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They Left Their Clothes By The Water

I made this piece around a simple narrative image:

Children come to the water. 
They take off their clothes and leave them to enter. 
In the water, something happens and the children do not return.

What happens to the children in the water? It’s hard to say exactly. I saw what happens in the water as a kind of transformation—a revelation, a change from unconsciousness to consciousness, from oblivion to a crystallizing vision, from the physical to the spiritual. And what of the notion that the children do not return? I have worried in showing this work that viewers might read it solely as menacing and pertaining to some instance of untimely morbidity. To me, the fact that the children do not return was not necessarily meant to be taken literally. In some respects the revelation of the water might be the metaphorical end of childhood or the rebirth into a different state of consciousness from which there is no return. And in so far as the sense of death seems implicit in the piece, my intent was less to dwell on death as an isolated tragedy, than to see death as another mysterious transformation.

The installation, first shown at Gallery Naga in Boston, and later at the Fuller Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, was comprised of children’s clothing, much of it slated, a “river” made up of basins with floating slated wax forms inside, and small books that were sealed and painted with children’s heads. There was also fabric pieces extending to the ceiling, which was altered for each site.

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