Line Of Joining

Line Of Joining

The Macdowell Colony, Peterbourough, NH | 2009

I spent time at the MacDowell Colony as a National Endowment for the Arts fellow in February of 2009. My project directly responded to the architectural environment at the colony. Within the Cheney Studio, walls made with panels of homasote had warped over time. My intervention into the architecture redefined the space as a site for reconciliation between deterioration and preservation. The seams, or “lines of joining” between the panels, became the starting point of a 24-day experiment working directly on the walls. Daily sessions involved excavating and digging into the wall, followed by sculpting areas with fresh plaster. The expansion and contraction of the wall’s surface generated a collection and arrangement of plaster fragments on the floor. This temporal installation explored the demarcation of space as a volume that came apart at the seams.
error: © 2003-2020 Jill Downen