Amoria, site-specific installation in my grandmother's Oshkosh, Wisconsin garden, documented within artist's book

106 pages, Fully-illustrated
Softcover
6.75 x 9 in.

Edition of 200

Photographs by Adam Kremer, Published by Space Sisters Press, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9996113-0-2

Images: © Adam Kremer

For Momo, Summer 2018, Oshkosh, WI:

My grandmother, Jennet Nordstrom Brooks, tended to her garden for 40 years with artistry and adoration. She cultivated it with homespun techniques she learned growing up in rural Sweden. My grandmother often expressed her discomfort as an immigrant, but communicated easily through her garden. She chatted with family while picking snap peas, gifted neighbors with currant juice, entertained me with handcrafted flower crowns, and honored my grandfather, John, on his birthday with a cake covered in homegrown raspberries. Two years before I began work on this project, my grandmother yielded to dementia and moved out of her home into a care facility, letting the garden lie fallow. My grandfather stayed and sustains what he can–a few pepper and tomato plants, some rhubarb and raspberry bushes.

Within this context, I worked for two weeks in the garden. I suspended two painted steel bars between plywood panels and the surrounding fence–inverted moon gates that frame the overgrown land, or gestures that read as pictorial drawings in space, like figures in the garden. ‘Satellite’ paintings and assemblages made of found, repurposed, and organic materials engaged unnoticed sites: the space between two fence pickets or vegetable beds, the sod covering once-healthy onion bulbs, rusting tomato cages, rotting crabapples on the ground. The viewer meanders through, discovering what already existed as much as what I created.

Photographer Adam Kremer documented the work and garden against the backdrop of the annual Experimental Aircraft Association air show at the local airport a few blocks away. Adam and I worked in the sun and rain, alongside my grandfather who snacked on apples while watching colossal planes and shrieking fighter jets fly overhead. The still moments felt just like another conversation with my grandmother.

The garden is mysteriously medial and ever-dynamic. It is situated between lifeless and overgrown, domestic and natural, ordered and wild, once conserved and now covered in clover. Amoria is a taxonomic synonym of the common clover (Trifolium). It is a name no longer in use, a trace of a scientific history of naming that still searches for specificity. The garden continues to become. –LK

Works:

Half Moon, Compilation

Half Moon, Curtain

White, Coming From

Green, Coming From

Half Moon, Vertical

Yellow, Leaving Out

Blue, Leaving Out

Half Moon, Red, Yellow + Blue

Half Moon, Green + Yellow

Of the Columbine

Of the Dame’s Rocket