Exhibit Gathers a World of Dirt
She collects dirt. So naturally her admirers are ready to dish a little about Irene Carlyle.
She started from the ground up, they point out. And she has never worried that what she does is going to soil her reputation as an audiologist. The woman is quite down to earth about it all, in fact.
“Irene finds details,” says Jaime Wemett, “in things we walk right past.”
Wemett, a 22-year-old Whittier College senior, was studying the 430 jars that were being arranged Tuesday in the dirtiest exhibit ever staged at the staid school’s library.
The jars contain sediment that has been gathered from around the world by Whittier College faculty and staff members to enrich Carlyle’s curious collection. Handfuls come from Mozart’s grave, from a former Nazi concentration camp, from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa, from beneath Flora Mae Goodale’s sister-in-law’s bathroom window.
“There’s something very fundamental about dirt,” explains Carlyle, 60, a professor of speech pathology and audiology. “It’s permanence in impermanence.”
If that sounds a little mystical, consider how her collection began.
Anthropology professor Emelie Olson was headed for Chimayo, N.M., a few years ago when she happened to ask if Carlyle wanted her to bring back some “sacred dirt” from the Indian land.
Why not? Carlyle replied.
“I started thinking that people here go to such interesting places it might fun to ask others to bring back some dirt, too,” she said.
To her surprise, her colleagues dug the idea.
History professor Dick Archer, a gardening hobbyist, returned from a trip with soil scooped from gardens at Virginia’s Monticello and the Jamestown settlement.
Biology professor Warren Hansen came back from Australia with ant hill tailings gathered from the Outback.
Mike McBride, a political science professor, came home from Germany with sediment from the Berlin Wall--after stopping off on the way back at South Bend, Ind., to claim a clump of dirt from the shadow of the Statue of Our Lady of Fatima at Notre Dame University.
Music professor Dave Muller visited a fossil-filled Alaskan tunnel and gathered fine glacial dust from between the bones of a 14,000-year-old mammal.
College registrar Jerry Adams retrieved dirt from an early Quaker meeting site in Easton, Md.
Campus security chief Ed Malone, who Carlyle said is part Cheyenne Indian, brought earth from the site of Custer’s Last Stand.
Former college nurse Flora Mae Goodale returned from a visit with relatives in West Virginia with the soil from her sister-in-law’s yard. “I even dug up some dirt outside the Pittsburgh airport with my rental car’s key for Irene,” laughed Goodale.
Other jars contain sand from four fathoms beneath Los Angeles Harbor, rocky material from the top of a Mammoth Mountain ski run, dirt from a White House planter, pumice from atop Hawaii’s Haleakala, sand from the base of Egypt’s Sphinx and earth from a grassy area next to Moscow’s Red Square.
The collection glistens with different textures and colors of clay taken from a wheelbarrow belonging to Mexican artist Josephina Aguilar, marble chips from Marble Falls, Texas, and the ash of burned cow dung from India’s Kapaleeswarar Temple.
Contributors have returned toting their samples in film canisters, sandwich bags, hotel envelopes and even sanitary napkin bags, according to Carlyle.
But only one person has reported problems in gathering soil.
Economics professor Steve Overturf told Carlyle his dirt “was confiscated” in London. So he contributed a “dirty story”: a British tabloid’s published account of two women caught up in a public brawl over a man.
Overturf’s contribution is included in the library show, which is on display through the end of May. Also included are snapshots and postcards that show where some soil samples were taken.
“I’d say this is one of our more different exhibits,” acknowledged Ann Topjon, a college librarian.
Carlyle said she will continue to catalog contributions as long as colleagues and students keep digging up dirt.
Globally speaking, she says, they’ve only scratched the surface.
