Legacy Strike
In this installation, "Legacy Strike", I interface objects I have inherited from my maternal blood relatives with articles either from, or inspired by, the collection of Historic Northampton Museum. From the archive I chose three objects: a bear trap, a cradle and an embroidered mourning portrait. The heirlooms I have incorporated include: a collection of baby dresses worn by my mother and her sisters, a coat with a fur collar belonging to my grandmother, cross-stitched doilies (made by my great grandmother?), a Victorian Era chair from my grandmother's house, an afghan crocheted by my great grandmother and a tea set my grandparents purchased on their honeymoon.
The collective parts of this work grow out of a recent sculpture, titled "Repeat". In "Repeat" I have altered a chair which came to be mine after the death of my grandmother. The title refers simultaneously to the human tendency for repeating mistakes (personally and en mass historically) and to the term "repeat" in a printed fabric (the frequency at which a motif will repeat itself down the textile). These predictable patterns have been thwarted; dissected and rearranged. The result is an object that appears to be both wounded and furtive.
Within this expanded piece, I have animated the aforementioned artifacts in a tryptic of cryptically unsettling scenarios. The unexpected actions and associations created within are intended to explore an inheritance of pre-set conditions and expectations rather than to display an illusion of sentimentality.
