Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights is an ongoing series of castings made from doilies and rope. Combined and cast into iron, the once flexible fiber becomes frozen in its cast iron form. Delicate and thin, with the doilies appearing similar to leaves or flower heads, their forms evoke garden detritus or arteries delivering blood to an extremity. Dyed in shades of green and transfigured into iron, the works together become a dystopian garden. Combining women’s decorative craft with marine ropes and casting it into an industrial material creates a new representation of growth, foreign and familiar.
40 Burnt Books
Forty burnt books are presented on custom-made steel brackets jutting out from the wall at an angle similar to lecterns or rare book displays. They represent today’s undervaluing of education, the shift from analog to digital technologies, the fraught contextualization of our histories, and the destruction of knowledge. Book banning is on the rise while public school funding in the South suffers in divided districts still in recovery after years of pandemic-restricted teaching. The tattered and charred pages are a visual representation of years of violence that are invisible but nevertheless have real consequences to our communities and our children’s futures. 40 Burnt Books also reference the advent of the internet and the reduced reliance on books to transmit knowledge, for good or ill. Our communities believe in what is presented online through the algorithms of social media and often biased sources disseminated widely. How can we believe in a single truth when there are thousands of versions from which to choose? Burning books is equivalent to censorship and a fear of spreading knowledge. One only burns or bans a book if the content is so offensive or dangerous to those in power. These books were already destined for the landfill, but now act as physical representations of censorship, historical wrongs, and ephemeral violence made real.
Originating from a 2018 salem2salem residency in Salem, Germany and expanded for the 2021 solo exhibition HOME//WORK at the Lauren Rogers Smith Museum in Laurel, MS. Selected in 2022 for the group exhibitions Faculty Exhibition 7 at the Jule Collins Smith Museum, Auburn, AL and Art of the South at Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville, TN. On display at the ROB as part of the 2023 ArtFields competition and exhibition in Lake City, SC from April 19-29, 2023.
Poetry inspired by the piece by Auburn students.
Frühlingsglaube
Frühlingsglaube roughly translates to a belief or hope felt as a result of spring. The title is from a romantic Friedrich Uhland poem of the same name, describing the fleeting beauty of spring and the hope that springs from the changing of the seasons. The spring of 2021 was an opening up of human activity after long lockdowns and pandemic restrictions. The beauty of blossoming trees is ephemeral and is all the more beautiful for its fleeting nature. The long dark pandemic winter and the overarching sense of doom led to all the more precious awakening. The use of red and abstract petal or wing forms as installed in a former slaughterhouse visually connects to flayed skin, bloody edges, as well as organic floral edges as found on a crepe myrtle or a linden tree. Caught in suspended animation, Frühlingsglaube captures the moment of transformation from life to death.
Thoughts & Prayers
Twenty-three cast iron teddy bears lie prone, suspended above the earth speared through with steel rod and bolted in place with bright red hardware. Floating in an oval arrangement, the bears lay frozen in space dejectedly, abandoned by their previous owners. Their figures stand in for victims of gun violence, now the leading cause of death for children in the United States of America. Thoughts & prayers are expressed after mass shootings or horrible, violent gun deaths time after time instead of action. We have become numb to the violence and the risk inherent with public and private space.The teddy bears were chosen for their association with childhood, innocence, and the ability to provoke empathy. Teddy bears are often left at sites of violence as temporary memorial markers. Transformed into iron, they are heavy and fixed in place, permanent markers of the past victims who have become all too common in our daily landscape. On display at the top of Cary Hill Sculpture Park at Salem Art Works in Salem, NY.
Gallery Installation
20 (of a projected 40) Wreaths
20 (of a projected 40 Wreaths), range from 7"-16" circumferences, cast iron, 2015
There is a worldwide tradition of creating wreaths as decoration or in celebration of a festival or holiday. In American, this is normally unpaid women’s work that beautifies her domestic environment. My interest in the form began when visiting Latvia in response to their midsummer wreath-making, rooted in pagan traditions celebrating Ligo. Men weave wreaths of oak leaves while women create wreaths of wildflowers and assorted greenery. These wreaths employ texture as a way of visually representing the fossils our culture creates. Each wreath has an organic and an inorganic texture: bubble wrap and wheat, sequined fabric and acorn caps, smartphones and ferns, aluminum foil and concentric spiral shells. The first twenty small scale wreaths were cast at the 2015 Sculpture Trails Iron Workshop and the subsequent large scale public works The Eudora Welty Wreath (2016) and Trails Wreath (2018) were also cast at Sculpture Trails.
