Where the arms hook onto the body
2008 – ongoing
The bread that my grandmother made several times each week inspired this project. This bread is a living culture that must be regularly fed and baked with in order to keep it alive. My grandmother shared the culture with many women in our rural southern community and descendants of her culture are still being used to make bread today, having been passed down several generations in different families. I am making the bread as a posthumous collaboration with my Granny, continuing the work that she loved most, and asking questions about the power of an "object" to hold the memory of someone intimately connected to you long after they are gone.
For where the arms hook onto the body, titled so by the way my grandmother described her aches and pains in her later years, I invite people to share their own memories of someone or something that is no longer. In exchange, I offer bread and share a memory of my Granny. The project's title also references the part of the body where we engage with others in the intimate act of hugging.
Ultimately, this project is about longing. "It brings up issues of how a moment can be charged with significance, and how fleeting things can extend forward in time or imagination, and it questions what is real." 1
1. Shana Dumont, Curator, Montserrat College of Art Galleries
(See exhibition history below.)
Exhibition history
Exchange performed twice in 2009, as part of Visiting Artist opportunities at Endicott
College, Beverly, MA
and University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Exchange was performed in conjunction with "Many Kinds of Nothing", curated by Shana
Dumont, Montserrat College of Art Gallery, Beverly, MA, 2008.