Stopgap In Situ, 2021, performance, video, sculpture, installation, The Peanut Factory, Edenton, NC
I went one place twice a day during quarantine in March of 2020, to the small farm where I cared for horses on an island in Eastern North Carolina, known as the Outer Banks. It is here that I began a series of performances in an old abandoned hay stall while the horses ate breakfast, with materials sourced for free from my home, studio, close friends, the side of the road and later, temporary employment venues. I found the red feed bucket in that stall, and smuggled the materials in past the main house in a shoulder bag, or tucked under bales of hay in a wheelbarrow that I carted across a field in front of that house. The whole idea of this work happening would be so foreign (and therefore possibly upsetting) to others in the surrounding community that secrecy was necessary, especially as I needed to maintain relationships for my employment. The performances then moved to behind my studio, where I also worked in secrecy for similar reasons (neighbors and such).
I approached each performance with the same expectations / guidelines: respond to the material and the space and the day (and the day’s events) with my body, going in without a plan. These temporal sculptures juxtapose humor and horror as physical coping mechanisms aimed to respond to the materials at hand as metaphor for our shifting responses to the pandemic, climate change, and social change.
I used materials I could collect. Financial impacts from the pandemic dictated this decision, along with living in a region where effects of climate change are felt almost daily. The continuing development and promotion of disposable vacation experiences and goods are all simultaneously expediating negative impacts on this coastal region, which is just hell bent on leaching all natural resources dry for financial gain. Use of these materials, manipulated in reference to the body, aims to speak to the divides and analogies between these ideas. The detritus then became concrete documents of the ephemeral actions in sculptural form as solidification of experience through labor intensive processes and repetition.
These works were then installed in the tower of The Peanut Factory, a circa 1932 peanut processing plant located in Edenton, North Carolina, also known as the Inner Banks. A new series of performances were executed for this virtual exhibition, as response to this building and time, exactly a year after the performances originally began, coincidentally. The tower consists of three floors, and the works were installed in accordance with and in response to the space itself, much like the original performances’ impetus. The bottom floor was projections of the original works, the middle floor sculptures, and the top floor became a new series of performances.
I stood still and listened to the neighborhood.