Mixed Media Installation

2024

​

My passion for poetry started in childhood. In South America, where I lived in my childhood, poetry is consumed on a daily basis. Poets are venerated and their work recited and quoted from memory. Both my parents were poetry enthusiasts, each with their own favorite poets. Their books could be found on shelves and tables all over our house. In social gatherings, in addition to food, music and dance, my parents and their friends recited their favorite works to each other. This early imprint has remained with me throughout my life, and it has inspired and informed a lot of my work. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote about how ordinary things become precious to us because of who made them, who gave them, or who touched them. My assemblage is composed of many ordinary things that have memories attached to them. The objects are positioned in and around a tower created with picture frames. In addition to providing structure, the picture frames give a reference point to images from the past, much like a photograph.  All the objects are covered and connected by a poem that simultaneously preserves and absorbs them. These objects that were precious for the memories they carried are now protected, but they are also impossible to touch. They have been rendered out of reach, frozen in time by the words of a poem.

​