Site-Responsive Works

Elizabeth Michelman

Think/Dream Wooden headboard, nails, paper pulp, cotton cloth, pigment, language 60” x 51” x 30” Boston Public Library 1992

Think/Dream (detail)

Ceramic tile, hardware, language eight units 12” x 12” x ¾” dimensions variable (later version) 1994

“Slow Down” Ceramic tile, hardware, language eight units 12” x 12” x ¾” dimensions variable 1994 (installation view, Reclamation Artists, Boston, MA)

Final Words Coated brass plaques, language Eighteen units, 4” x 12” (installation view, Boston Public Library, Boston, MA) 1998

Field Glass, sand, riverstones, language over carpet 2” x 128” x 128” (installation view Buckingham Brown and Nichols School, Cambridge, MA) 1997

Opening Question Coated brass panels, language Nine panels 4” x 10” (installation detail, Fuller Museum, Brockton, MA) 1007

Opening Question Coated brass panels, language Nine panels 4” x 10” (installation detail, Fuller Museum, Brockton, MA) 1997

Divine Comedy Children’s, women’s, and men’s intimate garments, copper cable, clothespins, acrylic paint, language Twenty-three garments, dimensions variable (installation overview, Allandale Farm) 2005

Divine Comedy (installation detail)

Why Site-responsive?

Working with a site, the artist relaxes into a free-floating bodily/sensory awareness, reducing dependence on the eyes alone, and becoming alert to more subliminal characteristics of a place. The physical environment or the social context may provide stimulus for an impulse toward action or speech.

I respond to a variety of cues of the environment --- materials, shapes, passages or gestures, or things I hear people saying around me. I find myself associating to personal experiences or other places I have been that share the characteristics I am perceiving here. A sense of rhythm in a balustrade, a pattern of stones in a wall, or the figured grain of wood paneling--- any of these may set in motion an idea for an installation that points to the space and feelings of the people in it.