All materials are copyright of Linda Price-Sneddon 2010
Notes on My Nature / Our Nature
In the spring of 2006, Community Programs Manager Benares Finan Eshelman asked me to consider an artist residency at the Fuller Craft Museum’s as part of their Art Aspire program. Benares had seen my work at an exhibition in Boston and was intrigued by my surprising use of colorful, inexpensive craft materials. My work is concerned with building awareness, respect and awe of the natural world in all its forms- from the grand to the mundane. At the time that Benares approached me, I was interested in finding an opportunity to work with teens to explore nature as inspiration for the creative process. I was particularly interested in working with urban teens who generally have less exposure to nature’s healing beauty. The timing was perfect.
I proposed a project that would utilize the beautiful grounds of the D.W. Field Park surrounding the Fuller Craft museum in an iterative process of observation, reflection and creation in response to the students’ experiences in this setting. At this time the Fuller Craft Museum had just begun a partnership with the Champion Charter School in Brockton, MA. and served as the students only exposure to art in the curriculum. Benares felt that seniors from the charter school would be a good match for this program, and planning was begun.
The program was comprised of (10) consecutive three hour sessions wherein the students engaged in a process of observation and experience of nature both as a group and in solitary encounter, followed by reflection/discussion and creation of works in response to their experiences. Two large walls within the community gallery space were reserved for art produced in the weekly sessions.
At the start of the program, I created two graphically simple wall drawings to act as “visual armatures” that provided cohesion to the work as the walls progressed. One wall was designed to address the interaction of “Nature” and “Culture” while the other was a stylized “Landscape” for incorporating the students responses to nature in text and images. The wall-drawings evolved throughout the ten weeks in a collaborative process of action and interaction between the students and myself. The teens were given digital cameras with which to explore the surroundings. The images they captured were incorporated into the wall drawing, and were integrated into a video montage that I had created earlier from my own explorations and shown as a part of the gallery installation.