Episode I: The Dance

Today it was the stench of lavender she smelled most clearly. It made her sneeze—tchee. She was full of it. Full. The scent of tangerine and lemon lingered too, and all the other soaps. She took things as they came, wet, cold, clean in her hands. She blew a long white sheet into the air with such force that the clothesline crackled before her. Back and forth it went, each movement undoing the knots she’d tied to the trees, maybe a year ago, maybe ten, but she didn’t notice. She folded the sheet over the thin dark line into a practiced rectangle, hovering perfectly above the grass like mist on a winter morning. The second was a long-sleeved shirt. The third, a pillowcase. The knot trembled at the end of the trees with each new weight. But she didn’t see such things. As she reached for the next piece, her body knew the line was misbehaving, something was off between the basket and her small dominion. But she didn’t dwell on it.

It was the wind.

Black clouds rolled above her like a curse, releasing the first full drops: drup drup on the roof, blump blump on the asphalt, pft pft on the grass. The whole act had begun to look less like a chore and more like a dance. How she moved between the sheets, making space, fitting the whole household on that lean line knotted between two trees, so long ago she didn’t care to remember. Then the clouds swallowed the blue whole and—blop—the woman looked at her boot. Her shoulders were soaked; the white sheets bowed under the weight, bending on the grass like men in prayer. The basket slipped from her hands. She froze. Her three siblings were now beside her, standing at the edge of the house, their small hearts worried something had gone wrong. It was as if that single drop on her boot had opened a portal to another time, when she was six, or nine, standing on the same grass, hand in hand with her siblings, watching their mother hang laundry in a storm. One piece after the next, on that lean line between trees, never halting, never hearing their cries, the mud on her soles erasing all that clean, a day’s work stepped on with the fallen sheets. Intent only on keeping up with a dance she couldn’t even see.

Anne Wehrley Björk grew up in Farmington, New Mexico, in the far northwestern corner of the state, where landforms stretch languidly across the vast San Juan Basin, encompassing the present-day Four Corners region. At the center of this arid depression, down a nearly dry river valley, lies Chaco Canyon, its monumental stone and adobe architecture marking what was once the epicenter of civilization in the American Southwest between 850 and 1250 C.E. This region lies within Diné Bikéyah, or Navajoland, and within the present-day boundaries of the Navajo Nation. It is the main site of the Chaco Culture, known to us through the remnants of its complex architectural plan and the imposing stone structures built into the sandstone walls of the canyon that remain remarkably intact. The ancient Chacoans left behind a vast constellation of petroglyphs that hint at their mastery of archeoastronomy, their sophisticated trade networks, and artefacts that raise as many questions as they answer. In this landscape, the ground is rust- and shell-colored, and the canyon walls of sandstone—which is soft to the touch—are etched in the stark, high-altitude light. It is from this terrain, both majestic and enigmatic, that Björk’s painterly sensibility emerges.

Anne Wehrley Björk spent time in this vast landscape as a child, camping at Chaco Canyon with her family. The wide-open spaces and remnants of an ancient civilization embedded themselves in her imagination and formed an early visual and emotional imprint that she has returned to throughout her practice. However, to say that she paints this place, or that she paints the landscape, is not quite accurate. Although she draws on recollection and refers to the canyon walls as the “bones” of her compositions, her subject is the emotional impact of a place as it transforms over time. Her paintings function as spaces of remembrance, spiritual resonance, and states of being. The spatial qualities created by swathes of parchment white are the spatial qualities within a canyon; they are the experience of the canyon. This interior landscape continues across her work as a rigorous process of trial and error.