"Touch" - Class September 6th


I went rock climbing at a gym in West Berkeley this weekend with some new friends. It's been a very long time since I've been climbing but my new friends were pretty expert and I was able to learn a great deal from them. The climbing walls in a gym, compared with climbing in the mountains, are not at all authentic. And yet, the feeling of working through the puzzle of a route to make it to the top of a vertical climb indoors was very real. In thinking about the word for this week, "touch," it struck me that these manmade climbing walls in the huge warehouse that is the climbing gym are very sculptural. And the physical activity of climbing these walls created a sense of closeness and familiarity and changed the way I perceived them. This drawing is a (quick) attempt to represent this.

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