After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, I used my collection of Japanese fabrics to suggest an aerial view of the disaster. In Japan, purchases are carefully wrapped. In this piece, each section is also carefully wrapped - except the blackened, flooded sections, which have been ripped open, representing the losses incurred. The tan border is an old sake bag. The ceramic bits (visible below) were dug out of the sand at low tide at the Miyajima Gate.
Her Artist Statement:
How do we learn history? Textbooks give us dates and leaders; students memorize facts for the test, but few people have a deep understanding of how our ancestors lived.
As a child I felt that lessons of wars and nations had little bearing on my family history. It was like studying weather patterns, gusting far above, knowing that my peasant grandparents had survived in thatched huts in Poland. What was their story? My art is created with that question in mind.
The objects I use are collected at my equivalent of archaeological digs: garage and estate sales. In my Passaic neighborhood, there are still large numbers of first and second generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. At these sales I hear the language and find the tools of my grandparents. There, I unearth items that were once commonly used in the domestic sphere – pincushions, darning eggs, crochet hooks – but are now almost extinct. I exhume forgotten embroidery and mending, and present them as petrified specimens.
My textile works are art and archaeology. They are the stories of past generations. By deconstructing past artifacts and preserving them in an archaeological presentation, I hope to change viewer perception of our textile heritage.
Top to bottom: Artifact #1; Fossil Garment #2; Fossil Garment #6; Generational Fossil; Hiroshima 2012; Lost; Strat Markings; Treasure Hunting Jacket; Tsunami Japan; detail of Tsunami Japan
http://www.dianesavonaart.com/
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