Thesis Project: A container for memory
Expansion of Hold on Forever
Hold On Forever explores the memory of place through the combination of landscape painting, tapestries, ready-made structures, and living walls. This project is the product of a months-long communication between the artist and her father, an interior horticulturist.
Participants enter a partially enclosed space with a low ceiling that mimics a cave-like atmosphere with walls made from paintings and textiles. The canopy is blanketed with ferns and bromeliads which are hung upside-down. In this space, the participant is immersed in an environment that emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants: plants provide us with oxygen, we provide them with carbon dioxide. Plants also create a negative ionic environment, which is believed to increase the production of the mood-boosting hormone serotonin in the body.
Weaving together personal narratives with ideas of time, communication, and healing, the installation provides a space for the viewer to enter, slow down, and get a breath of fresh air.
Experience
Gut feeling, being present, connection, to be in the body, to settle down.
Growth, learning
Sublime/awe
Feeling
Sensing
Lying
Experience
Instinct
Learned knowledge/embodied knowledge
Slow time/Long view
Geography - history
Sync, rhythm, heartbeat, the heartbeat = presence; on/off: binary
Thresholds, passages
Instinct
Turbulence, Vibrations
structure
Construction // home // security
Safety
Granite and dirt
Granite and arsenic and radon
Safety
Seeing all
Long view
Knowledge
“Precognition” / a knowing before
→ safety
Grasping (at straws)
Textiles, weavings
Warmth, care, being held, insulation, fur, blanket, wrap, snuggle, women’s work, coding, repetition, time consuming,
hand made, tie together, strands of a story, Tim Ingold and meshworks
Greenhouses
Play
Camping
Family
Bees
Look up
Lie down
Be held
Greenhouse:
Colonialism
False nature
Control of nature
Reminiscent of dad/family as a child
The smell of dirt and wet mossy blown air
Dirt under fingernails
Grandma and gardening, and better homes and gardens, and Santa Fe, and small pink roses, and vegetables and bunnies, and stones with copper inlay, and birches, and balloons, and dance and Balanchine, and woodpeckers
Verdant
Life
Warm wet growth
Everything was alive--the greenhouse ac wall, galvanized bucket with water and algae growing
What is nurturing?
Care, security, refresh, love, being held, being safe, being able to grow
Growth
Memory always changing → Memory is/as a type of present
Landscape: personal and physical
Andrus polar bearskin rug → Stormy lake Superior and lupines
communication
Reset. Rewind.
Sublime
The idea of the long view is utilized in my paintings -- control
The obfuscated view in installations
Sight and the idea of knowing/knowledge
Control and safety with the idea of sight
No surprises, knowing what is going to come your way --impossible
Overview, god’s view, knowing, knowing, knowing
Seeking security, grasping security, seeking safety. Impossible
Feeling small and making art, putting things together, sorting out different ideas
Parceling, organizing
Problems? The othering of land // Romanticization of nature (colonialism and house plants)
Mountains and rivers without end
Binary:
On-off
In out
Breath non-breath - the autonomic nervous system and inhalation and exhalation increase heart rate decrease heart rate
Translated to binary code and used as a pattern for weaving (Communication // Communication without words ):
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Second Iteration, Version 1 Idea. Push the installation more; this feels too similar to the first iteration and not dynamic enough
Providing for the potential of experience (the structure acting as a container for memories for me)
Lying down: savasana as a way of metabolizing the benefits of the practice.
Walk through the exhibition but provide the possibility of lying down and looking up at a ceiling of constellations of plants.