Where some imagine that there is only one Trisha Donnelly, I know there are at least four. One is surely a biological entity, and another a projected image, like the one who acts out the codeless semaphore of Canadian Rain (2002). A third, a literary invention of the first, sometimes appears in her place in the vicinity of the art world. A fourth is a malleable figure, co-authored by the third, and anyone who tells her story. (There may be more: one who can travel through time, another who can speak in the tongue of seals, and so on.) The following essay surveys some of Donnelly's recent practices in this light, including a lecture at the Frieze Art Fair in London in October 2004, an exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, summer 2004, and one of the works included in the 54th Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, winter 2004/05.

I. The green grass starts to grow

'Where is Adventure? What is Culture?' was the last of six panel discussions held on the occasion of the 2004 Frieze Art Fair.¹ Chaired by curator and artist Matthew Higgs, the panel included Christian Jankowski, David Robbins, Nancy Spector and Trisha Donnelly. These names already suggest that the event was not intended to be your average discussion: each respondent's answer to the title's pair of impossible questions was to be bent into mute and funny shapes. Jankowski improvised his replies on an electric guitar instead of talking; Spector discussed the accidental transformation of an artist's exhibition into a credit-card advertisement.

Trisha Donnelly answered 'Where is Adventure? What is Culture?' by recounting an episode from