Raffaella Cortese is proud to present, in her spaces at Via Stradella 1 and 7, a solo show by the American artist Helen Mirra.

Mirra’s pensive installations are formally minimal and made with humble materials such as wool blankets, raw linen or hand-dyed cotton banding. For the artist walking is an integral component of all her works. Since 2010, she has been organizing these walks with great attention and precision, as sort of open-ended expeditions in different places in the world. The results take various forms – sometimes printmaking, sometimes writing, sometimes sound recordings. Artists such as Anni Albers, André Cadere, John Cage, Douglas Huebler and Ree Morton share her orbit. Mirra’s habitat is an edge where logic and geology meet, according to the weather.

On show in via Stradella 7, the Hourly Field Notes series from Western Japan, realised in autumn 2012.

Each of these works is made with brief texts written through the course of a single day’s walking, and each hour is represented by a one meter length of 16mm wide cotton – a slice of the landscape, a partial horizon, a short silent-silent film.

Mirra’s most recent Hourly Directional Field Notations realised in Arizona in 2012 will be exhibited in both the gallery spaces. These are made over the course of a walking day as a sort of paced printmaking. The activities are interdependent: the walking structures the printing, and the printing impels the walking. The prints were made with watercolor on raw linen and the size is that of a drop cloth or ground cloth, which when folded, fits in Mirra’s backpack. The prints are direct impressions of paradigmatic materials found en route: neither photographic nor descriptive, their geographic location indeterminate, they are nonetheless an insistent sort of fact. Both series of works develop from Mirra’s present practice: a cycle of exhibitions in which walking in one region results in a body of work for exhibition and subsequent walking in another. Next, Mirra will walk in the Dolomites.