Cloud Garden at Guild Hall

Site-Specific Installation in the Furman Garden, Guild Hall

August through November, 2020

Cloud Garden at Guild Hall is a site-specific outdoor installation and community project created during the Covid 19 quarantine and exhibited from August to November, 2020. Installed in the trees of Guild Hall’s Furman Garden, tangles of wire, balled up deer fencing, feathers, pop tops from seltzer cans, unidentifiable pieces of hardware, and other artifacts of my everyday life hang as mobiles, creating dangling objects that shimmer in the air like the stories we tell about ourselves.

My Cloud series began in 2006 when my mother brought me boxes of childhood toys, jewelry and trinkets from the home I grew up in. Wanting to give meaning to my history through sculpture, I combined souvenirs of my present life with these fragments of my past in tangles of wire that hang, cloud-like, from ceilings or tree branches. I re-engaged with this process during the Covid 19 crisis, when like most of us, I am spending more time at home immersed in the minutia of domestic life. The work in this installation updates my materials to pay tribute to this extraordinary time, and includes samples from the bag of single socks and gloves waiting optimistically for partners who never showed up, pieces of a wall sculpture I made for my infant son (now 24 years old), tufts of fur from our new puppy, Binx, and shards of the Nerf soccer ball he attacked, along with other items unearthed during the prolonged quarantine.

The clouds bounce and sway in the garden, creating a soothing environment for these tense times.