Fragment House Collaboration – Part I
Danielle Krcmar:
In the Spring of 2011, I was offered the opportunity to make a sculpture for the River Project. Mary Pinard and I had previously discussed collaborating and this struck me as the perfect opportunity for us to work together. I love Mary’s poetry and wanted to make sure that the piece we made together really integrated the text into the sculpture. We visited the Slocums River Reserve together and on our own. After discovering that another sculptor had claimed the site where a small house once stood, we chose the bluebird field as the site for the sculpture. I knew I wanted to make a sculpture that referenced house/home and human habitation in this particular landscape. I sketched out ideas: a house foundation of clay bricks with written text, an armchair made of mosaic, clay books with the poetry carved into the pages, cast concrete molding that would draw the outline of a house, concrete cast to look like fossils with text cast into them. As I tried writing with wire and casting the wire words, leaves, and acorns into concrete I read and thought about Mary’s poem “Song Net for an Estuary,” since Slocums River is an estuary: “where fresh and salt waters knot, now unknot…” (Pinard, Song Net For An Estuary). Mary visited the studio and was enthusiastic about the concrete casts. We discussed the architecture of poems and the different ways that poetry could occupy a page or a sculptural surface. Eventually, the cast concrete house frame idea transformed into a steel frame “drawing” of a house that would hold a wire grid of pieces of beach glass found miles back up the coast on Boston’s Carson Beach. Mary’s poem could be etched into the window-panes of the house and words could also be etched into select pieces of beach glass. The completed sculpture, inspired by sheds, abandoned buildings, playhouses, and follies, is a space to come inside but still be in the landscape, unprotected.
This Sunday July 29th from 12-2pm, Danielle Krcmar and Mary Pinard will host a Picnic/ Poetry Reading at the Slocums River Project. Please join us and feel free to bring guests; kids are welcome and the reserve is also a great place to walk your dog.
Danielle Krcmar, Babson College Artist-in-Residence