Bricolage
I have been making “bricolage” since I was a child - from sticks, stones, shells and bones found in my feral wanderings. But I did not have a name for my passion until 2007, when M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle published her mind-blowing book Evocative Objects, wherein she tells how she discovered the concept of “bricolage,” (coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss) during her studies in Paris in the 1960s. According to Lévi-Strauss, the artist "shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." He likened the artistic process to the work of a handyman, who solves mechanical problems with whatever materials are at hand, terming it “bricolage,” a word derived from the French verb bricoler, meaning "to putter about”.
I began building and photographing bricolage in 2020, while I was locked down with a lifetime of collected keepsakes, relics and charms. One day, I will have enough assembled for a whole portfolio, but the urge to make them comes serendipitously. So far, I have built and photographed only three, two of which have been exhibited in galleries (which I find amazing).
“Family Medicine” combines ancestor images with vintage homeopathic remedies and a few feathers. My mother and her mother grew up outside Chicago, in a small church community where everyone had a supply of homeopathy at hand, some of which I have inherited. The feathers come from someone who used to bring me gifts from the Adirondack woods, precious to the inveterate magpie in me.
The second image is titled “Doll with Polaroid.” Certain love objects connect us to the past - like a doll that probably still bears DNA traces of the girl child who long ago disappeared into adulthood. Likewise, an old Polaroid of the two: holding within its layers of silver halide and image dyes a liminal, luminous moment. Both doll and Polaroid exist now talismanic in my attic - sacred objects possessing what Jung once called “a soul spark.”
Spoken / Unspoken / Cryptic / Encrypted is a bricolage of elements collected from Iphones, Ipods and MacBooks used by me and my children between 2007-2014. As the kids grew older, and eventually left home, we went from daily talk and touch to a distant landscape of emails and cell conversations, all filtered through elements extracted from and manufactured around the globe, fashioned of platinum, silver and other precious metals. What if we could mine them for all our lost words - spoken and unspoken, cryptic and encrypted?
Family Medicine
Doll with Polaroid
Spoken / Unspoken / Cryptic / Encrypted
