Susan Ossman
Gather Wood, Gather Words was first inspired by a trip to Northern Morocco in 1991.
I was awed by the relentless work of women gathering wood for their cook stoves. As they trekked across the vast green hills, their red and white mendil (skirts) seemed to paint the landscape. Were their ever-longer treks in search of wood due to climate change, or did their labor contribute to deforestation? When I returned home to Casablanca, the image of the women returned: the action of their work seemed stitch together the land they traversed. Where were the men while they gathered? I wondered as I sketched, paint and stitched. Since that time, red threads and gestures of gathering wood have inspired artworks in which I reflect on how human relationships with the natural world and with each other are entangled.
In 2024 I developed a site-specific exhibition on this theme at the Tangiers American Legation Museum. Ayoub Lahlou and the momkin collective joined me to develop oa performance that enlivened the entire museum with the themes of the Exhibition.
Planet First
In 2022, I began new fieldwork in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia in collaboration with William R. Duell and James D. Faubion. Exploring logging and declining paper mills in isolated communities in the American South led me to enter natural and social environments that were entirely new to me. It led me to paint in tandem with James Faubion's poetry and work as a dramaturge for the play by WR Duell wrote based on our fieldwork. Wordsmyth Theater Company in Houston presented a staged reading in April 2024. A full production is in the works with New Views Theater for 2026.
A Rhizomatic Network
In 2023 Ram Natarajan ,Kim Robertson, and Andreas Valentin joined me to develop new research for 'Gather Wood, Gather Words" in India, the Amazon and the UAE. We prsented a first view of the work that resulted from that fieldwork in a collaborative exhibition at the Rizq Art Initiative in Abu Dhabi in April 2025. Prefacing concepts or topics with an attention to movement, we sought in that exhibition to bridge divides of manual and intellectual labor, nature and culture.