'If you have 3 of something, it's a collection.' - some vendor on Etsy
Monday, November 1, 2010
Coki Beach, St Thomas
Years ago my sister and I took a Thanksgiving cruise through the Virgin Islands with our dad.It was a horrible horrible horrible trip and St Thomas was the most horrible part of it.
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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