ARCHIVE OF A SCRIMSHAW
This project started with a university trip to the Providence Public Library. We were invited to explore the library's special collection archives. I was immediately shocked by the amount of whaling material the PPL had collected. Among that material I found a decorated sperm whale tooth from the 1800’s. The library had identified two figures engraved on the scrimshaw to be of Awilda, the female pirate and an image of a woman taken from a fashion magazine in an 1830's dress. I became fascinated with the object itself and how it captured these two stories. As a response, I created a scrimshaw of my own using machine learning to generate stories of our time. I made a scrimshaw of exact height, width and weight and created documents of authenticity to accompany it.
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ARCHIVE OF A SOUVENIR
After “Archive of a Scrimshaw” I created “Archive of a Souvenir”, a collection of curated digital memories translated into physical objects. A fictional souvenir shop of digital experience to highlight the significant change in the way we store and preserve memory in modern life. It is an exploration of the visual language of souvenirs and memorial ephemera - the physical objects which we keep as an embodiment and trigger for our individual and shared memories.
