, there’s no real substitute for measuring devices. 

The littlest acres are wrought at the fingertips.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings (and trimmed with red ribbons), compromise stumbles, its name synonymous with educated guesses and shreds of evidence. 

Negotiating punctuates the perfect fit every day of the year, in and out.

The bottom line is tin cans and a string, nothing, and everything, wrestling, gracefully.  There are things we see again and again.  Double vision is where the pictures are secondary and all in a day’s work.

Spreading a loose, wide mesh of fine tuning, vividly rendered with few frills or custom labels, in an appropriate thickness, leaving nothing behind but the notion of easy solutions.

Drawing a line with the familiar name paradise, somebody mentioned a spectacular view. 

Amid images of perfect pitch, today he discovered something more than windmills – in miniature divisions.

In a tight, neglected corner, attention to detail is conditional with back-to-back weeds and crepe myrtle shrubs.  Getting the hang of how to grow vegetables is guaranteed, even in soil that gets partial sun.

Navigating the serene ways of waterfalls as detailed as the zigzagging of fireflies, present imperfect, slow motion terrain of common machines, telling us more than we ever wanted to know, without paper.

Broth is the crux of all cooking – the foundation of soups and sauces.  Necessary little vowels, good for what ails you.  Simmering below the surface among each sound of speech, unequal to narration but not retroactive.

It started at the nose with symmetry and proportion in abundance with the world on a brawny string, the predictable and the haphazard.

Objects are slippery anywhere your mind wanders over surface texture and wallows there with chalk and a can of glazing compound.

Because of proof that sound and light don’t stick to squares, green fields shimmer wide open,  sieve-like, from big to small, in our daily landscaping.  The simplest sites punctuated by crosswords.

Mix and match borders function as closures that work not simply but just because stones, mortar, and a version of unraveling do, too.  For the regularly scheduled curiosity, the settings change with little planning.