River teeth in Nyack

Yesterday Jenn and I took a train up the Hudson to visit our friends Gail Hovey and Pat Hickman. On the way we stopped at the Tovin Studio Gallery in Nyack, where Pat’s work is on display.

The first thing I noticed was a wheel of what looked at first glance like arrowheads. Pat explained that these were river teeth, a name adopted by David James Duncan for his book and journal, which offers this explanation of the name.

There is in every log a series of cross-grained, pitch-hardened masses where branches once joined the tree’s trunk. “Knots,” they’re called in a piece of lumber. But in the bed of a river, where the rest of the tree has been stripped and washed away, these knots take on a very different appearance, and so deserve a different name. “River teeth,” we called them as kids, because that’s what they look like. Like enormous fangs, ending in cross-grained root that once tapped all the way into the tree’s very heartwood.

Most of the show consists of works created from sausage casings—or in other words, the intestinal linings of animals. The material dries to a light papery sheet like parchment, which Pat wraps around objects (including some of the river teeth), colors with rust and other natural materials, assembles into ancient-looking books, and into which she embeds rusty nails and the lively-looking dried bodies of geckos. (Pat assured us that no geckos were harmed to create her art. They died of natural causes or in screen-door accidents and other mishaps.)

As another visitor commented, the overall effect of the show is beautiful and creepy—an assessment that Pat didn’t seem to mind.