Memory and Perspective
I began this body of work at the first Smitten metalsmithing retreat in 2014, five inspiring days of work in the studios of Arrowmont School of Crafts. It is based on a two-day drive I took in March several years before, from my home in Illinois to my childhood home in Oklahoma. It started out as a record, of sorts, of the landscape, colors, light, architectural forms and weather I experienced along the way. But memory, like the features of landscape that we pass along the road, changes with time and perspective. Shapes coalesce, shadows shift and stretch, new forms are revealed. This project hinges on that particular malleability of memory.
The steel frameworks of these pieces are suggestive fragments of the architecture of those days on the road. They are the scaffolding on which I’ve hung fragments of found materials, whose own histories have surrendered to my memories of the hues, saturation, sky and shapes of that journey. New pieces created in the years since follow the original theme, but also represent shifts and transitions in form and materials since the inception of the project. As I return to new phases of this project periodically in the coming years and the time between the actual event and the memory of it increases, what further changes will occur? How will the colors, forms and textures evolve? Eventually, the saturation and significance of what I saw of the land in those two long-ago days may shift and slide and stretch into works with only a few material or aesthetic connections to the original pieces...