Mortal Objects

Mortal Objects, 2018, colored pencil on dura-lar and paper, antique boxes, insects (harvested post-mortem), wisteria pod, tulip petals, tanned opossum skin, thread, approximately 10’ x 3’ x 1’

Mortal Objects explores the ways we seek to preserve and relate to nature in a personal way. The series of antique boxes would have been used to hold or display precious items, such as the jewelry casket box at the very end containing the Hercules beetle, the doll display box containing the opossum skin, or the jewelry box containing the wisteria pod.

Almost every box is paired with a drawing or cutout that reveals or preserves its contents. This pattern creates drawings that disappear into cutouts and then nothing, echoed in the empty box. The relationship of the boxes and drawings becomes confused and mixed up as the cutout drawing becomes the contents of the box and as the paper disappears. In the final pair, the pattern is re-established— a drawing with a cutout that exists precariously above the object preserved in the box.

Box 1: Wisteria pod inside earth 20th century jewelry box with drawing of wisteria pod above.

Box 2: Tulip petals in decorative glass box accompanied by drawing above with section removed and suspended on string between box and drawing.

Box 3: Cicada husks with string inside a decorative glass box with cicada husk cutouts above.

Box 4: Empty box with blank paper above.

Box 5: Cicada drawing inside an antique cloisonné box with cutout above.

Box 6: Opossum skin inside doll display box.

Box 7: Hercules beetle inside casket display box accompanied by drawing and cutout of beetle above.

Mortal Objects is part of the Nature Is A Haunted House project. Please scroll down to learn more about this group of works.

Nature Is a Haunted House Project

Anne Greenwood's artwork installation titled A Small Piece of Turf — Installation shot at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, 2019

Nature Is a Haunted House

“Nature is a Haunted House— but Art— a House that tries to be haunted.”

- Emily Dickinson (1876 letter to Thomas Higginson)

Nature is a Haunted House is a series of installation works that incorporate painting, drawing, found objects, sculpture, insect and plant material, and decorative objects.

The works in Nature Is a Haunted House focus on places where the wild and domestic get mingled: the rough edges of the suburban yard, urban animals in human-dominated spaces, the borders of wild parkland. In such spaces, natural and man-made get jumbled, and the thriving, living elements adapt and assert themselves, so that the notion of an inherently pure nature set aside and “out there” becomes eroded. Instead, nature is here, next door, underfoot, and within reach.

The show features animal, insect, and plant life that exists near humans, with both unfortunate and beneficial outcomes. These works are informed by the slow, accumulated examination of the wild and domestic life on North Mountain in the Hot Springs National Park where I live and work. Each piece is an attempt to fix and capture an intimate experience of this permeable boundary between the natural and the human.