'If you have 3 of something, it's a collection.' - some vendor on Etsy
Monday, November 1, 2010
The Bill Davies Paddle Out, Long Sands Beach, York, Maine
After my friend Bill Davies died his friends celebrated is birthday on his beloved Long Sands Beach with a surfing competition and an old fashioned paddle out to spread his ashes.
The Sand Project began after a trip to the Natural History Museum in New York. I love the scientific aesthetic of the Hall of Biodiversity, where thousands of specimens, from tigers to fungi, are cataloged and presented. Soon I was eyeballing the collection of sand my daughter and I had collected over the years from our travels. I started to write a mini biography to accompany each vial of sand. As I went from one sand memory to the next it was becoming more and more evident how we are all linked to landscape - to place and to time. In short order, the sand and 100 attending memoirs took on the form of a family portrait without paint.
I am a conceptual artist whose work has underlying threads: biography, history, text, repetition and memory. And let’s put a big fat underline under biography, because that is the thread that runs through all the work. Biography.
With each project I am attempting to bear witness. When Marvin Gaye called out, 'Can I get a witness?' I heard the call. And have felt the gravitational pull of projects that allow me to collect, chronicle and archive, tell and retell.
I am working to reveal something emotive and intimate about each subject. My intent is to spark that last piece of the puzzle, a visceral thread of recognition in the viewer.
Check out my work at laurengillette.com
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