Outdoor Screen Installations, click on image to enlarge
My yard
The place I have the most access to regularly hang outdoor work is in my own yard. This has been where I have experimented and grown my practice and knowledge. It’s where I have watched the weather work on the pieces, made adjustments, and figured out how to make them longer lasting if I desired. I have watch the light and the shadows dance and the pieces change as the sun moves across the sky and as seasons pass. This piece hung in my front yard, undergoing several adjustments, for close to a year before we moved. I documented her constantly because she was so beautiful and provided so many moments of contemplation. Get in touch if you’d like something for your own property.
The photographs above were taken in Squamish in June 2023 with a variety of my painted screens being installed throughout our hike. This work is an attempt to return to memories of solitary childhood exploration in nature, now with new information about myself and what my childhood play meant. I spent hours and hours creating secret gardens, forts and glens, finding treasures and decorating my spaces, willing magic to real. When stuck inside as a child, I would stare out the window and let my eyes unfocus so the screen added a layer of blurring visual texture as I dazed out and escaped into my imaginary world. I am using window screen because it is a barrier between indoor and outdoor and I am repurposing it through activations with color, light, and shadow, using the screens to create a new type of liminal space in nature, one full of the magic and wonder I wanted as a child. When I am done with these installations, I use the screens for other works.
The installation and images above were created and taken in an old friend’s yard in Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn, where we stayed when we returned east foir the first time since leaving New York in late 2017. During this trip, I brought several screens intended for installation in meaningful locations bnoth from childhood and into my adulthood. What I discovered in returning to New York is that we are not meant for that space. We are meant for spaces full of things we can pick up and carry in our pockets, where our shoes will touch many types of earth throughout the day, where crows are often the loudest thing to contend with. Each day we would venture into the city to show our kids where we started together, where they became real and an idea, and each day we would return, in complete sensory overload. They escaped to tablets and I to the back yard, where I worked each day for a precious hour or two until dinner time, immersing myself in as much quiet color as I could.
This installation above was created on Plum Island beach, Massachusetts, in August 2023 with painted window screens and my mother’s antique lace curtains and bamboo polls. This installation holds a lot of meaning for the place, which is in the town I grew up in, as well as for the materials and the time it was captured, on my last night in town while my children played in the surf with husband and my father sat behind and watched me lose time in my screens. Building structures, or anything, has never been easy for me as I struggle with direction and spatial awareness and an ability to understand some rather basic construction methods. Like in most things, I try to follow my own intuition. I wanted to bring screens that reminded me of childhood beach towels and a specific artwork I made with many overlapping, colorful sailboats. The lace hung in the windows as a child
These images document screen installations I made in the summer of 2023 in my childhood yard in Newburyport MA. Returning to my father’s house with a bag of screens to see how I might inhabit the spaces I played in as a child as an adult. I spent countless hours alone outside in my yards as a child, with few friends and ability to engage outside of my deep inner world. So much of what I make now as an artist was formed in the woods as a kid, searching for objects of interest to decorate little forts and dens I created. I was also a gatherer, a person forming an identity on the peripheral of people, more connected to the land around me than to the people around me. These color interventions are just an extension of what I’ve been doing my whole life. To be able to do it in a place that had so much meaning to me was very important.
These images were taken in Maudsley State Park Newburyport, MA, a place I spent a great deal of time as a child. Maudsley was initially a place of escape for me, a magical park that came to be my secret woods where I would spent hours exploring alone. I would ride my bike there and learned its trails and histories. It eventually became a place where my inner world directly conflicted with middle school social struggles. The park shifted from a space place to one of trauma and one I had to reclaim over years. Going back with my own children and showing them the trails, both well trodden and secret, that I had walked as a child, was a powerful experience for me. My use of screen here was deeply purposeful and an attempt to process traumatic events from my memory.