Public Project
Found
—Mark Strand
Nothing will tell you where you are, and yet we persist endlessly in the human effort to understand and connect. What is this place, who am I, and what is my relationship here? What can I offer, and what can be learned? What are the particular tastes, scents and sights of a lived experience of a given place, and how do they shift over time? When routine overtakes the senses, how can connection be stirred?
Each moment is a place you’ve never been. I often turn to the natural world where what is offered up to the senses each moment is ever new, where transience is unmistakable. Shifting light, flowing water and gentle wind remind the body that a constant state of change moves outside of us as within. We work against the temporal, in effort to remember and be remembered, through the stories we tell, the art we make. And so I find myself at the intersection of my own desires—to remember and forget, to hold and let go—upon the surface of the land that marks the juncture of life passed with that which is constantly being renewed, a field of decay punctuated near and far by new growth. It is here that I begin again.
Process Statement
I have been collecting natural objects for most of my life, scanning and archiving them for two decades.
I grew up, like many, with one room in our house filled with salon style family portraits and snapshots. Displaying the images of natural objects in vintage frames, these often overlooked objects are presented as significant, worthy of deeper inspection. Recontextualized and enlarged to reveal details often not visible to the human eye, the unique characteristics of each object remind us that we are woven into the wider natural world, each of us here briefly.
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