SUJI PARK Collecting Dust
In 2015, Park made Garden, a site-specific mixed-media installation which fused an imagined archaeological site with a consideration of the histories embedded in material culture. Free from the constraints of the gallery environment, Park embedded Garden into a grassy landscape, first removing a section of turf and then breaking up and turning the topsoil. Digging into the exposed dirt to create shallow depressions, she partially buried a sequence of vessels within this earthen site. Groups of elongated gourd-like and semi-figurative forms were clustered upon the surrounding grass, strewn across the broader site like fragmented relics of some unknown history.
The fertile soil into which Park dug lies on Waiheke Island, the second-largest of the islands spread across the once-abundant stems, in part, from the ambiguity of the relics she has situated here. Unmoored from any historical context, these vessels prompt us to consider the ways that we reconstruct our understandings of each other in the wake of the severance or repression of historical memory.
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