JUNE WAYNE・Art + Science
The Terrestrial Works
Environment

“Lemmings are known for their recurrent mass migrations. The blind suicide of whole societies of the short-tailed furry rodents occurs at the end of such pilgrimages—often to the sea at night, where vast numbers drown by jumping off cliffs into fjords. Wayne suggests that lemmings, like people, when choosing a leader, “merely elect someone who doesn’t know the way.”

“This tapestry presents a primordial landscape, populated with human shapes sometimes difficult to recognize. Although a lemming is a herbivorous, nonhibernating rodent that burrows through the roughest of Arctic and sub-Arctic soils, in this tapestry the title is applied to the humanized lemmings and takes advantage of the popular misconception that these creatures commit mass suicide by throwing themselves over high cliffs in large numbers. One sees in this tapestry tremendous turmoil, rapid movement and apparent struggle, which easily describe a mass suicide, leaving the viewer haunted by Wayne’s devastating portrayal of chaos in black and white.”

“‘La Journée des Lemmings’ more than ten feet wide, is a sumptuously textured abstraction in intricately woven wool. Its fractured, black and white storm clouds visually coalesce into layers of geological strata, like an X-ray of underground sedimentary rock. Across a dark, compressed band in the lower right quadrant, tiny naked figures swarm. Humanity’s chaos evokes the social turmoil of the day – Vietnam horrors, the fallout of stalled Paris peace talks, the senseless bombing of Cambodia, the slaughter of students at Kent State and more.”