Place Project

When I find myself thinking about places that are important to me I immediately begin to focus on places that formed my most valuable personal relationships and memories. I think of home, grandma and grandpa's house, and memories that make me feel warm and fuzzy. In order to avoid these cliches, we were urged to create a flowchart that might reveal an idea that resides beneath the obvious places that are prominent in the brainstorming phase. I found myself thinking about temporary places and vacations. I questioned the permanence of a place and its significance to forming memories and relationships. I also pondered the amount of time needed to be in a place before it begins to mold your past and make an impact on your life. Through this conceptual dilemma of the temporary place, I began to think about building forts with my little brother. A fort can absolutely act as a place. We created the space and made it our own. We often spent free time in them, doing everyday things, but doing them in the fort. Sleeping in the fort was always, of course, the ultimate goal. I feel like we may have built forts more than the average siblings 2.5 years apart in age, but then again my brother and I always had a strong relationship....

I remember playing a board game with my brother, which ended in a disastrous explosion of competition. There was name calling, anger, and accusations galore. After the incident my parents sat us down and we had a long talk about the importance of our relationship as siblings. They stressed the fact that after they are gone, it will just be the two of us and if we don't get along, our family would be nothing more than a descriptive word for two people who are born of the same parents. I remember the urgency in their voices. The two of us sticking together is so important because we're all we've got after our parents aren't around. The conversation made an enormous impact on my desire to stay close to my brother. We were amazing friends and playmates as children. The idea of siblings disliking each other was completely foreign to me until I was exposed to friends who "hated" their little siblings and never wanted to be around them. I feel extremely fortunate that I have a friend who is also my brother and that we were able to share laughs and play together as kids in a sibling relationship far from common.

For this project, I intend to re-create one of the forts of my childhood. We always built the forts in our vast unfinished basement with the same series of blankets. I will use the same blankets that hold the musty smell of a concrete basement floor in order to enhance the sensory quality of the installation. I will construct it using chairs and clothespins and decorate it using the same props we continuously used time after time. I want the viewer to crawl into the space and experience my place as their place and hopefully be able to trigger their experiences of building forts as well.