Artist statement: Tarpentry A visual narrative of landscape and culture
Often, a new project comes to light while working on another. This was the case with Tarpentry.
It was fall in Vermont, and I was making great progress shooting color landscapes using Polaroids when I ran out of time. The foliage was gone. We entered that other season between fall and winter. Stick Season.
Now there is a wonderful feeling of melancholy and inner reflection that arises during this time of year, but one has to realize that the traditional Vermont landscape, represent in Vermont Life Magazine for example, does not exist for good chunk of the year. Instead, the landscape is rather drab, dull, almost monochromatic. I began to look really hard at the dormant landscape, studying the topography and culture that was exposed after the leaves dropped. I was looking for color in a colorless landscape and what I found were tarps. Tarps were everywhere.
Tarps are used for protection, a colorful prophylactic against winter. They cover things of value, objects that are considered precious by the owner. It’s akin to buttoning up a child’s coat to protect her from the elements. Culturally, however, tarps are more often used as a stop gap, a quick cheap fix, when resources are not available to provide an adequate solution to a problem.
Tarpentry is what people resort to when they can’t hire a carpenter.
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