Project Statement

From the beginning, our collaboration has centered on connection. The connection between materials, time, place, and people. Throughout the residency, we exchanged materials and notes through the mail. These materials included collected images, painted papers, dried plants, and recycled materials from around the house such as pieces of clothing and junk mail.  We made our first collages from materials we had each collected and combined from our past projects. The series “Material Connections” began as an exploration of materials and techniques, exchanging our perspectives and ways of working. Some pieces we created individually while others we mailed back and forth.

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Through the exchanges in “Material Connections”, we discovered a specific combination of source material that proved to be rich in imagery and thematic content, which generated our ongoing series “Children at Play” Emily combined images of children from a book about children’s playgrounds that Eden had sent her with backgrounds from an old children’s atlas book, and Eden suggested adding text from the book. By juxtaposing these two sources Emily discovered myriad ways to comment on environmental and social exploitation, colonization and capitalism. Eden created sound art to accompany the images using image to sound software and then editing and adding to the sound.  The sound art and collages create a statement about society’s treatment of the environment and people for greed in the past and today.