How right it seems, somehow, that the gods are responding to senators; ancient Greece — birthplace both of democracy and the storied panoply at Mount Olympus — must have witnessed a similar engagement.

…Hillman situates her work in temporal and geographical specifics, with all of their attendant debris. She neither shies from, nor encrypts in ageless generalities, the depredations and delectations of the contemporary era.

Whether it be the Eighties, Berkeley, Congress, an aqueduct, or even a phone booth, Hillman situates her work in temporal and geographical specifics, with all of their attendant debris. She neither shies from, nor encrypts in ageless generalities, the depredations and delectations of the contemporary era. The result is not a topicality relevant only for its day, or week, until it is replaced by the next dispatch. Protecting Hillman’s work from obsolescence is not simply the pithy old trope of the universe through the particular, but rather the fact that the universe is particular, in the most literal sense of the word.

A central focus of Hillman’s activism is protesting war. The rhetoric of war justifies itself by championing measured destruction so as to build, and rebuild. Matter is neither created nor destroyed; everything that was is still with us. Fitting, then, that Hillman finds such equivalency in the seemingly disparate: the breast of a dead sparrow and “an ounce of tea”; dollars like discarded gauze that “have done violence” and now “lain down to absorb the blood.” Nothing — object or action — is disconnected from its destination, its outcome: a woman on a flight crosses the International Dateline,

Of course, one may reason, a child knows about the rotation of the earth. But our perception of flying makes it hard for us to unite origin and arrival in a continuum, to remember that our loved ones are still part of the same world as we. Hillman’s speaker intones, like a mantra:

Hillman also reminds us that we are continuous with geography, weather, and other species. Her images of the inorganic — chairs, an insignia, a mask — co-sign the reality as much as images of the “natural” — flowers, water birds, a mushroom. Without aggression, she dismantles our ideas of ourselves as being apart from nature. Her message is not that we must not cut ourselves off from our habitat and fellow animals, and our shared past, but that we cannot: we are, literally, of a piece.