Cloche Suite

Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

Cloche suite I,II,III, lambda archival prints, 40”x 32”

I had begun to collect glass bell jars common in the Victorian era as small miniature greenhouses. The function of these domestic domes was to nurture seedlings or to contain special rare miniature plantings.

While walking in the woods a couple of years ago I began to imagine siting and photographing the glass domes from my collection in the Northern Ontario boreal forest. I liked the inversion and the tension between the wild or seemingly disorder of the forest and the reflection of the trees on and through the glass jar. The placement in the forest and the photographic process itself suggested trace and apparition while the glass knob on the top functioned as a lens creating an upside down reflection, a camera obscura of sorts. All these layers merge together and explore intrinsic paradox, metaphors and blurs which enhance the experience of this imaginary site or daydream of the garden.