Notebook of Stone

From the Tibetan Plateau and Berlin

Vivian Darroch-Lozowski

6 X 9 inches, 72 pages

CONTINUING A DIALOGUE between herself and landscape / culture / language, Vivian Darroch-Lozowski records her extended stay in the Western Himalaya mountains and her journey to the German city of Berlin in Notebook of Stone. In Notebook, images of personal contact or connectedness with others are evoked bodily and elementally. There are Vivian Darroch-Lozowski's dialogues with others; and there are her internal dialogues which remember experiences of distanciation, or which articulate interior isolation. In recording her travel she always and acutely is aware of her material body, a body which is pre-verbal and sensual. Thus, the book conveys a penetrating sense of being human as homeothermal. This and her encounter with stone, the seed-image of the book, yield a writing which is intonation, mythos, and texture. Writing out of a love of language, she shows how language tries to mean what cannot be meant by such a sign.

Vivian Darroch-Lozowski

Author

Working with words and with images, Vivian Darroch-Lozowski has committed more than twenty years attempting to understand the ethical and aesthetic folds of the body's senses, language, and sight as they affect each other. Working across different genres and media — literary, creative non-fiction, libretti, film, photographs, drawings, scholarship — she has established a body of works that demonstrates a changing and existentially necessary discourse, which preserves a dialogue between body and image. Crucial in her earlier works is her emphasis on body's response to place — India, the Tibetan Plateau, the High Arctic, Antarctica, France and Italy, the People's Republic of China. Vivian now holds the status of Professor Emerita with the University of Toronto. She has been an Invited Artist-in-Residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and currently is sustaining her commitment to thought through drawing and painting.