Re-Collect/Recollect is a collaborative research-creation between two siblings. They are close in age--only 20 months separate them. Both artists share synergies across their independent practices that sometimes are not realized until after their work is made. When they were seven and eight years old, they were asked to accommodate a move onto a sailboat by selling all their belongings at a garage sale. The grief they both felt while watching friends and relatives acquire their things lead to a different kind of relationship with objects, where their lives have been spent buying, collecting, meticulously storing, and documenting their objects. Object sharing also took a place in each of their practices, particularly in the form of re-collecting and re-making that produced an act of recollection that has brought forth memories sometimes similar, and sometimes very different, but like a two headed coin. In the past their work has been independent, and at times even competitive. This new project marks the first collaborative work between the two, and has brought them closer as a pair, particularly since their mother’s recent passing.
Their mother bought them plastic file boxes to hold their drawing tools. These contained: pads of paper, unusual colouring books, as well as coloured pencils, graphite pencils and felt pens. Their mother was trying to make the experience fun for them, but the boat was often far from idyllic, and the shift to living within the tight confines of a forty-two-foot sailboat was challenging and sometimes traumatic. These containers created an escape for the sisters, allowing for a creative outlet when they were confined due to weather or offshore. This became the basis of a lifetime of work for both sisters.
The project, Re-collect/Recollect begins with a methodology begin as children, where they would have drawing contests, starting with a prompt chosen by alternating siblings. This methodology changed and adapted over time, sometimes competitive, the outcome was constantly shifting. Sometimes it was quantity, other times quality, with an unsuspecting judge roped in to choose a favorite.
This new work will be developed into a new collaborative body of work that bridges research across artistic, pedagogical, and museological fields. The collaborating artists/sisters bring together their individual research and methodologies from related but disparate disciplines to explore a shared research question that they will connect to existing bodies of research and creative practices. With an overarching theme of accessing memory through objects and the creative process the artist/siblings will unpack personal shared experiences and explore similarities and differences in how that impacted their artistic research and how that has manifested in their academic disciplines and art practices
This body of research explores the correlation between instances of recollection as experienced through reproducing objects. Looking at comparative examples of shared lived experience, this research will reveal parallels between their shared melancholy and an urge to tell with an environment where they felt that they can’t. Their unique coping mechanisms and shared goal is to find ways to identify triggers and use them as a creative outlet as opposed to negative behaviors that happen in many family structures. Because the artistic collaborators have a shared experience, this research will explore how the specific environmental factors manifested similarly in each creative and professional practice (Academic Instructor/Artist, Museological Professional/Curator/Artist).
To begin this collaboration, the siblings came up with a list of one-hundred words that represented their childhood. Each month a word will be chosen alternatively by each sibling, and Michelle and Jennifer will explore the prompt using their own research methodologies.