Measuring a Mountain Range of Grass
ink and pencil on Arches watercolor paper
42 x 30 cm
2020
One morning in the spring, I chose an arbitrary 10-cm strip of lawn and measured a straight line across it, accounting for the vertical distances of each blade of grass that a bug would have to crawl over. As soon as I measured the lawn – in fact, as I measured it – this landscape shifted: The grass plants grew imperceptibly, the breeze bent the blades. Later that afternoon, the landlord mowed the lawn.
The measurement captured a particular and unrepeatable moment in time: In that moment on that morning, the path of lawn, at first understood as 10 cm as the crow flies, was 12.27 meters long as the bug crawls.
