Fly down from us

performance with pulley system, apples, alphabet cards, word dice, audio recorders, paper, wax, found inks and liquids, fabric, rope, hardware
Performed at Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC, 2019

In Fly Down From Us, Thorn interacts through a three-story hole, performing gestures of communication and transformation that describe the alchemy of collaboration. The performance is centered around a negative space left in Elsewhere Museum by the project “Core Sample” by Jason Ferguson. The hole spans the three floors of Elsewhere and serves as a portal through which Thorn exchanges objects and communication via a pulley system. Mechanical systems and chance operations are entangled with make believe to describe the experience of shared authorship. Half-eaten and deseeded apples, colorful potions, and invisible ink messages accumulate over time. As the performance progresses, a chain of pages containing text from a short story Thorn co-authored grows downward toward the first floor.

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“If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”
- Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

In Thorn’s work, holes are a recurring symbol for desire as a magnetic force. One is drawn to peer into a hole, to lean over its empty space, but also to anchor oneself to resist falling in. Similarly, the energy of love can provoke opposing desires— to be pulled in and absorbed, or to retreat to a safe distance. Though this symbolic hole can never truly be filled, the act of putting themselves into it by sending signals across the void draws them closer. The hole is a point of connection and separation.