RELIQUARIES
I was born into a long line of collectors. I have spent my entire life surrounded by things that have been picked up and passed down through generations. I am interested in the act of collecting, in the preciousness of objects, and how we protect certain objects because they hold some sort of importance to us. My work explores the preciousness of collections through a series of reliquaries using metal and found containers. Most of these containers do not have their lids, some of them are a part of my mother's collection and some are from my own. It is fascinating to me that she picked up certain things over her lifetime and protected them for so long. I have been able to examine her collection, and I have witnessed my own habit to collect and protect things that are precious to me, or that have become precious to me because they were once precious to someone else. I am using this mode of containment to exemplify the preciousness of these objects and to attempt to work through my own questions about my mother's collection now that they can no longer be specifically answered. What closely follows the design of reliquaries throughout history becomes personalized through the use of my own objects, each specific to the relic or purpose it is made for.
This body of work was created and displayed for my Bachelor of Science in Visual Arts Thesis at SUNY New Paltz in 2016.
