BFA, Studio Art – Single Discipline Focus (Sculpture)
Certificate in Digital Fabrication and Design
Artist Statement
I Can’t Wait to Show You This
Minong, The Good Place, Isle Royale National Park. This remote archipelago has been known by many names and has many faces. Its landscapes range from sheer basalt shores and ridges to lowland meadows, marshes, and swamps, all kinds of forests, to ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and the ever-present Lake Superior. Despite being the least visited park in the lower 48, Isle Royale is the most revisited park in the entire park system and is a place rich with memories for some 25,000 people annually who brave its wilderness. I am one of those visitors and my four separate journeys to the island have helped forge influential memories. My exhibition, I Can’t Wait to Show You This, draws upon cherished and influential experiences and emphasizes the ephemeral qualities of memory. Memories are strange things; fragile, transient, never twice the same, close to reality but always a step removed. In fragments, I remember the boardwalks that meander endlessly through the marshland, bare basalt, gravel, sand, and dead foliage constantly underfoot, shelters and picnic tables covered with decades of graffiti, docks used to jump into the icy waters of Superior, treks to the next night’s campsite, a topographic map purchased as a souvenir. Using these impressions of the island, I present ethereal memory-scapes that represent fleeting moments in the wilderness. I hope viewers will consider memories of their own special places and how time and distance have preserved, changed, manipulated, twisted, and skewed them.
