Darwinian Dream
Residency at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, August 2011.
The overarching theme of my work continues to be place – making a connection with a site, being present in the moment combined with a reverence for the past.
I am interested in an archaeological sense of a site – acting as a time capsule, a vessel holding the contents of the evidence of the past. In some ways a site can become an extension of the body – as a marker for freedom of movement and to be a part of something outside of and larger than self.
Darwinian Dream was another work created during the summer residency. In this work I limited myself to using only materials I found on site. I was looking through the center’s small library and came across an essay by Ruth Moore called “The record in the rocks.” There was a passage I found intriguing: The fossils buried in the rocks were in one sense time clocks. They spoke of the order of the past. As long as there was no disturbance, the oldest strata lay at the bottom of any series. The younger sediments and the younger fossils had been deposited on top of the older. If the strata were in their natural order, the order was clearly visible as that of a stack of books.
I created created a book-shaped pillow - the clay itself was site specific, excavated from a bed made by movements of the Laurentide Ice Sheet 20,000 years ago. I rested my head on the soft, unfired clay, which collapsed under the weight. The essay passage was written in graphite on muslin which covered my body.
The overarching theme of my work continues to be place – making a connection with a site, being present in the moment combined with a reverence for the past.
I am interested in an archaeological sense of a site – acting as a time capsule, a vessel holding the contents of the evidence of the past. In some ways a site can become an extension of the body – as a marker for freedom of movement and to be a part of something outside of and larger than self.
Darwinian Dream was another work created during the summer residency. In this work I limited myself to using only materials I found on site. I was looking through the center’s small library and came across an essay by Ruth Moore called “The record in the rocks.” There was a passage I found intriguing: The fossils buried in the rocks were in one sense time clocks. They spoke of the order of the past. As long as there was no disturbance, the oldest strata lay at the bottom of any series. The younger sediments and the younger fossils had been deposited on top of the older. If the strata were in their natural order, the order was clearly visible as that of a stack of books.
I created created a book-shaped pillow - the clay itself was site specific, excavated from a bed made by movements of the Laurentide Ice Sheet 20,000 years ago. I rested my head on the soft, unfired clay, which collapsed under the weight. The essay passage was written in graphite on muslin which covered my body.
