Maureen Cummins

The year I spent at Weir Farm was a time of inspired peripatia, the work created was the result of both real and imaginary meanderings. The first pieces I produced, Artist's Books, Inventory, and Ghost Diary, made direct use of images, texts and objects unearthed in the Farm's extensive archive. The next crop of work, Current Events, Archive of Memory, and Declining Futures was an unusual group of hybrids, mixtures of the wild and the cultivated. In content, these works seriously address issues of the earth and environment, while in form they playfully reference the rarefied materials and carefully preserved ephemera found in libraries and archives. "Cataloguing" nature in this way led to a consideration of the darker aspects of collecting and to a work on paper that is visually reminiscent of a naturalist’s notebook. Entitled Life Cycle of an Emerging Artist, it presents images and experiences from an artist’s life in which an exotic species is dissected and classified.

The final work included in the exhibit was a response to the story of J. Alden Weir's first wife, Anna, who died within days of giving birth to her daughter Cora. In the piece entitled Elegy for Anna, I explore the conflicting and contradictory emotions that must arise when birth and death coincide.