Winter Collection

sticks, twigs, marble tile

This work was designed for an exhibition at the South Bend Museum of Art in South Bend, Indiana.

Throughout the winter I collected sticks, twigs, and other remnants from snowdrifts in the dark, snowy early hours of the morning on my way to work at a food coop’s kitchen. These sticks and twigs were then glazed and displayed here on white polished quartz tiles.

When collecting them and turning them into this piece, I was thinking about the differences between memorialization, preservation, and loss. I was thinking that there is power in knowledge of the past, but a danger in losing oneself to it. Is there a balance between reverence for what’s been, revisiting cycles in your own life, and moving on?

I found it interesting that these sticks and twigs caught in the snowdrifts had their decay frozen in a moment that caught their intricacies as they awaited the spring.

2015

Images here taken by Mark Rospenda