Project 3: Site, Place, and Installation
ANALYSIS

In this series of sculptures, I was playing with the idea of leaving traces of myself behind. At first, I mainly focused on images of hearts, made from things that I found in the environment, because hearts have always been my favorite shape. But then as I spent more time outside in nature, I really wanted to show not only what I made with the materials that I was using, but my presence that was once there.

I have always loved thinking about things like how many people before me have stood or been in the same spot that I am now. It's something that will always remain a mystery, because the presence of people is not something that is visibly left behind for any extended period. So in the later images of my work I really tried to focus on what I was doing in that space and leaving a trace of my body behind.

So I did things like lay down under a tree in the Garden of Remembrance and then use the petals that had fallen from the tree to show the place where I had once been. The petals that had not yet browned were all white on one side and had different colorations on the other side, so I used the all white sides of the petals to trace and then fill in my body's outline so that it could be differentiated from the rest of the petals on the ground.

I then went to a place where I commonly go to sit and reflect on things in my life and then used bright, pink flowers from a nearby bush to show people who walked by where I had been sitting there. I did the same thing with grass on a bench outside of Monty as well.

I do wish though that I had also shown my presence in more than one place in the same area, and use different materials for each of my presences left behind, so that someone walking by could have seen the interaction between the different presences, and probably would have gotten more from the experience, and thought more about the collection of these images reminiscent of bodies that were once there.