Max Sorenson
Featured: May 28th, 2025
✳ If your artistic practice were a cycle, how would you describe its shape—linear, circular, spiral, or something else?
My practice is a river.
It pushes past me, a roiling mirror held in place by its own motion. It is a jumbled collection of arrivals from upstream—the expected alongside the unseen. It wavers ceaselessly, sometimes roaring and sometimes softly babbling. At its source are pools of interest and desire, attentions and intentions that feel like my own. It is fed as it flows by streams of words from friends and mentors. Rivers of history—personal, familial, cultural, and societal—swell its waters and release a story buried in the sediment below. With each meeting and each turn of its course, unexpected fears, coincidences, anxieties, and joys are stirred up from the depths. I can count on all of this to pass by, but I can’t know how long each guest might stay. Some I can hold but others are borne on eddies, rapids, and undercurrents that I can’t make sense of before they are away and downstream. I never know how much I can’t see. The river’s distant shore is a place I don’t think I’ve been.
My practice is a river.
But it isn’t a river I can find mapped and printed in sky-blue. I can’t find this river tangled in the legal jargon of a multistate river compact, or scientifically explained with words like overgraded, entrenched, or alluvial. It is a river that does not have just one name or even one language. I call it Wisconsin, down by Isaac’s, Grande, Prairie, Mississippi.
I can sit and watch as it flows past me, rising and falling with the rain. I can walk to its edge, wade in slowly, wobbling as my feet are set downstream of where I put them. I can feel the cold, then hold-my-breath, plug-my-nose, and jump in. Or, I can turn my back on the water and walk away until I cannot hear it rush. I can keep going and wander up a bluff, miles from the shore, and look back to remind myself that it is still there.
Sometimes this river surrounds me and sometimes I can only just make it out.
I breathe in and then out with each step I take up the pale yellow sandstone steps that lead me upslope. Virginia bluebells and scilla push blue-flowered green through the damp paleness of last year’s leaves. Honeysuckle and buckthorn have just begun to break bud, raising this fresh green to eye-level. A humid-valley heat rushes through my body as I continue to climb. I look up at the sun flooding through the empty oak branches. Every year, as the sun strengthens, a spring green pulls water from soil to sun, floor to crown. I look down as I crest these stony stairs. April rains have carved minuscule channels into the gravel of the trail, mirrors to the great river I have left far behind me in the valley below.
—
Maybe my practice isn’t a river at all.
Maybe it is the water that flows between the banks, maybe it is something else entirely.
It is with me even when my back is turned, and it isn’t always flowing downstream; it falls from the sky and it wells in my eyes. It is rooted in the climate of the life I continue to choose to make for myself in a wide world of uncertainty and change.
It is the substance that swirls and trickles, then rushes and roars through the channel carved by a life lived carefully, thoughtfully, and quietly.
It is the same water that runs through us all, a tributary that can’t be isolated.
