LARAMIE, USA

A Volcano Pilgrim in Exchange for Fire

While in residency at the Vermont Studio Center in July 2010, Serena Perrone (American, b. 1979) created A Volcano Pilgrim in Exchange for Fire, a series that would forge a connection across time and place. This was less than a year after she learned of poet and University of Wyoming professor Craig Arnold’s disappearance in Japan in April 2009. Upon hearing a report on NPR stating that the acclaimed poet had been researching volcanoes and had not returned after a day’s hike, Perrone became quickly engrossed in the story and invested in the ultimately unsuccessful search for Arnold. 

 

The works are comprised of several layered printmaking techniques, including intaglio, monotype, silkscreen, and letterpress. They are poetic in their communication of volcanic imagery paired with passages from Arnold’s blog Volcano Pilgrim, documenting his trip to Japan. Arnold’s texts, excerpted to reflect Perrone’s own feelings and emotional state at the time of creation, haunt the volcanic clouds. The prints become a visual testament to a missed connection.

 

The two artists – Arnold and Perrone – are intertwined by a fascination with volcanoes and the mythologies surrounding them. Arnold set off on his expedition to follow in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century Japanese master poet Matsuo Bashō, who famously wrote of Mt. Fuji. Perrone’s fascination with volcanoes was fostered throughout her childhood spent visiting her ancestral home, Sicily, the Italian island that is home to the notoriously active volcano: Mount Etna. She was further inspired by reading Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, illuminating another piece of her one-sided conversation with Arnold. Carson’s book is an epic poem, reimagining the myth of Geryon and the Tenth Labor of Herakles—a resonant parallel to Arnold’s own engagement with classical mythology. In Arnold’s final poetry book, Made Flesh, he published “Hymn to Persephone,” a reinterpretation of Greek myth.

 

Perrone’s work evokes a sensitivity to the volcano as a symbol for upheaval and transition. Each individual print features a different volcano that Arnold either may have or certainly did visit across Italy, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, or Japan. The images extend beyond the span of each page, creating a large panorama meant to read like a book. The cinematic unfolding of the volcanic voyage invites introspection about the passage of time, underscored by the date and time stamps to indicate the date of each blog post. The work transcends mere documentation to become a meditation on place as both physical reality and poetic metaphor. The geology that has been a backdrop of Perrone’s life, in turn, shaped her perceptions as an artist and has become a recurring character in her work. It is imbued with the weight of global mythologies and mysteries. As part of the larger exhibition, Sympoiesis: Co-Creating Sense of Place, Perrone’s work A Volcano Pilgrim in Exchange for Fire is a posthumous collaboration between the living artist, deceased poet Craig Arnold, and the metaphorical and physical volcano.