Fragment House Collaboration – Part II
Mary Pinard:
As a poet who shapes words into bundles and couplets and waves across and down a page, I have always felt a kinship with sculpture.So when I had the opportunity to work with Danielle on a piece for the Slocum River Project, I was very excited.I admire—and am inspired by—the ways her sculptures engage a range of materials (clay, mosaic, concrete, hair, glass, even the way she invites light into her work).I was curious what materials she would choose for this project, especially after we visited the site together with its multi-textured landscapes, salt air, boulder walls, weaving gulls, bluebird boxes, and hints everywhere of past inhabitants.As her vision for a fragment house developed—one that offered refuge and reminders of loss, structure and textures of breakage—I began to think about voice.What would the voice of such a house sound like?What might it have witnessed over its life in this field?What memories—whole or tattered—could it hold?This is where I began to shape my poem, and as Danielle and I talked about where it would appear in or on the house, the idea of etching it into the glass pane emerged, almost like a letter someone left behind.And while we liked to idea of the “natural” sounds moving in and around this house with its glass-remnant walls like wind harps, we wanted to offer the disembodied voice reading the poem and accessible by dialing a phone number—a voice close but also very far away.Something like memory.
Mary Pinard, Babson College Arts and Humanities Division