It was in the spring of 2020 that things became verbs. But that’s not yet quite right: It was in that season of that year that constellations of things – configurations of objects arranged in space – together, by some force of synergy, began collectively verbing.

For an artist whose business it is to make objects, you might think I’d have noticed this strange potential of things. But I had not. Before this happened, things had been nouns: inert, autonomous objects that behaved as such.

None of this is as odd as it sounds. At the time in question, we were, like everyone else, sheltering in place. While the little crown-shaped microbe worked its tyranny over the globe, my husband and I were hunkering down, dutifully stockpiling canned goods and hand sanitizer. And, as if for the first time, we were inhabiting our house – deeply inhabiting it. The house that housed the objects that started conspiring.

It began with the library. Suddenly the picture window acquired a frowning countenance. This was fair enough: Why had it been placed on the shady side of the house, forever condemned to cast its gloom over the place? But then the chairs and table, for their part, began grumbling about the throw rug, protesting the sting of its briary texture. From there it became a free-for-all: the shelves claiming suffocation against the ill-proportioned walls, the rug bemoaning the floor tiles their overactive pattern. One or two of these outbursts would have gone unnoticed, but when all the emoting became a chorus, denial was no longer tenable. Fleeing, I dragged a desk into the bedroom. And there it happened all over again. After just three months of confinement our entire place of refuge was a confederacy of grievances.

Of course, none of this went without resistance on my part. As aware as anyone of what philosophers call the pathetic fallacy, my reason protested. Surely all these feelings were mine alone – my feelings being projected onto inanimate matter, only now surfacing under the strain of lockdown. But again and again I couldn’t escape it: this all-encompassing atmosphere of negative affect seemed to be issuing from the house itself. 

*

Such was the situation when, in those endless days of quarantine, I received a gift that would prove transformative. Sent by a friend who thought it would resonate, it was a little book by a Finnish architect called The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture?, I thought. I knew nothing about architecture, other than that I liked some buildings and disliked others. Why a book on architecture – on architectural theory, no less?

My friend, it turned out, could not have been more right. As a passionate advocate for the intelligence of the senses, I was thrilled to discover in this unknown author a sympathetic voice. A polymath with a deeply philosophical mind, Juhani Pallasmaa is one of the leading figures in contemporary Nordic architecture. Celebrated for both his design work and his writing, he is at the center of a growing movement to rehumanize his field. Responding, as he puts it, to the inhumanity of our built environment, Pallasmaa argues that alienating interactions between our buildings and our bodies cause us distress and impoverish our lives. Conversely, he asserts, spaces designed to nourish our senses can fulfill species-level needs we often don’t know we have. While I had always thought about our sensual interactions with art, somehow it had escaped me to consider the larger picture – the environments through which we move every day but rarely attend to focally. While tantalized by his total vision, it was through Pallasmaa’s insights into our tacit relationship with things – our ongoing, unconscious conversation with the things around us – that the seed of a transformation lodged itself in my brain.

To architects, I discovered, what was happening in my house was nothing out of the ordinary. What they know better than anyone is that things in our proximity act on us. Speaking the silent language of qualities and rhythms, things resonate and reverberate with the thingly in us – the fleshly matter of our bodies that is inseparable from our minds.  Different arrangements of different materials generate distinct forces, each registering in us as subtle sensations. Running our eyes over a stucco wall, our bodies feel that gravelly texture. Entering a yellow room, our bodies fill with warmth. When gravel and warmth are experienced together, summoning memories, associations, emotions, and imaginings, and when these are in turn charged by further sensations, the alchemy of things erupts into atmosphere. Or, better yet, things begin to atmosphere.

More books followed, many by Pallasmaa but also by other architects. The significance of it all began to coalesce: While I knew a great deal about making things, there was a truth about looking at them that I’d failed to notice – namely, there is no looking at without also being in. Wherever and whenever we are looking, we are situated in a thingly space, a singular place-time field of things-in-relation. Activated by this field of relations, itself interacting with larger and smaller fields, our bodies participate in our experience of the thing seen. Peripheral vision, unconscious perception, smells and sounds all play a role in our apprehension of the visual. I could only conclude that I who was so expert at all things visual was missing something essential about visuality itself.

Energized, I began to seek out resonant spaces. The little copse of dogwoods presiding over our yard, their bark structure echoed in the pattern of the terrace stones, both resounding with the aroma of the pines to the west – all bodied forth a mood that seemed to revitalize my cells. Determined to neutralize the clamor in my house, I made what few rearrangements I could short of total overhaul, and in time the confederacy fell silent. And finally, however reluctantly, reason and felt experience settled on a truce: Whether the affects of objects originate in them or us, the lived world, the world before thought, is one undivided whole. Mood is the song of the pre-thought world.

*

Before the thingly uprising that stirred my world into verbing, my studio was a space of bounded, discrete things. And by things here I mean bounded rectangles. While sculptors and architects work in real space – the three-dimensional space of matter-in-the-round – we painters make our home in the more abstract one of the picture rectangle. Implicit in this rectangle, whether we are conscious of it or not, is that hallowed convention of pictorial space: the space of magic and illusion where the second dimension becomes the third. Shapes come to the fore or recede into the distance; brushstrokes miracle-forth volumetric form. But the magic of the picture rectangle rises to another register still when the forms within its space are what we call abstract. Here, the world that beckons is emphatically other; without imagery grounded in visible realities, it is a fictive world, a world that’s purer, more intensely meaningful, and somehow more elevated than the real one. For so many years, each painting of mine, each drawing, all of the abstract lineage, was a portal offering entry into an elsewhere and otherwise. The real world could be a procession of horrors, but the sacred rectangles to elsewhere would remain inviolate. I was, like so many others before me, essentially in the transportation business.

All of this began to change one day in my time of hunkering and reading. Immersed in a book by an American architect,[i] I turned a page and was met with a strange little image. A geometric oddity that seemed to flicker and glow, the thing in the picture looked like an abstract painting. Resolving into focus, though, it revealed itself to be a church, its interior all white but for a few small elements. Designed in 1984 by Juha Leiviska, the caption informed me, the Myyrmäki Church sits just outside Helsinki – a city in a country renowned for its modern architecture. More images followed, each more spellbinding than the last. Not towering like a cathedral and devoid of the latter’s darkness, the church conjured nothing so much as the inside of a pipe organ – a fantastical thing that emitted light instead of sound. Without knowing quite why, I became obsessed. Photographs began to collect on my studio walls – shots of interior and exterior, seen from every angle. And in the five years between then and my visit to the place, my rectangles would begin a transfiguration.

2.

Like so many pivotal moments, the opportunity arose from a convergence of improbables. It was just after the new year in 2025, and, while on a rare, fully funded sabbatical from teaching, I was offered a month-long artist residency in rural Finland. I paused only for an instant; as someone who runs cold by constitution, the thought of February in Finland left me paralyzed with dread. But with Myyrmäki calling, I could only submit. The trip would begin with a week in Helsinki.

The day I arrived, the city looked particularly bleak. The country had been clamped in a freeze that had even the locals moaning. But in what would become a recurring theme, the Finnish people seemed to have anticipated exactly what I needed. Weary from the travel, I stumbled into the airport bathroom to find the sound of birdsong. Discreetly placed across the softly lit interior, a line of little speakers chirped and tweeted, their melodies fluttering around the wood-paneled room. After eight hours of roaring metal and mounting anxiety over the cold, suddenly there I was in a little tree-lined garden. When I stepped outside into the night, the arctic air felt less oppressive than I’d feared.

With a few days to get acclimated before my visit to the church, I began to familiarize myself with Finnish culture. The Finns are known as the happiest people on earth, and while this annoys them (they’re a people congenitally averse to overstatement), the claim became more valid the more I observed. A chapel in the city center dedicated to silence, its elegant, curved structure made of three kinds of wood; a gently rolling rooftop above an underground museum, its undulating surface a space for children to play; illuminated staircase railings with soft leather coverings; windows on every wall to draw light and warmth in – these were people who thought deeply about human wellbeing. Sparing no expense, it seemed, every detail of the built environment was carefully crafted, not so much to give pleasure as to support thriving. It was as if they had studied the neurophysiology of the human animal and created a culture expressly to serve it. Even things that ordinarily escape attention seemed designed to feed the senses and optimize living (to wit: the plywood walls surrounding a construction site adorned not with graffiti but with delicately etched botanical forms). If, as Pallasmaa says, the door handle is the handshake of a building, the whole city seemed a hand bidding welcome to the human organism.

*

Finally, the day arrived. Buried in my faux-fur hat and goose down parka, I set out for the train station to meet my companion, John. A Boston architect and a friend of a friend, John would be accompanying me on my pilgrimage. Approaching our track, we grew flustered when the ticket kiosk wouldn’t accept our credit cards. But then John, a longtime visitor to the country, remembered that no one checks train tickets in Finland; they go by what we Americans call the honor system. Ticketless (but not without guilt), we boarded our train to Vantaa, the town to the north where Myyrmäki lay waiting.

For those arriving by train, the church is essentially camouflaged from view. With its rear facade abutting the tracks, it presents as a series of nondescript walls, more factory-like than godly, and certainly not light-emitting. Failing to see it the first time, we missed our stop and had to double back. But traversing the underpass and making our way toward the front, ordinary transformed into something else altogether. Viewed from the side, the structure became a succession of slices, a phalanx of giant playing cards set upright on their edges. Reaching the front, the phalanx resolved into a building, all sideways stretch but for a cross-bearing vertical. On all sides, patches of birch trees shot up into the sky, bright white needles illuminating the wintry air.

Neither did the entrance announce itself with volume. Unlike the large cathedrals of Europe, Myyrmäki does not elicit grandeur of any kind. Low-lying and humble, the whole outside signals an earthliness surprising for a church. More earth awaits inside, where, after at last finding the door, we entered a small space lit by a row of vertical windows. Subtle odors hung in the air: mostly wood but also brick and stone. Looking around, I felt nothing of the enchantment I’d gotten from the pictures; all I saw was a long, low-ceilinged corridor leading back in the direction we’d just come from on the outside. John let me take the lead. There was no one in sight, no signs guiding visitors toward the main space. I proceeded tentatively. After coming all this way, the last thing I wanted was to feel underwhelmed.

Drawn by a luminance midway down the corridor, I began to feel something animating my pace – not enchantment, but more like a subtle kind of electrochemical excitation. Things were conspiring – I could feel it in my body – and not like the things that had cast a pall over my house. These things, these humble materials surrounding me on all sides, were humming and vibrating to the tune of something extraordinary.

And then there I was, right in the luminance. Opening up on my right was the main space of the church, suddenly more vertical than seemed possible and all aglow with kaleidoscopic white light. Layers of planes formed syncopated arrays – wall slats, ceiling panels, walls that were panels, all of them animated by configurations of light and shadow. Columns of light slanted in from above, overlapping and interpenetrating the solid geometry beneath. Some walls glowed, illuminated by slivers of window tucked into hidden recesses. More light, lamp-cast, punctuated the space in the form of hanging discs, all hovering above in an undulating wave. Diffuse light, whisper-like, seeped through veils of suspended cloth, each pulsing with a pattern of subtly printed horizontals. It was an abstract painting extruded into real space, all rhythm, pulsation, hum, reverberation. The whole place atmosphered a kind of omnisensory music. While light crescendoed across the white surfaces, the dynamism of the space crescendoed through me, everything – animate and otherwise – sharing in the to-and-fro of the same frequencies.

We walked into the music. Transfixed, I knew I had to be alone, and the two of us agreed to explore on our own. I set myself up in one of the pews near the altar. Unlike any cathedral I’ve ever visited, where the altar is only reached after a long walk down the nave, Myyrmäki puts you there from the start; with its sidewise orientation, the front and back of the church form the width rather than the length. The whole design seemed a counterstatement to the idea of a distant God. Here there was no smoke and incense, no oppressively dim lighting to incite fear and submission. Instead, the building takes you into its fold, wrapping you right away in its light and warmth. Fully immersed, I felt as if I were inside one throbbing sensorium. While I had come prepared with an arsenal of cameras, after a short time I put my equipment away. Arrangements of form inside flat rectangles seemed powerless to capture the mood of the place.

What was it, this mood that so gripped me in its spell? It wasn’t exultation; the space was too modest, too earthly for that. But even as a secular person, I felt sure it was something that should be called sacred. While I knew little about the Lutheranism of the church’s ministry, the building seemed oriented away from the transcendent. With its profusion of windows unaltered by color, all placed precisely to bring the earth-world in, I couldn’t escape the feeling that this was a church of immanence. This mood, this light-poem, so moving and palpable, was singing of the sacred here on earth. Here in the realm of lively, collaborating, affective things.

We stayed until the church was set to close. Retracing our steps down the entrance corridor, I took one last futile photograph before stepping into the chill. And here, to my surprise, the music continued, albeit in a slightly different key. As we walked back toward the train tracks, the birch trees to our left beat their rhythm in the sky while the ice underfoot played a crackly percussion. Passing the church to our right, its pale yellow brick emanating warmth, the smooth touch of the railing hummed our way down the path. Even a nearby chimney chimed in, bellowing its sooty perfume into the air. Everything seemed to atmosphere profound affirmation.  My senses alive with hawklike intensity, I was sure I had never been so present to the world.

3.

Newly back in the States in early April, I felt anxious, ungrounded. I missed the sensual generosity of Finnish culture, the way the grain pattern of the different woods breathed life into every room. I missed the windows, all the light. But most of all I missed how every artifact of human making embodied the knowledge that the things around us matter – indeed, that the things around us enter us, transform us. Placed in arrangements resonant with our human needs – physiological, psychological, cognitive, and spiritual – things can turn us from the anxiousness of minds lost in thought to the groundedness of bodies at home in the world – and, of course, vice versa.

I sought refuge in my rectangles. In the years following my discovery of the photograph of the church, my work had become an ode to light. Over the surface of each drawing, each one human-scale and hung unframed, illuminated bands and glowing forms charged the picture rectangle with pulsing energy. All inspired by images of Myyrmäki, the drawings had come to seek, by way of simulated light and form, something of the mood the church achieved with the real things. Each was a light-world you could enter at will. And now, re-immersed in a culture as anti-aesthetic as it is anti-intellectual, I wanted to enter them every chance I could get.

But something was different. I noticed it on my first return to the studio. It wasn’t that I couldn’t be swept into the fictive spaces; the drawings felt just as compelling as they had before. It was that they were no longer fictive spaces to me. Gazing at the graphite forms hovering across a group of drawings, I found my eyes travelling between them and the surrounding space. The walls supporting the masses of paper, their shapes and proportions engaging the pictorial forms, the floorboards beneath pulsing a soft beat with their planks, the little windows on the far wall shimmering green in my periphery, even the sawdust and its odor wafting in from the other room: all these things were conspiring with my drawings now, all emanating a mood of…

A mood of… what was it? It was something quiet and still, but alive, breathing. Mysterious but not fearsome, it was an upswelling of meaning. It made everything in my studio seem to shine, not with light but with a distinct kind of presence. It was a grounding presence, an elemental presence — an elemental presencing. It was a reminding, a remembering, a calling-back-into.The lightforms in the drawings, hovering inside the rectangles as they always had, no longer beckoned me into them but seemed to radiate outward – outward into my space and the space of the other things. The rectangles themselves were bodies now – bodies among other bodies, all participating in the collective song. There was no elsewhere anymore, and no urge to go there – only a where that was emphatically here: a ubiquitous, all-enveloping, earthly here-and-now. The rectangles hadn’t so much turned as opened, now two-way channels instead of one. Pictorial space, now a here-ing rather than a there-ing, had become continuous the world right here. For the first time in my art-making life, it no longer felt right to use the word abstraction for my work. No, my drawings had become more like retractions – things that, conspiring with other things in just the right arrangements, exchanging forces with just the right materials, pulled me not away from, but back into, the vibrating, resonating, mystery of the real.

As I walked back down to the house, the afternoon light was electrifying the leaves, setting them aglow in a carpet of chartreuse. When I got into the house, I opened all the windows to let the outside in and began the long process of remaking our dwelling. Having come fully home to the real, there was, after all, nowhere else to go.

[i] This is Sarah Robinson’s Architecture is a Verb, a book to which I’m  indebted as much as Pallasmaa’s.

THE CHURCH

(all photo credits Taney Roniger)

THE DRAWINGS

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https://www.concatenations.org/

All images copyright and courtesy of Taney Roniger

Art, Creativity, Culture, Environment