Portfolio Works

Portfolio research

I remembered Lucy from Jae’s Contemporary class and wanted to know more about her.

I am currently reading her book, The Lure of the Local. I am glad that I did not discover this book earlier because her writing is so on point with my own ideas; the way that she writes is so closely attuned to my own work I think I might have questioned if these ideas were my own. I gave my first ‘A Sense of Place’ talk in 2007 and was naïve enough to think that I had coined that term myself, lol. My conversations with Janet last year revealed to me how large a theme Place is in art - much larger than the small segment of Land Art that we covered in Contemporary. Lippard says that her interest in this theme began in 1992 and she herself was surprised by the amount of literature written on the topic. In the opening chapter she writes,

“This book is concerned not with the history of nature and the landscape but with the historical narrative as it is written in the landscape or place by the people who live or lived there. The intersections of nature, culture, history, and the ideology form the ground on which we stand – our land, our place, the local. The lure of the local is the pull of place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to to a prevailing alienation. The lure of the local is that undertone to modern life that connects it to the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly concocting.”

When she uses the term ‘sense of place’ in The Lure of the Local she is using it in exactly the same way that I am; not just in reference to the landscape or tied to rural areas. She uses it to talk about a ‘cultural space’ (my rewording of a longer of her explanations) that is applicable to urban and industrial areas as well. This is one of the reasons this topic interests me so much – not just because of my personal experience and interest in Appalachia but because I see it as fertile ground to explore what is really happening in our rural-urban divide.

I will briefly summarize my family interviews and research with one phrase that I included on the label for the work, Lineage, “When we left we didn’t know we were leaving.” This is a quote from my grandfather speaking about his experience with his five brothers. At that moment in the conversation I realized that was my experience as well – we all thought we would be gone only a while and then go back. Only one of the five brothers, Weaver ever returned. Because Weaver lived in Appalachia when I was growing up I never realized that he also had gone to work in the mills. He was the oldest and was already married and had children when he left. He treated working in the mill like many construction workers do – “off on the job”.

The mills really worked against this mentality. They worked to build connections between their workers and the Piedmont - social activities, housing developments, churches, etc. They threatened not to re-hire workers if they left - my grandfather had this experience. He did leave in his first year when a job in Appalachia opened up clearing the road through to Fontana but when that job was over and the construction company was going to the Midwest he didn’t want to go that far from home so he returned to the mill. He went to visit his brothers on their lunch break and the superintendent that had threatened him hired him back on the spot. I heard and documented many other stories that I had never heard before. My research has greatly shifted my childhood perspective and understanding of what was happening in my family.