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Page 2
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Vessel is a place of remembering lost victims and healing their wounded survivors. The imagery of Vessel grows from a single gravestone in an ancient New England burying ground, a slab of lichen covered marble on which a crudely carved sailing ship, is forever sinking in a stormy sea. Like this stone, the I imagery I have used is literal rather than abstract. I have tried to recall the travelers lost on 9/11 the way the earliest New Englanders mourned travelers lost at sea. Vessel speaks with a familiar vocabulary: native trees and flowers, fieldstone walls, names and poems, and the white marble of gravestones. |
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The 9/11 tragedy was both public and personal. In the randomness of fate for those who perished, in the scrutiny of the media lens’, we saw our neighbors; the faces from the coffee shop. We shared with them the rituals of buckling our seat belts and putting our seats in the upright position. Now we all share the feeling that there but for fortune go I. We walk across a boarding ramp as a group but we encounter our fate alone. And so, in this memorial, only one person at a time may pass through the narrow stone gate. |
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This two sided garden reflects the public event on one side and the families’ loss on the other. On the public side the two carved marble jet forms fly the length of the two stone walls toward the narrow passage. Going through these “gates of eden” to the personal side one stands upon a weathered landing stone under the shade of a large maple tree. Carved into the stone is the date, 9/11, and a poem. On this personal side, beyond the event, we find the names of the victims etched and illuminated on large glass tablets bolted to the fieldstone walls. On the event side the bench is an isolated bronze trio of airliner seats. On the personal side the benches are natural boulders with sawn and hammered tops. These are placed in front of each glass panel of names. The two different kinds of benches invite two different kinds of contemplation |
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| Marble gates and threshold by the artist. 1991 |
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Around the maple tree and beyond, the plantings reflect the austerity and beauty of a small New England burying ground, with its lichen covered stones, and its names, names, names; each name resonant of a once living soul. The names we find on graves, the poems, the prayers, and the histories; the animation of the human voice, flow like water, a perfect contrast to the slow changing timelessness of stone. |
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We stand on this landing stone for the two planes that never came to land. We stand under the maple tree for the end of autumns, yet autumn comes again. Each name is a shelter against the rain of memory that washes against the stone. The loss we carry in our eyes is each one a face remembered. And lost laughter, found now “in beast and flower, in tree and stone.” |
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