I will be using this phase of the residency to use objects to tell a story.  

 

Imagine an ornately decorated cookie tin.  It has pictures of the cookies that should be inside on the lid.  A kid waits for their grandmother to turn her back and attempts to steal a cookie.  As the kid wrestles the lid off the tin a collection of spare buttons, pin cushions, needles and thread spill out all over the floor. There are no cookies in the cookie tin.  We could use the cookie tin to tell the story of the butter tub that didn’t have butter in it, but leftovers from some other day.  From the kid’s perspective this is a story of deception and disappointment.  But it’s really “Exhibit A” of how my grandparents survived the depression era.  People of their era reused and repurposed things.  They fixed things.  They were resilient and resourceful.  They didn’t throw things away if they could be used in some other capacity.

 

For this exhibit you will find objects or artifacts that could tell a story by themselves. There will also be poems and short stories displayed that tell the story of the significance of the objects.