Stumbling Blocks

(A Complex Grief 2)

The Stumbling Blocks (A Complex Grief 2) is an installation made of solid fir blocks and their surface saturated with ink. An ink painting on paper from the series A Complex Grief was nailed on as if a label or lid. As the cubes dried, they began to crack and distress and take on the appearance of burnt wood, calling to mind the ruins of fire stormed domestic dwellings. The idea of a grave site is suggested. I imagine each carbon soaked block containing the essence of an unknown life. The buckling of the imaged paper as the fir expands or shrinks gives a sense of a memory wanting to emerge. One needs to be careful walking amongst them; looking down, the roses suggest voices calling forth, or blooms of bombs as seen from above.

This work was shown as part of the exhibition The Persistence of Love (in a Time of Disaster) The exhibition opened January 8th 7-9 2021 ( non social ) and continued Saturdays and Sundays 11-4 January 9-24, 2021

In German cities and towns, as a memorial to those who suffered and resisted under the NSDAP regime, brass blocks are inserted into sidewalks. One notices them as they protrude above the general level of the pavement and then peers down to learn of the people remembered.

Guenther Demnig is the artist and sculptor behind the stumbling stones. Here, he installs new bricks in Berlin. He says formal memorials are too abstract. Not so with the stumbling stones. “Suddenly they are there, right outside your front door, at your feet, in front of you,” he says.