And the head went on singing & forgetting #6
This sculpture is constructed from reshaped clothing collected from the Rio Grande Valley, where it was abandoned by refugees crossing the border into the U.S. The re-embodiment of this clothing suggests the human beings who once occupied them, as though they are ghosts haunting the personal objects they were forced to leave behind.
The artwork’s title comes from Alice Oswald’s poem “Severed Head Floating Downriver,” about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus traveled all the way to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, which Hades allowed under the condition that he not look back until he had completely crossed back into the world of the living. Orpheus almost made it all the way out, when he turned around. Eurydice was gone—but was she ever there, or was it all a trick? These clothes were left behind by migrants after completing their own crossing, a last act before entering into their new lives.
Too often, their stories are forgotten, their existences ignored or, worse, despised. Further in Oswald’s come these lines: “I always wake like this being watched/ I always speak to myself/no more myself but a colander/ draining the sound from this never-to-be mentioned wound.” I want to encourage continued attention to this issue and the human beings affected by it, protecting it from becoming a “never-to-be mentioned wound” in a cycle of “singing and forgetting.”
As seen in Pence Gallery:
As seen in: https://pencegallery.org/exhibitions/past-exhibits/
This sculpture is constructed from reshaped clothing collected from the Rio Grande Valley, where it was abandoned by refugees crossing the border into the U.S. The re-embodiment of this clothing suggests the human beings who once occupied them, as though they are ghosts haunting the personal objects they were forced to leave behind.
The artwork’s title comes from Alice Oswald’s poem “Severed Head Floating Downriver,” about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus traveled all the way to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, which Hades allowed under the condition that he not look back until he had completely crossed back into the world of the living. Orpheus almost made it all the way out, when he turned around. Eurydice was gone—but was she ever there, or was it all a trick? These clothes were left behind by migrants after completing their own crossing, a last act before entering into their new lives.
Too often, their stories are forgotten, their existences ignored or, worse, despised. Further in Oswald’s come these lines: “I always wake like this being watched/ I always speak to myself/no more myself but a colander/ draining the sound from this never-to-be mentioned wound.” I want to encourage continued attention to this issue and the human beings affected by it, protecting it from becoming a “never-to-be mentioned wound” in a cycle of “singing and forgetting.”
As seen in Pence Gallery:
As seen in: https://pencegallery.org/exhibitions/past-exhibits/
This sculpture is constructed from reshaped clothing collected from the Rio Grande Valley, where it was abandoned by refugees crossing the border into the U.S. The re-embodiment of this clothing suggests the human beings who once occupied them, as though they are ghosts haunting the personal objects they were forced to leave behind.
The artwork’s title comes from Alice Oswald’s poem “Severed Head Floating Downriver,” about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus traveled all the way to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, which Hades allowed under the condition that he not look back until he had completely crossed back into the world of the living. Orpheus almost made it all the way out, when he turned around. Eurydice was gone—but was she ever there, or was it all a trick? These clothes were left behind by migrants after completing their own crossing, a last act before entering into their new lives.
Too often, their stories are forgotten, their existences ignored or, worse, despised. Further in Oswald’s come these lines: “I always wake like this being watched/ I always speak to myself/no more myself but a colander/ draining the sound from this never-to-be mentioned wound.” I want to encourage continued attention to this issue and the human beings affected by it, protecting it from becoming a “never-to-be mentioned wound” in a cycle of “singing and forgetting.”
As seen in Pence Gallery:
As seen in: https://pencegallery.org/exhibitions/past-exhibits/
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