The Project Vision
When I first envisioned this project in the Spring on 2019, I imagined a symbolic, ephemeral modern art installation. This initial vision has been the anchor-point over the last year as I took steps to make it a reality. It remains a truly pure expression, with a surrender to literal unweaving by natural forces.
The 2018 piece titled Blood Memory explored ancestral inheritance as it relates to instinctive-knowing, my affinity to work with my hands, and my emotional pull to weaving. Growing-up without grandmother-elders, my hands become the emotional connection to generations of women in my lineage.
Digging deeper, I am compelled to explore blood memory in the context of ancestral trauma. My maternal grandmother was 13 when her family left the Midwest for Karelia Russia in 1930. Thousands of Finnish Americans were recruited during the little known Red Exodus. Many of the men were taken in the night (executed) leaving their wives & children undocumented and stranded in Stalin-Russia. Her family was able to flee only to be silenced by disbelief, shame, and fear upon their return. The trauma was buried. She never spoke of it, but it was carried in her DNA like the scripted messages of perennial plant seeds, to me. My intuitive approach to work allows me to weed these traumas through my art.
This public art project will be a temporary installation lasting at least one week, set in a park in Duluth, MN on the edge of Lake Superior. Many of the Finnish-Americans who left for Russia in the 1930s came from communities in and around Duluth and other communities along the southern shores of Lake Superior. This place is relevant for this work.
The installation itself will consist of multiple human-height steel frames that are secured in/to the ground like stakes. The arc structures will be the top connection point for strips of weather proof fabric that will extend down to a line of anchors in the ground - 6ft away from each frame. These vertical fabrics will act like the warp on a loom. Additional fabric will be woven like weft perpendicular to the warp. The woven tapestries will be fully anchored at the start of the installation, creating a soft lean-to shelter that can be entered and occupied by individual visitors. The structures will open towards Lake Superior, providing a view, and space to reflect. With their back to the city, they face the horizon - as if leaving /embarking in a new direction.
An event-based ceremony will act as the opening reception. I will speak about the work and ceremoniously release some of the warps from the ground anchors according to plan. Some will be unleashed in the middle, others at the end - some substantially, others just a bit. Over the duration of the installation, external factors will play a role in the degree of unweaving. I envision the wind being a meaningful component as it whistles through the woven fabric, and in its potential to affect the integrity of the weave. The work will represent the ways tradition, culture, communities, and individuals are unwoven when they are disconnected from their foundations, and set free when loosened from their traumas. Each structure will reflect a different set of variables, process, and result.
