Well, I'm in the thick of it this semester. Already into the second week of classes here at ECU and my students are nearly done with the first project. I'm teaching a textile survey class that serves as an introduction of textile processes and techniques. We are exploring bookmaking... Creating a fabric cover, making signatures, pocket folders, and hand binding. Whew! The students are totally rockin' this project. Big critique on Thursday and then boom- onto Silk Painting.
We Made a World of Our Own is an evocative multimedia installation that combines everyday, handmade objects with new media elements such as video and audio components to create an immersive sensory experience. Although the piece draws from my own memories, there's a familiarity in the story being told, one that can be felt on a universal level and attributed to each viewer's own imagination and childhood world of make-believe. The installation is a vignette of my life growing up in a small town in Missouri. Although we lived a mere seven miles out of the city limits, it seemed very rural and isolated. My siblings were my playmates and partners in crime. The majority of our time was spent outside making forts, building shelters, playing house, endlessly swinging, pretending to be on the prairie with Laura Ingalls, or reenacting the spirited Depression-era adventures of The Boxcar Children. We lived next door to my Grannie who was always working in the garden, canning, and cleaning. Sun bleached sheets, pillowcases, aprons, and skirts would billow from a clothesline propped up in the middle by a long pole. We would meander into the woods to hunt for treasures and climb on grapevine branches. To keep cool, we splashed around in a little metal washtub that we filled with well water every morning in hopes that it would be just right by mid afternoon. We had to guard the tub from the random stray dogs that were always wandering around during the summers. One itchy dog could easily drain the tub if we weren't careful. That tub is now well over one hundred years old; my Grannie herself used to play in it when she was a child. "We Made a World of Our Own" is a fabrication of my past. The clothes hanging in the installation are handmade and feature original photographs digitally printed onto the fabric with machine stitching running throughout. Some of the images are brighter and more vivid, others are faded and nearly gone - not unlike some of my memories. The clothes are also metaphoric for the role-playing, exploration, and experimentation that happens so naturally for children during times of make-believe. The seven-foot fabric house is covered with images of children playing; all stitched in thread using a freemotion sewing technique. The puckers and wrinkles add a visual and literal texture to the piece. As does the weaving, which is made up of old clothes donated by my family members. Creating the weaving was an emotional journey that I didn't expect. I held my dad's work shirt, worn and stained, and remembered his life as a mechanic. I wrapped myself in my Grandma BeBe's jacket and cried as I thought about our long talks while popping beans and shelling pecans. I ran my fingers over my mom's nurses smock and breathed in the faint smell of her perfume. The weaving symbolizes one's path in life and how identities are formed and shaped by childhood experiences. The length represents the distance one gains from those experiences as an adult. While the front of the little house displays a rear-projected video of my nieces at play, an ethereal melody redefines the space. The audio is a recording from my mom's jewelry box, a gift given to her by my dad when they first started dating and she passed on to me after his death. The tune has an emotive effect that triggers many intimate memories of the world we created with nothing more than our imagination.
Size varies but is approximately 20.5 ft wide, 16 ft deep, and 10-12 ft high.
Ernest Hemingway, whose family had summered on Walloon Lake since the late 1890's, became a frequent guest of the City Park Grill. He would sit at the second seat from the end of the bar and write the material that eventually would make him world-famous. His story "A Man of the World" makes mention of the Annex and surrounding buildings.
